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Ethics in the News Oct. 6

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The deadly campus shooting Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, that left 10 dead and others injured conjured up familiar ethics debates about reporting in post-tragedy environments.

Notably, conversation circulated around the naming of mass shooters, following comments by Douglas County Sheriff John Hanline who refused to say the shooter’s name publicly. While many have rallied behind movements like #NoNotoriety as a strategy to deter mass shooters, National Public Radio’s Elizabeth Jensen argued in favor of shooter identification as a means of unraveling a story and placing it in the larger context to hopefully identify trends and prevent future tragedies. Poynter’s Kelly McBride added that naming the shooter can prevent misinformation, citing the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting where gunman Adam Lanza’s brother, Ryan Lanza, was incorrectly identified as the perpetrator early in the investigation.

But some large news organizations like CNN have observed the #NoNotoriety concerns and minimized both naming and showing the community college shooter. Fox News evening host Megyn Kelly brought the debate to Twitter voicing her disagreement with CNN’s Don Lemon who asserted that “we journalists must name shooters” in a tweet of his own. The debate is sure to continue as details emerge about UCC gunman Chris Mercer, 26, following the Oct. 1 shooting.

In other journalism ethics news this week:

Center for Journalism Ethics in the news:

Why we need a radical new framework for media ethics

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In “Radical Media Ethics: A Global Approach” I declare that the only way to rescue media ethics from sinking into oblivion is to think radically.

Let me explain.

We need to rethink the basis of media ethics from the ground up. The tweaking of ideas and re-formulation of rules, as seen in recent revisions of codes of ethics, is a temporary, localized fix. It does not address the larger conceptual swamp in which we find media ethics.

The most serious problem is not irresponsible journalists. The most serious problem is not differences between legacy and citizen journalism. The most serious problem is the sorry state of the framework of ideas we call media ethics.

Framework in a mess

wardbookThis framework, inherited from a non-global, pre-digital journalism, portrays the journalist as a professional gatekeeper who serves the public by informing citizens truthfully, impartially, objectively, and independently. She uses time-consuming verification procedures.

Given this interpretation, we have a means of evaluating practices.

The media revolution undermined the framework.

Principles, such as impartiality, are rejected. Instead of consensus we have a clash of values. Many new practitioners prefer an interpretive, engaged journalism far from the “straight” reporting admired by traditional media ethics. If time-honored principles such as truth-telling are maintained, there are disputes as to their meaning. For instance, what does accuracy mean in an era of instant updating? Where reinterpretations of principles are not available, we are left with a conceptual ‘hole’ in the middle of our ethics.

The result: We lack an agreed-upon framework for evaluating stories. Media ethics is like Humpty Dumpty after his big fall; it’s a mess.

What I’m advocating is a radical rethinking of media ethics for digital, global journalism, a new framework for others to build upon. I look for principles that might re-integrate media ethics. I put forward a code of global digital ethics.

Are you a radical, really?

Some people are puzzled or worried by my use of “radical.”

When I was growing up amid the Cold War, radical was a dangerous, negative word. It referred to Trotskyites and others who would replace capitalism with communism.

I was never a political radical.

My radicalness is one of idea. The first entry for “radical” in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says the word means “going to the root or origin … affecting what is fundamental; far-reaching; thorough.”

My radicalness is philosophical, but it is not divorced from the world. I have little patience for those who think philosophy is an abstract activity by elite thinkers detached from life. I follow Dewey and other pragmatic philosophers in defining philosophy as social and reformist.

Philosophy is engagement with the urgent issues of our time by critiquing assumptions and proposing alternatives.

When the winds of change blow, fundamental thinking is needed to overcome old beliefs that have atrophied into what J. S. Mill called “dead dogma,” and stand in the way of progress. In media ethics, the old ideas of news objectivity as just the facts, balance as always giving equal space to all sides, and impartiality as emotional detachment, are dead dogma.

Four imperatives

Photo by Ash Carter on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

A radical attitude can be summarized by four imperatives for thinking, which are developed at length in my book:

Imperative #1: Think big, not only small

This follows from what I have said. Addressing specific dilemmas is important but at least some of us need to spend time thinking big. We need to propose a reinvention of media ethics that integrates the values of many types of journalism and has a chance of gaining the support of many types of practitioners.

Imperative #2: Think public, not personal

The reintegration of media ethics starts with broadening the political philosophy of journalism for digital media. This means rethinking, not abandoning, the public justification for journalism – the formulation of norms that apply across platforms and individuals. If we think of media ethics as only what each individual journalist embraces, no media ethics is possible. Moreover, the public will lose whatever faith they have left in journalism once they learn that journalists, despite their impact on society, think they can make up their own values.

We must never lose sight of the social nature of journalism. Its norms must be justified according to how they contribute to democracy and fulfill public responsibilities. The trouble is that traditional media ethics says too little about how new forms of journalism contribute to the public aims of journalism.

Imperative #3: Think discourse, not fixed principle

Traditional media ethics places a high importance on honoring pre-established content, such as the principles that occur at the start of most codes of ethics. Often such principles are considered to be absolute. Ethics, it is thought, needs unchanging foundations. Disagreement on principle is a sign of a weakness in our ethics.

At a time of media revolution, we should emphasize the process by which we assess media values. Principles are not absolutes but our best attempts to articulate our values for this period in journalism. Media ethics should be an open-ended discourse across platforms and borders. Ethics has always evolved, and we should expect, and welcome, criticism. Ethics is naturally, and rightly, contested.

Imperative 4: Think participation, not exclusion

As media ethics moves beyond professional newsrooms, it becomes ethics for everyone. The maintenance of good journalism is a society-wide responsibility. It requires that the public be part of ethical regulation. For example, the public should be able to participate meaningfully in the revision of codes of journalism ethics.

Applying the imperatives

The radical attitude, then, is one that thinks big and seeks reinvention, thinks of media ethics as evolving discourse without absolute principles, and stresses the public nature of practice in terms of justification and participation.

So, let’s adopt this attitude. What should we do with it?

For one thing, we should use this attitude to develop norms for increasingly prevalent areas of journalism:

  • Ethics of new media ecologies: Future media ethics should guide journalists working in non-traditional environments from nonprofit web sites to investigative centers within academia. Future media ethics should say useful things on the responsible use of new media, and how to deal with integrated newsrooms.
  • Ethics of interpretation and opinion: Interpretive and avocational journalism grows. Ethicists need to fill this gap by distinguishing between better and worse interpretations. They need to provide a specific meaning to such key concepts as “informed commentary,” “insightful analysis,” and “good interpretation.”
  • Ethics of activism: Activist journalism will also proliferate. But, when are activist journalists not propagandists? Rather than simply dismiss activist journalism on the traditional ground of objectivity, how can we develop a more nuanced understanding of this area of journalism?
  • Ethics of global democratic journalism: New thinking in ethics will need to reconstruct the role of journalism in global terms.

My book is only one attempt to start rethinking media ethics from the ground up. May there be other books, other attempts.

Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist, author and educator, living in Madison, WI. He is Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics at the University of British Columbia, Courtesy Professor at the School of journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, and founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin.

This post originally published at MediaShift. Reposted here with permission.

Ethics in the News

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Brian Williams started Monday at an anchor desk at MSNBC. It’s his first on-camera job since his suspension and later removal from the NBC evening news desk for ethical violations.

Williams’ return has been mostly well received. Ratings of his inaugural day’s pope coverage were the second best daypart of the year. The L.A. Times suggests that audiences are willing to trust Williams again if they are watching his show. But, as Poynter’s Al Tompkins wrote back in February, a lot of Americans didn’t recognize Williams’ face in polls before the story about his lies and exaggerations emerged. Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik told CNNMoney that he believes Williams should not return to television journalism because violating the “truth” principle is too grave of a sin to overcome.

The return of Williams coinciding with the pope’s visit to the East Coast spurred plenty of jokes: The hashtag #brianwilliamspopestories was a thing. And, during a recap of pope news coverage, on “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver poked fun William’s return. But, the joke felt light hearted enough.

In other journalism ethics news this week:

Center for Journalism Ethics in the news:

Charlie Hebdo Controversy Raises Ethical Questions on a Global Scale

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The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is notorious for causing controversy. Long before the January 2015 attack on the publication’s journalists, cartoonists were raising eyebrows with images that some people found to be distasteful at best and racist at worst.

Apologists for the magazine have always responded by invoking the political power of satire, as well as the press’s right to free speech.

Now Charlie Hebdo is embroiled in another controversy, this one centering on the publication’s depiction of Syrian refugees struggling—often unsuccessfully—to make it safely to Europe. The social media sphere has exploded in debate, with some commentators asserting that Charlie is mocking Syrian refugees like 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, and others declaring that the magazine is actually criticizing the European nations that have failed to help the Syrian migrants.

This debate raises ethical questions that are inevitably global in nature. As the media ethicist Stephen Ward argues, “Global power entails global responsibility.” This means that a globally recognized outlet like Charlie Hebdo doesn’t get to simply be a “French” magazine anymore, speaking only to a French audience. In fact, this publication can’t even claim to be strictly “European,” especially now that people around the world have held vigils, saying “We are all Charlie.”

It’s time for publications like Charlie Hebdo to stop pretending that they only have a national or regional audience. That means paying more attention to the diverse perspectives of an increasingly global public. It also means being more transparent about who and what these cartoons are actually for. If “we are all Charlie,” then Charlie might benefit from thinking about all of us.

Sensationalism or a Call to Action: Covering the Syrian Refugee Crisis

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I met a Syrian refugee this June. Sitting across from me in a crowded Beirut café, the young man told me how he’d escaped from Syria and started working as a news fixer in Lebanon—arranging interviews for journalists and translating when they couldn’t speak Arabic. Later, he’d moved to Turkey and launched a media company—but that had been a challenge because he enjoyed no official legal status in Turkey. He also found it difficult to travel to Europe in order to build his company’s brand.

So, the young man told me, he was back in Lebanon to say a permanent goodbye to his friends in Beirut. This was because he was getting ready to take an “all-or-nothing” chance and swim from the western coast of Turkey to the nearest Greek island. There, he would get a fake ID that would allow him to travel to Sweden, where he’d learned he’d be granted residency.

I don’t know if he made it. After that day in the crowded Beirut café, I never heard from him again. But I’ve been thinking about him lately, as the story of traveling Syrian refugees has flooded the mediascape, and as the image of a drowned Syrian 3-year-old has caught the world’s attention. Maybe my friend has been tracking the events in Hungary and Austria from another crowded café, this one in Stockholm. But then again, maybe not.

One thing this young man told me before our interview ended was that he’s lost all faith in the potential of journalism. He said that the coverage of the Syrian crisis has done nothing to help people like him. I wonder what he’d think of this most recent explosion of news coverage on the Syrian refugees, coverage that raises a number of questions relevant to global journalism ethics.

Syrian refugee camp in Greece. Photo dated September 2012.

Syrian refugee camp in Greece. Photo dated September 2012.

Here, I’d like to examine the question of focus. I’d like to ask when it’s ethical (and when it’s not ethical) for international news media to focus so relentlessly on the trauma that individual people endure. Are there times when it’s ethically necessary to get in the face of death and despair and snap a picture or shoot a video? Are there times when those images must be distributed around the world, regardless of the impact this may have on the individuals who are suffering?

The drowning death of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi certainly invites these questions, since his image has surfaced on numerous media sites, in various stages of censorial blurriness. Nilufer Demir, the Turkish photographer who shot the image, asserts that she wanted to “express the scream of his silent body.” Since then, activists across the world have redistributed that image, in an effort at calling attention to the plight of Syrian refugees, almost five years into the Syrian civil war. Following this, the BBC has asked if this one picture has somehow “shifted our view of refugees.” The image has even inspired U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to attest that the U.S. could do more to protect them. So in one sense, it seems that Demir’s decision to snap a picture of a dead baby on a beach was indeed an ethically justifiable decision.

Yet, even before his own trip from Turkey to the Greek islands, my Syrian friend told me that he, like many Syrians, had lost all faith in the potential of journalism to change his situation. He had briefly worked as a news fixer, not because he wanted to help change the world, but because he needed money to survive. A number of local journalists I interviewed in Beirut over the summer echoed my friend’s doubt. They had long been working with Syrian activists, and knew their frustrations. Years of fruitlessly uploading their images to YouTube had led most Syrians to resent rather than celebrate the foreign news media who covered their oppression, they told me. According to them, help could have come much sooner, and if it comes now, it will not come as a result of western news coverage of the Syrian crisis.

So the question has to be asked: Who is this coverage really for? Is the international distribution of the “captivating” and “horrifying” image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi capable of comforting his family? Is it capable of inspiring anything other than the rather useless and clichéd compassion of people who will never know such pain (and will never lift a finger to help in any way)?

Young Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Photo dated September 2012.

Young Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Photo dated September 2012.

The admission of more than 5,000 refugees into Austria on Sept. 5 might at first suggest that real change is finally coming. After all, British Prime Minister David Cameron has also just pledged to resettle “thousands more Syrian refugees.” Now, rather than stagnating in the impoverished and disease-ridden camps that crowd parts of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, maybe these people have a chance at really living again. Maybe these images of traumatized Syrian children (and adults, for that matter) have had an impact that makes them ethically justifiable despite their invasive quality.

The problems become clearer, however, when we start to investigate the less flashy coverage of the Syrian crisis—the coverage that crunches numbers and analyzes concrete trends, instead of merely creating high-resolution slide shows of other people’s suffering. For example, the Washington Post recently reported that since the Syrian war began in 2011, the U.S. and Britain have done little to nothing to relocate the Syrian refugees: the U.S. has resettled only 1,541 refugees since 2011, and Britain has resettled only 216. Other coverage shows that the wealthy Gulf nations rarely help the refugees at all and that some European nations remain opposed to offering any space within their borders. Rather than framing personal trauma in a salacious fashion, this type of news reporting does a much better job of informing the world about what’s really happening to the Syrian refugees.

It’s one of our truisms that ethical journalism must be balanced, and it must give the public what it needs. This increasingly global public needs to know the big numbers and the inconvenient details. While emotional images of dead or traumatized individuals may help to inspire public sentiment, “outrage” and “compassion” are not enough. People need to understand the sticky truths and the diplomatic hypocrisies that plague national and international policies on refugees in the 21st Century. In the case of Syria, the job of international journalists is to illuminate the growing connections and chasms between the Syrian refugees and the nations to which they flee.

Getting Bruce Jenner Right

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I grew up with Bruce Jenner in my cabinet. Just 10 when he became known to many as the “greatest athlete in the world,” I knew him as the face and the form on my Wheaties box. He was strong, he was handsome, he was likable.

I had rounded the corner past 40 when my niece pointed me toward something called “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” an alleged reality show. There was Bruce again. Older, a bit bumbling, but still entirely likable.

And today I sit with trepidation as Bruce will appear again tonight, this time in an extended interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. The show has been endlessly questioned, hyped, teased and imagined. ABC’s ads proclaim in Bruce’s voice, “My whole life has been getting me ready for this.” He may — or may not — discuss a transition from male to female.

My fear stems from whether journalists, commentators and the public at large are ready to get this right. This is a moment for us as a society to begin respecting transgender people, understanding experiences we don’t live, and moving forward on serious social injustices this community faces. Media coverage and conversation will be a major part of that moment.

Make no mistake about it, we’ve gotten this wrong before. Piers Morgan on CNN. Katie Couric on her syndicated show. News stories presuming to establish whether a child is “really” a boy or a girl. We do this largely because we are trying to map a binary view of gender onto a spectrum of gender expression. Although the National Review would have some believe actress Laverne Cox is or is not a woman, the reality just isn’t that simple. We want to assign some kind of biological A/B certainty to gender, but scholar Katherine Bell encourages journalists to recognize instead that all gender expression is a “deeply held notion of self.” Cox’s self is a woman. And to misunderstand that is to get the story of her wrong.

The Reality of Disparity

Getting it wrong has consequences. In focusing on appearance (as Morgan did) or genitals (as Couric did), media miss the larger — and often tragic — realities for trans people. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, respondents reported:

  • vastly higher rates of attempted suicide (41% among transgender respondents vs. 1.6% among the U.S. population)
  • housing discrimination and living in extreme poverty at a rate four times that of others
  • double the rate of unemployment, with 90% of respondents reporting some measure of harassment, mistreatment or discrimination at work

All of these measures saw increases among respondents of color

These effects are felt by the approximately 700,000 Americans who identify as transgender. For Christina Kahrl, a trans woman who covers Major League Baseball for ESPN, Jenner’s interview is about Jenner’s own experience. But it also presents a moment to awaken people to the trans experience and the disparities people face.

“What can you as a journalist teach people about the trans experience using this moment in time?” she says. “It’s a rare experience. And you have an obligation to talk about it well, with an eye to all those issues – health care, employment, safety, sex education.”

Respecting Experiences You Do Not Live

I called Kahrl before writing this piece for a specific reason: I was terrified of getting it wrong myself. I was born female and have always felt like and lived as a woman. So can I truly understand how another person born female could feel like a man and live as a woman? Or as a man? How might I feel as someone who doesn’t feel a strong gender leaning?

I’m white and can’t know what it really means to be Asian in our society. I’m middle-class and don’t pretend to grasp the true grip of poverty. I’m straight and can’t walk in the shoes of a lesbian. But as a journalist — and someone who teaches a whole bunch of aspiring journalists — I am ethically bound to respect that which I do not know and work to responsibly and sensitively report on the range of experiences of all people.

So in this moment — this “rare experience,” as Kahrl termed it — what should we do in covering the Jenner interview and transgender people overall?

Study up: When you’re trying to understand something you haven’t experienced, you surround yourself with background information and perspective. Three excellent places to start:

Open up: Closed-mindedness is a particularly deadly trait for anyone engaging in public conversation, including journalists. The essential element of telling stories about experiences you haven’t had is an openness to that very idea. It’s recognizing that you don’t know. It’s in this element that we see the stunning difference between the missteps by Piers Morgan and Katie Couric. Where Couric recognized where she had erred and brought Laverne Cox back to her show for a “teachable moment,” Morgan brought Janet Mock back to his show to reprimand her for “vilifying” him.

Listen up: When Sawyer interviews Jenner, people will watch. I’d love to think we could live in a world where someone’s gender transition is no big deal. But we don’t. Plenty of people will be talking. The most important thing is how much we will be listening. By engaging with trans communities on social media and opening ourselves to trans people living in our communities, we can find and tell the stories that don’t get the ratings grab Jenner-Sawyer will.

“The key here is what this conversation creates as a moment for all people to talk about trans people,” Kahrl said. “To demonstrate our capacity to accept that people are different and will go through different challenges in life. If Jenner is able to do this, hopefully it will engender some greater measure of acceptance for trans people, to treat trans people with greater dignity.”

Responsibility for All

It is that dignity that concerns me when we expand ethical questions beyond journalists and commentators and out to the wider public. I’ve become increasingly concerned about how quickly our ability to publish in an instant has increased and how far behind our conception of the responsible use of that freedom lags. Whether with GamerGate or non-consensual porn, we see a gulf between access to technology and the thoughtful use of it.

Bruce Jenner has already walked the tabloid and social media gauntlet and more is sure to come. Yet Jenner has fame, money, power and privilege that may serve to insulate him from demeaning tweets, hateful posts and nasty memes. But the trans kid in the high school down the road doesn’t. He already faces the disparities detailed above and the consequences of trying to survive in a society that doesn’t accept him. Transgender is not his “choice” or his “lifestyle.” It is who he is, and that alone is worthy of respect.

As I thought through that and what it meant, I sat down with a remarkable young student of mine. At just 20 years old, Lanni Solochek has spent significant time trying to learn about and understand how to cover and write about transgender people. As we talked, I thought about how mature she was and how much further down the road toward understanding she was — and at less than half my age.

“As a journalist and a human being,” she said, “I’m focused on people. On their lived experience.”

What a tremendous amount we could all learn from people like her, people who learn about what they haven’t lived.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ted Eytan and used here under Creative Commons license.

Videos of sessions, award presentations and the keynote from Conference 2015 are now posted

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For those unable to attend or watch live online, we have now posted videos and social media summaries from Fair or Foul: Ethics and Sports Journalism, our seventh annual conference on journalism ethics.  Complete archives for the 2015 conference and all preceding conferences may be found at our Annual Ethics Conferences website.

The links below will take you to Individual session pages:

Conference Program (PDF)

If you have questions or would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact ethics@journalism.wisc.edu.

Protecting freelancers: A Conversation with Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists

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When I first heard that the Committee to Protect Journalists had introduced a new set of standards on the protection of freelancers, I was skeptical. Would any of the major news organizations publicly embrace these standards? Even more importantly, would they live by them?

It’s not that news editors don’t care about the journalists they hire. It’s just that taking care of freelancers costs a lot of money, money that news organizations are scrambling to save in the era of budget cuts, layoffs, and the closure of international news bureaus. When we’re talking about “big brand” news reporting, in other words, we’re talking about huge machines—machines that are bigger than any individual news executive. Still, individual freelancers are dying more and more frequently, pointing to the timeliness of this new set of standards.

Only two months after the CPJ’s announcement, it’s still too early to tell what impact the standards will have. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s website provides a list of the news organizations that endorsed this call for reform, and the list includes some venerable names: The Associated Press and the BBC, just to mention a few. But it’s difficult to say exactly how these standards—remarkable in their breadth and commendable in their goals—will be applied.

For media ethicists like me, the question of application is key. I specialize in global journalism ethics, and I want to think past the perpetual critique of what journalists should be doing for their public. While that question remains vital to the field of media ethics, it is also essential that we think about the ethical treatment of the journalists themselves. How are major news organizations grappling with the question of safety in the field, for example, and what do these organizations owe to the myriad news employees who do not possess that increasingly elusive title—that of the “staff correspondent?”

I recently spoke with CPJ executive director Joel Simon, and he made an important point: Even when we’re talking about the best practices for ensuring the safety of journalists, we should avoid abstract concepts. In order to do the question justice, we need to think more precisely about the historical, economic, and geopolitical context in which a given news organization is operating. Here’s an edited account of our conversation.

LP:       What could managing editors and news directors do to make war correspondents safer?

JS:       First of all, most of the violence committed against journalists is not committed against international journalists from newsrooms overseen by managing editors. Most of the journalists who are killed in conflict zones are local journalists, and they’re targeted because of their coverage. And a much smaller percentage of them are international correspondents, and most of those are actually crossfire incidents. So certainly when you’re talking about international correspondents and you have a historical perspective, I think safety training is very helpful. And there has been more of an acceptance and recognition of the importance of adequate security training and equipment. But if you look at the information ecosystem, then the role that managing editors can play is fairly limited because many of the folks who are in this ecosystem and providing information about conflicts are certainly not international or Western correspondents. And some of them don’t want to even necessarily self-identify as journalists.

LP:      So, in terms of this ecosystem, what would you say about how it’s been changing—the relationship between these big news brands and the outsourcing of labor to these less protected news employees?

JS:       Well, look. I spent my whole career as a freelance journalist in Latin America. So, this is not a new phenomenon. There’s always been a reliance on freelancers, particularly in these sorts of “second tier” conflicts, for the kind of things that may not have made the front pages every day, but you had to cover. But it’s become more pronounced for a variety of reasons. One is that the media industry is less financially stable because the revenue stream has been disrupted by technology, and so they have fewer resources to support fully staffed bureaus. And that’s been well documented, and everyone knows all about that. Then you’ve got the risk profile. In some parts of the world—this is not true everywhere, but certainly in some parts of the world—being a Westerner or being a Western journalist is so dangerous that you’re not able to move around in a way that would allow you to carry out the most basic kind of reporting. So you need to rely on local people who can blend in more easily. And the third thing is that the technology has made it possible for people who are in the right place at the right time to engage in journalism and feed this news cycle. There’s always been this kind of—now it would be called crowdsourcing—element to covering major global events. But now these people can participate directly. That changes the dynamic. And the last thing I would mention is that when you look at conflict zones and the role that journalists have played historically, what’s made journalists relatively safe in conflict zones is their utility to all parties. And that utility was a function of the collective information monopoly that journalists exercised. You wanted to communicate even if you were in a pretty rough neighborhood and you were kind of unsafe for yourself. You really didn’t have a choice other than to talk to the media. So the media was inherently useful, and that helped make journalists safe. And now that’s no longer the case. There are alternative ways of communicating, particularly if you’re communicating with likeminded people or supporters. And so journalists are less essential, and that’s also had a profound impact that sort of recalibrated the risk in many parts of the world.

LP:      What would you say is the responsibility for safety or care that should be taken, when it comes to these local news employees or freelancers?

JS:       We’ve developed guidelines, and they have been endorsed by a number of media organizations. And they try to lay out these responsibilities. They focus more on assignments, but they lay out pretty clearly what the obligations of editors and media companies are and what the obligations of journalists and the freelancers themselves are, in terms of training and professionalism. The issue is complex because you’re dealing with different communities. And you’re also dealing with different kinds of media organizations. Some are relatively large and have the resources to support training and pay at a level that allows freelancers to invest in the kind of equipment and training they need. And some are less well funded and have a different culture. And it’s hard to get them to take on this responsibility. There are some local media outlets that really have far fewer resources and don’t necessarily have the same kind of journalistic culture. Some of them are highly partisan or are compromised in some other way. And then you’re dealing with different communities. You’re dealing with staff correspondents, and you’re dealing with international freelancers, and you’re dealing with local fixers and stringers, and you’re dealing with local journalists who are working for local media. And then the international media is picking up information from those sources. I think the broadest answer is to say that if you are an international news organization, you need to have the broadest possible vision and understanding for this information ecosystem, and recognize that you have a responsibility not only for the individual that you employ or have contracted but for all the different pieces that allow that person to function.

LP:      Is there anything in place to hold people accountable for this responsibility?

JS:       These guidelines are really directed at international news organizations hiring international freelancers. They don’t really address you if you’re a Mexican newspaper and you’re based in Mexico City and you’ve got a stringer. Or you’re a Pakistani newspaper and you have a stringer in the FATA. Then, these guidelines are going to seem very, very aspirational. I mean, theoretically they should apply, but the practical matter is that they would not. So these guidelines are really for international news organizations hiring international freelancers. So, I don’t think there is accountability. I mean, there’s accountability within news organizations. There’s accountability created by the fact that there is some attention being paid to these lapses, and there’s the sort of shame factor that could function sometimes. But there’s no mechanism across the industry to ensure accountability.

LP:      I’m also wondering about the information that the CPJ gathers on sexual assault in the field.

JS:       We did a big project looking at this issue. We don’t have good data on sexual violence. It’s very difficult to document because people are reluctant to speak about it in many circumstances. They don’t self-report. It’s not always covered. So we’ve made more of an effort to document sexual assault, but we don’t have comprehensive, comparative statistics.

LP:      And what was it that made you launch the project and start making more of an effort? When would you say that happened?

JS:       There was a lot of awareness around this following the attacks against journalists in Tahrir Square and the systematic harassment of female journalists covering those events. More journalists came forward and began talking about this. And of course, sexualized violence predominantly affects women, but it also affects men. We found both men and women speaking out about this and talking about their experience. That really created a period of awareness and reflection. That is when we made that commitment to do a better job of documenting these kinds of violations.

LP:      What would you say is the top ethical concern right now when it comes to war reporting? What is the most current ethical question you’re trying to answer?

JS:       I think whenever you ask these questions, it’s really important that you define the scope. What do you mean by war reporting? Are we talking about what is the ethical debate that’s happening in the Afghan media or are you talking about the BBC? Or are you talking about Mexican news organizations covering the drug war? Or are you talking about Syria and international news organizations and the way they cover that? Major international news organizations have a whole series of ethical obligations. I would say the greatest challenge that they’re facing now, when it comes to these kinds of issues, I think there are two challenges: One is the relationship with freelancers. And the second is the duty of care for staff who are facing—and this applies to freelancers—extraordinary risk, particularly the risk of kidnapping or the vulnerability to psychological injury, like post-traumatic stress. How do you care for the people you employ who are exposed to those kinds of risks? So it’s their relationship with freelancers and it’s the full range of duty of care for your people.

[Featured image credit: Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons]

Kluwe brings player perspective to this year’s ethics conference

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Coverage of the 2015 Ethics Conference can be found here, where you can find updated coverage of panel discussions, keynote addresses, and different breakout sessions hosted at the conference.

Chris Kluwe will bring an athlete’s perspective to Fair of Foul: Ethics and Sports Journalism, this year’s Center for Journalism Ethics conference.

A former NFL punter, Kluwe has continued to advocate for same sex marriage and gay rights. His stance on these beliefs is why he is on the panel discussion “Out of Bounds? Criticism and Vitriol in Sports.”

His nine-year NFL career spanned three teams, the Seattle Seahawks, Minnesota Vikings, and Oakland Raiders, with seven of them as the punter for the Vikings.

Kluwe had an online blog for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which he quit after the newspaper published an editorial for the ban of same-sex marriage. It was not that he disagreed with their stance; it was how they portrayed the editorial that pushed him over the line. He tweeted, “What concerns me is them presenting a completely biased piece (word choice, examples used, conclusions) as a neutral position. That’s not only irresponsible journalism, it’s massively hypocritical.”

On April 30, 2013, Kluwe wrote an article on Deadspin describing his thoughts on why he was released by the Vikings titled “I was an NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot.”

As an NFL player with experience as an opinion writer, Kluwe understands how criticism in sports journalism and the ethics behind it. Journalism Professor James Baughman, ESPN Milwaukee sports writer Jason Wilde, and ESPN Chicago columnist Melissa Issacson will join Kluwe on the panel discussion.

2015 Shadid Ethics Award honors Chicago Tribune staff

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Coverage of the 2015 Ethics Conference can be found here, where you can find updated coverage of panel discussions, keynote addresses, and different breakout sessions hosted at the conference.

Three Chicago Tribune reporters and a photographer are recipients of the 2015 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics. Their revelations about serious abuses in Illinois’ juvenile justice system brought about reforms and led to the resignation of the director of the state Department of Children and Family Services.

Reporters David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib along with photographer Anthony Souffle conducted a one-year investigation to produce a five-part multimedia series revealing that hundreds of Illinois wards were assaulted and raped by their peers each year in understaffed and violent institutions.

The Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison makes the award annually to recognize and promote high ethical standards among journalists. The honor carries a $1,000 prize and will be presented at the center’s annual ethics conference in Madison April 10.

“While their investigative work was outstanding, the judges were most impressed with the care taken by these journalists to protect the privacy and best interests of the victims whose stories they told,” said the head of the judging committee, Professor Emeritus Jack Mitchell.

Reporters assured all interview subjects that they could determine what, if any, of the stories they told would be published. In one example, a girl they interviewed on video had second thoughts about her compelling story just before publication, and the reporters honored her request to withhold it and thanked her for what she had taught them.

Ethics center director Robert Drechsel observed that ethical journalism entails seeking truth while minimizing harm and said this series did both.

The award is named for Anthony Shadid, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who died in 2012 while on a reporting assignment for the New York Times. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his courageous and insightful foreign correspondence. He had been a member of the ethics center’s advisory board and was a strong supporter of public interest journalism and the importance of discussion of journalism ethics.

The April 10 conference on the UW-Madison campus will address ethics and sports journalism. The event is open to the public. Registration is open through April 3 at http://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/conference.

The Tribune entry prevailed over four other strong finalists for the award:

  • Fox 31 Television in Denver for the decisions it made about reporting on Medicaid “super utilizers;”
  • The Pittsburgh Tribune Review for pursuit of an apparent cover-up of the killing of civilians by an American in Iraq;
  • Pro Publica for placing raw Medicare data in context in its “Treatment Trackers” project; and
  • The Tulsa World for its aggressive, yet sensitive, coverage of a botched execution by the state of Oklahoma.