4

Truth and Honesty

A WORLD OF LIMITED TRUTH

Lying, deception, and dishonesty are so perva- sive in contemporary society, it seems, that some
ethicists must feel like moral dinosaurs in their continued defense of truth as a funda- mental value.
Take, for example, this recent disturbing headline: E-mail urges lying for blood drive. In April 2004 the
press reported that “members of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority at Missouri were urged to lie about their
health to qualify as donors in a competitive blood drive” at the university. In her e-mail to sorority mem-
bers, the chapter’s blood donation coordinator threatened punishment for those members re- fusing to
donate blood. They were instructed to lie about recent tattoos and piercings and colds—anything that
might disqualify them as donors. Far from being a harmless sorority prank, this kind of dishonesty could
have posed a threat to the blood supply.

Despite such continuing anecdotal evidence of a rather cavalier attitude toward the truth, we are
placing ourselves at great risk if we abandon truth as a fundamental cultural norm. Truth breeds trust a
precious and essential commodity within a democratic system and trust is an energizing force of social
intercourse and civil society. Unfortunately, the media themselves sometimes operate within a world of
limited truth and thus must bear some responsibility for the loss of reverence for truth and honesty.
Consider the widely publicized case of Stephen Glass. By the time he was 25, Glass was a rising star in
Washington journalism and an associate editor of the New Republic. His colorful details about such
fascinating topics as the small reli- gious sect that worshipped George Bush and the Las Vegas casino
that took bets on whether the next space shuttle would explode captivated his readers and earned him
a reputation for journalistic enterprise and creativity. Unfortu- nately, his stories did not originate with
real life but from Glass’s vivid imagination. After a month-long investigation, the New Republic editors
confirmed that 27 of the 41 pieces Glass had written for the magazine were full of fabrications,2 thereby
“destroying a portion of the always-fragile bond of trust journalists try to form with their readers.”

Glass’s fall from journalistic grace was soon followed by the tragedy of Jayson Blair, described briefly in
the opening to Chapter 1, in which the 27-year-old New York Times prodigy was accused of fabricating
or plagiarizing material in over half his stories, thereby precipitating an ethics scandal of staggering
proportions and a crisis of confidence in American journalism.

Unfortunately, these recent blows to the credibility of journalism may be symptomatic of an escalating
assault on the values of truth and honesty in both the media professions and society at large. For
example, when Primary Colors, a best-selling novel that was eventually made into a movie by the same
name, was pub- lished in early 1996, it set off a wave of specula- tion within the journalistic community.
The book, a thinly disguised portrait of the Clinton campaign and the national press corps, carried only
the pseudonym “Anonymous,” a fascinat- ing attempt at literary camouflage that was ri- valed only by
the plot’s political intrigue. After months of denials to his professional colleagues, including those at CBS
News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, Newsweek colum- nist Joe Klein confessed his
authorship of Pri- mary Colors but offered no apologies for lying to friends and colleagues. The plot
thickened when a Newsweek editor, Maynard Parker, ac- knowledged that he was aware of Klein’s in-
volvement in the project but declined to inform the magazine’s staff despite the fact that News- week
had been among those that had joined in the speculation.

In 1996, in conjunction with the baseball All-Star Game in Philadelphia, the tabloid Philadelphia Weekly
published a 4,000-word cover story on the “recently discovered love let- ters between Jimmie Foxx, one
of Philadelphia’s all-time great ballplayers, and starlet Judy Holliday.” Writer Tom McGrath’s highly
detailed exposé included a personal account of the relationship that began in April 1945 and ended in
late September when the movie star dumped Foxx. The Weekly later admitted that the story was a hoax,
a rather clinical way of semantically reducing this piece of journalistic deception to nothing worse than a
practical joke. Editor Tim Whitaker offered no apologies for this shocking admission, although he
promised in his column not to do it again.

The reactions to such desecrations of the truth have often been swift and unforgiving from both
journalists and media critics. For example, following the Jimmie Foxx hoax, a columnist for the
Philadelphia Daily News wrote: “The most shocking part of this mess is that Whitaker offers no
apologies. Since he says he’s done nothing wrong, he’s free to fake another story.” Similarly, CBS News,
which featured Joe Klein as a news consultant and commenta- tor on its weekend news program,
castigated the columnist for not being more forthcoming with them.8 Suzanne Braun Levine, editor of
the Columbia Journalism Review, was unforgiving in her assessment: “Journalists think of them- selves
as a fraternity,” she said, “and that jour- nalists are straight with each other even if nobody is straight
with them. They are extremely sensitive to being criticized or being duped. And what could be worse
than being duped by one of your own?”9

Reactions such as these from within and outside the media are refreshing in that they serve as evidence
that such deceptions are not necessarily the industry standard. And a con- tinuation of this moral
guardianship may serve to prevent such ethical lapses from be- coming pathological. This is the
optimistic view. A more bleak appraisal is that episodes such as these represent an increasingly casual
attitude toward truth as an ethical imperative. Truth, in this view, has not fared well in the moral
pecking order. This attitude is captured in a rather startling assessment several years ago by a public
relations practitioner for one of the ten largest U.S. corporations: “Does the word ‘lie’ actually mean
anything anymore? In one sense, everyone lies, but in another sense, no one does, because no one
knows what’s true—it’s whatever makes you look good.”10 The reality probably lies somewhere
between the optimistic and pessimistic views.

Some authors of nonfiction works attempt to justify their deceptions or outright fabrica- tion of facts by
an appeal to a “higher truth.” In this view, it matters little whether the specific facts underlying the story
are true. Instead, they are merely surrogates for the author’s view of political reality. This form of ethical
relativism is exemplified by the controversy that arose in 1999 over the book I, Rogoberta Menchu,
a captivating chronicle of the political violence that engulfed Guatemala from 1979 to 1983. Written by
Nobel Peace Prize winner Rogoberta Menchu, the book purported to be based upon the author’s
personal experience with the al- leged oppression of Mayan Indian peasants by Guatemalan landowners
and the struggles be- tween the author’s family and the landowners. However, part of Menchu’s story
began to un- ravel when anthropologist David Stoll pub- lished a book, based upon exhaustive research
and interviews, in which he claimed that Menchu described experiences she never had and con-
sistently altered facts and stories.

Unfortunately, I, Rogoberta Menchu is not the only award-winning author recently to stand ac- cused of
fabrication. Benjamin Wilomirski won the National Jewish Book Award for Fragments, his celebrated
memoir of the Holocaust. How- ever, as it turned out, the author’s real name was Bruno Doesseker, and
he was the son of a Protestant mother who never witnessed the Holocaust.

The evidence increasingly suggests that, as a society, we view the world from a perspective of greater
moral relativism. Even those of us who do not consciously condone lying are often un- willing to
acknowledge publicly a bright line between truth and falsehood. In addition, we are less inclined to be
judgmental of those who lie. “It’s not my problem” is a common refrain. Consider, for example, the
results of a student role-playing exercise in a class on “The Presi- dency and the Press” at the University
of South- ern California. The topic involved the sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and
former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The instructor, columnist Richard Reeves, di- vided the
class into two groups, half designated as advisers to President Clinton and half as Washington reporters.
The students each wrote memos to their superiors about how to handle the Lewinsky affair. Although
there were differ- ences between the two groups, both agreed that it did not matter whether the
information they were giving out or writing down was true. The Clinton advisers said it did not matter
whether their boss was telling the truth. It wasn’t their problem! The student reporters said it did not
matter whether “sources” were telling the truth. Nor did it matter that reports in other media were
accurate. It wasn’t their problem! Neither group assumed any responsibility for helping to spread
disinformation, even if it turned out later that their information was false. They could distance
themselves from their involve- ment in this episode with clear consciences. Their instructor, in a follow-
up column, de- scribed the lesson of the class as “[l]iving in a world of limited truth.”

TRUTH AS A FUNDAMENTAL VALUE

Are lying and deception ever justified? If you put this question to your friends, you would proba- bly
receive several different responses. Some would answer with an unqualified “Never!” Others would say
that it depends on the cir- cumstances. Still others would try to evade the question directly by cautiously
noting that the answer depends on the definition of the word lie. These responses, as simplistic as they
are, represent the wide range of answers provided by moral philosophers in their tireless efforts to
answer this question.

At the outset it should be acknowledged that lying and deception are related but are not nec- essarily
the same thing. For the purposes of this chapter, deception means “the communication of messages
intended to mislead others, to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe.”14 Deception may
result not only from words but also from behavior, gestures, or even silence. Thus, under some
circumstances the withhold- ing of information from the public might be considered a deceptive act.

Lying is really a subcategory of deception and involves the communication of false infor- mation that the
communicator knows or be- lieves to be false. Although media practitioners have been known to
deliberately transmit false information, many of the contemporary ethical problems involving the ethics
of truth telling fall under the broad category of deception.

The commitment to truth is perhaps the most ancient and revered ethical principle of human
civilization. Despite our constant temp- tation to lie and use deception in our self-interest, the idea of
truth as a positive value is well en- trenched in moral and legal philosophy. Some of the earliest
condemnations of lying were contained in judicial laws against false wit- nesses and perjury, such as the
ancient Code of Hammurabi, which stated unequivocally, “If a citizen appears as a false witness in court .
. . , he shall be put to death.”15 We find the Judeo- Christian expression of this ideal in the Ninth
Commandment’s dictum “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

On a more secular level both ancient and modern philosophers have been preoccupied with the role of
truth in human affairs. Of course, Socrates was eventually sentenced to death for his critical inquiry,
thus becoming possibly the first martyr to free speech. Kant, as noted in Chapter 3, felt that the truth
was a universal value that should be brought to bear in all circumstances, regardless of the conse-
quences. John Milton, in his Areopagitica, pub- lished in 1644, made a compelling argument for freedom
of thought when he depicted truth and falsehood as combatants in the market- place of ideas. The
truth, Milton felt, would always win in a fair fight. More than two hun- dred years later John Stuart Mill
was still pro- moting this idea in arguing for people’s right to express opinions free from government
censor- ship: “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth;
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and live- lier impression of
truth, produced by its colli- sion with error.”17 Of course, Milton and Mill were perhaps more interested
in the intellectual meaning of truth than its application to moral philosophy.

But if the truth is so sacred, why is honesty so often the first thing to be compromised when it is in our
self-interest to do so? The an- swer may lie, in part, in that the tendency to- ward dishonesty is as much
a part of human nature and our societal norms as telling the truth. In fact, the art of deception enjoys a
his- tory at least as ancient (if not as honorable) as the commitment to truth. Deception was linked
irrevocably with the idea of original sin when the serpent deceived Eve, who in turn persuaded Adam to
eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. This propensity for lying was passed on to Adam and
Eve’s off- spring, as evidenced by Cain’s response when the Lord questioned him on his slain brother’s
whereabouts: “I know not Am I my brother’s keeper?” And still later in the Old Testament, jacob’s
children, in a fit of jealousy directed against their brother Joseph, deceived their father by telling him
that Joseph had been rav- aged by a wild beast, when in fact they had sold him into bondage.

As we saw earlier, the ancient philosophers may have been committed to the ideals of truth, but even
Plato questioned whether the truth was always beneficial. When confronted with the proposition of
whether one should lie to save someone from a murderer, Plato said yes. And when the truth is
unknown, we can even make falsehood appear to be truth and thus turn it to our advantage.19 This
advice, of course, blurs the distinction between fact and fiction and raises contemporary ethical
questions con- cerning such issues as the use of composite characters in news stories and the use of the
docudrama the dramatic blending of fact and fiction as a credible TV format for communi- cating
historical events.

Our mythology, folklore, and literature are replete with dramatic examples of deception and lying as
legitimate means of fulfilling one’s self-interest. As consumers of fictional drama we are generally
impressed with the cunning and cleverness of acts of deceit of some of our favorite characters. In fact, it
is safe to say that deceit, rather than truth, is featured more prominently in literature to reflect the
human condition.

Thus, those who are prone to deception have an impressive array of witnesses in their corner.
Moreover, many contemporary philoso- phers, unlike their ancient predecessors, have virtually ignored
the importance of truth in human intercourse. We are living, it seems, in an age of relativism, when
accusations of moral misconduct are met with the rather cavalier retort “Everything’s relative.” The
problem is not that the relativists are entirely wrong; some- times deception may be justified. But if we
are to remain moral beings, both in our personal and professional lives, we should be prepared to
defend our deviations from the path of truth based on some firm moral foundation. Telling the truth
never needs any moral justification; lying and deception do.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTH

Some ethicists are uncompromising in their de- fense of truth as a fundamental value and ad- here to
the Kantian view that lying is inherently wrong. Others are more forgiving but still insist on a heavy
burden of proof to justify any lie. Ethicist Sissela Bok, for example, adheres to what she refers to as the
principle of veracity, which does not condemn every lie but requires that moral agents prove their lies
are necessary as a last resort. And even then, alternatives to lying must be explored and chosen if avail-
able.21 Nevertheless, because so many of the contemporary writings on moral philosophy have failed to
establish the continuing impor- tance of truth as an essential ingredient in our value systems, it would
be instructive to do so here. There are several reasons that civilized so- ciety should embrace the
commitment to truth as a fundamental principle.

First, a lack of integrity in human communications undermines the autonomy of the indi- vidual. As
rational beings we depend on truthful and accurate information to make informed judgments about a
whole host of activities, including the election of public officials, what products to buy, what TV
programs to watch, and even the selection of friends and profes- sional colleagues. Consider, for
example, the potential consequences of a phony film critic scam perpetrated by two Sony Pictures
execu- tives in 2001. They had fabricated a film critic named David Manning, who gave rave reviews to
Sony-distributed films Hollow Man, Vertical Limit, A Knight’s Tale, and The Animal. When the scam was
discovered, the executives were suspended without pay for 30 days,22 but this may have been little
comfort to those who de- pended upon these reviews and assumed they were the product of an
independent film critic.

Because many of our waking hours are spent consuming the visual and auditory stim- uli provided by the
mass media, we have a right, as autonomous individuals, to expect media practitioners to behave with
the same degree of integrity as the rest of society. When inaccura- cies, rumor, and unsubstantiated
allegations replace truth based upon personal knowledge, evidence, or corroboration, then informed
de- cision making, and thus individual autonomy, is prejudiced.

The damage that can result from an assault on the truth is clearly illustrated by the con- tentious
senatorial debate surrounding the con- firmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991.
Confronted with allegations of sexual harassment from former law school professor Anita Hill, Thomas
vehemently de- nied the allegations and called the proceedings a “high-tech lynching.” While the truth
may never be known, ten years after the hearings, David Brock, a former American Spectator writer,
acknowledged in a book that in the wake of the hearings he had been designated by Thomas’s right-
wing supporters to destroy Hill’s reputa- tion and scrub Thomas’s. According to Brock, he had printed
“virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” about Hill to make her appear “a little
nutty and a little bit slutty.”23 In the meantime, in the collective mind of the public a cloud still hangs
over a Supreme Court justice and his accuser.

The notion of individual autonomy is based, in part, on freedom of choice. Deception may undermine
the confidence we have in our choices, which may make us reluctant to exercise our autonomy in the
future.24 For example, a lack of veracity among advertising and public rela- tions practitioners would
understandably cre- ate a climate of public distrust of the business community. Thus, the term social
responsibility has entered the lexicon of media practitioners alongside the word freedom, a concept that
is also reflected in the codes of the various media professions.

The second reason for a commitment to truth is that it demonstrates a respect for per- sons as ends
rather than as tools to be manipu- lated. Deception usually places self-interest over the interests of
others. There are excep- tions, of course, such as in some cases when a doctor refuses to tell a patient
the truth about a terminal illness. But by and large a lack of ve- racity in the communication process
places the recipient of the deceptive information at a competitive disadvantage. Where media practi-
tioners are involved, the problems are magnified, because consumers are either more unlikely to
discover the deception than they would be in person or have no way to register their disap- proval
immediately with any real hope of hav- ing an impact.

Of course, the fallacy in this “respect for persons” rationale for truth telling is that it can also be used to
justify deception, as when some- one avoids unbridled candor to salvage the feelings of others. At a
higher level, journalists sometimes defend their deceptive practices in the name of the public interest.
Some investiga- tive reporters use misrepresentations to un- cover official corruption or other unsavory
activities inimical to society’s well-being. From an ethical standpoint this practice is defended on the
ground that it will benefit the public at large while harming (deceiving) a small number of unsuspecting
persons. Those who question

the practice believe that reporters are too in- clined to become undercover sleuths before ex- hausting
other means of getting the story. From a duty-based perspective two wrongs don’t make a right (even in
the name of the public interest), and deception as a routine news-gathering tech- nique should be
rejected. The belief in the truthfulness of communi- cations also builds trust between individuals and
between individuals and society’s institu- tions. Deception constitutes a breach of faith and makes it less
likely that relationships based on trust and credibility will succeed in the fu- ture.25 One writer has even
described the prac- tice of lying as “parasitic on the social process.”26 For example, a public relations
practitioner for a chemical company who is not completely honest with the press concerning a toxic spill
may have something to gain in the short term but will soon discover that the company’s (as well as her
own) credibility has suffered a seri- ous blow. Likewise, misleading or deceptive ad- vertising practices
constitute a breach of faith with the consumer, because it is usually more difficult for the consumer to
discover the truth about commercial speech than about political speech, which receives such intense
scrutiny from the press. Because trust is built on truthful communication, lying and deception under-
mine the very foundations of society.

Finally, truth is essential to the democratic process. Democracy depends on an informed citizenry, one
that approaches the political and economic marketplace armed with the knowl- edge that inspires
studious deliberation. In a complex democratic society, the media are the primary conduits of
information flow, and to the extent that they do not provide truthful, accurate, and meaningful
information, they deprive their audiences of the intellectual nourishment necessary for rational decision
making. The recent trends toward “sound-bite” journalism and the displacement of thoughtful reporting
and analysis with the sensationalism and triviality of the tabloid media are troubling manifestations of
how truth is often vulnerable to the lure of commercial values. Certainly nothing is ethically amiss in the
media’s appeal- ing to the popular tastes of their audiences. And to the extent that the public abandons
serious content for banality, they must share the moral responsibility for the depreciation of demo-
cratic values. But when the media are not faith- ful to the democratic mandate to service the political
and economic system that has pro- vided them sustenance in the first place, they become culturally
dysfunctional and deprive the system of its vitality.

MEDIA PRACTITIONERS

AND THE TRUTH–FALSEHOOD DICHOTOMY

In theory, it would appear that absolute truth is an ideal for which all media practitioners should strive.
In practice, however, the applica- tion of this principle often depends on the circumstances and the role
of the moral agent. Although outright falsehoods can seldom be justified, exactly how much truth is
good for the public soul depends on our expectations. For example, we expect journalists to be unbi-
ased and to report the truth (that is, as many of the known facts as possible that are important to a
story). On the other hand, consumers re- alize that public relations practitioners and advertisers are
advocates and do not expect them to do anything that would be contrary to their self-interest or the
interests of their clients. This is not surprising considering the fact that advertisers and public relations
pro- fessionals come from a different tradition than journalists. Thus, the question becomes one of how
much of the truth should be re- vealed and under what circumstances public relations professionals and
advertisers may withhold information that might be impor- tant to consumers.

In assessing the role of truth as it pertains to the various forms of media practice, Professor Frank
Deaver of the University of Alabama suggests that we construct a continuum, a form of ethical “gray
scale,” from one extreme to the other. In so doing, absolute truth will reside at one end and deception
and blatant lies at the other. Those whose purpose it is to provide facts and information (for instance,
ethical journalists) will lie near the “truth” end of the scale. Those who intend to deceive, even if for
justifiable purposes, will occupy the other end of the continuum. Unethical journalists and advertisers
and public relations practitioners who knowingly dispense falsehoods are the most prominent
inhabitants of this position on the scale. Somewhere between these two ex tremes, according to Deaver,
are two other points: those who intend to persuade by using selective information (that is, not the
whole truth), such as advertisers and public relations professionals, and those who engage in non- truths
without intent to deceive. Fiction (such as media entertainment that does not purport to be a truthful
account of events), parables, al- legories, and honest error fall into this latter category. New journalism,
which achieved pop- ularity in the 1960s, resides here because it often uses parables, allegories, and
fictional characters to achieve a “greater truth.” It is often justified on the grounds that a fictional
approach to real events and ideas appeals to a larger and more diverse audience than the more
conventional structured approach to journalism.

Truth in Journalism

The Standard of Journalistic Truth. From a journalistic perspective, expert opinion abounds on what
constitutes a truthful news account. At the minimum, three concepts appear to under- lie the notion of
truth in reporting.

First, and most obviously, the reporting of a story must be accurate. The facts should be verified; that is,
they should be based on solid evidence. If there is some doubt or dispute about the facts, it should be
revealed to the audience. This is a threshold requirement, because in- accurate, unsubstantiated, or
uncorroborated information can undermine the credibility of any journalistic enterprise. The failure of
CBS News to observe this basic canon of responsible journalism created an ethical firestorm in the fall of
2004 during that network’s coverage of the bitter and hotly contested presidential race between
President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. Pursuing what had already become a contentious
campaign issue, CBS News broad- cast reports on both its evening news program and 60 Minutes raising
new questions about President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service. Despite a mounting body of
evidence that the documents were forgeries, CBS News and Dan Rather continued to express confi-
dence in their authenticity, but after nearly two weeks at the center of a public brouhaha finally
acknowledged that they could not authenticate the documents. The disclosures that the source who
gave the network the documents had lied about where he got them and that a 60 Minutes producer
acted as a conduit between the net- work’s source and Senator John Kerry’s presi- dential campaign led
some media pundits to speculate on the future of CBS News, its top ex- ecutives, and the 72-year-old
Rather himself.30 CBS and Rather issued a public apology,31 but the harm to the network’s journalistic
stature was incalculable.

From the standpoint of accuracy, quotes should be used with precision. As an ethical practice, the
altering of direct quotes to avoid embarrassment to the speaker is questionable. If there is a problem in
this respect, indirect quotes or paraphrases should be used. Never- theless, some reporters believe that
“cleaning up” an interviewee’s faulty grammar is justified out of fairness to the person.

What if the quotes are accurate but contain assertions that the reporter believes may be un- true? Is
there an obligation to investigate the truthfulness of every statement (often an im- possibility during the
frenzy of a political cam- paign, for example), or does the reporter’s obligation end with quoting the
speaker accu- rately? Surely the failure to investigate may deny the audience some access to the truth,
but there is some question whether this duty amounts to a moral imperative. Nevertheless, when
reporters do not personally witness an occurrence or when the information is not general knowledge,
they should be sure to attribute the source of their information. This is a fundamental requirement of
accurate reporting.

Unfortunately, inaccurate quotes and sto- ries often assume a life of their own when re- porters fail to
conduct their own independent investigations and simply accept the accounts of their colleagues as
gospel. For an unsuspect- ing public, such stories may be uncritically em- braced as journalistic truth.
One of the most highly publicized examples occurred when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore
was quoted directly as claiming that he “invented” the Internet. In reality, what he told CNN’s Wolf
Blitzer in an interview was, “During my service in Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
When Gore was derided by both Republicans and the news media for this com- ment, several Internet
experts noted that Gore did indeed play an important role while in Congress in developing the Internet.

With the advent of the Web and the inevitable attractiveness of online journalism, the problem of
incestuous news coverage, in which journalists borrow liberally from each other, is likely to increase.
While inaccuracies can be corrected immediately by the original pub- lisher, they are likely to endure as
the number of derivative stories proliferates. Admittedly, the solution might elude even the most pas-
sionate and reflective ethicist, but the gauntlet has been thrown down. “If integrity isn’t a compelling
enough reason to think about these things,” writes Barb Palser in the American Journalism Review,
“consider the fact that con- tent sharing is making errors harder to erase. With more sites grabbing one
another’s content outright or referencing it in research, slipups are more likely to be immortalized. Now
imag- ine getting caught trying to swallow your own words.”

A particularly troublesome weakness in journalistic accuracy (and hence the overall truth of the story) is
in the reporting of re- search. This is significant because the market- place is increasingly dominated by
studies and surveys for public consumption. Many journal- ists, never having had a statistics or
experimen- tal design course in their liberal arts education, are awed by scientific studies. Without the
nec- essary intellectual tools to evaluate the method- ology or conclusions, they often accept them
uncritically. This is not the place to embark on a crash course in the scientific method. However,
journalists do not have to be scien- tists to at least question the source of the study and to attribute this
in their stories. This within itself may say something about the credibility of the study.

For the sake of accuracy, should reporters ever allow sources to review their stories prior to publication?
At one time prepublication re- view was a taboo, and the notion is still not popular with many journalists
because of what they perceive as a threat to their independence. However, Fred Brown, the Ethics
Committee cochair of the Society of Professional Journal- ists, notes that in the past couple of decades
“[w]e’ve put accuracy above independence, and we’ve decided it’s more important to serve our readers
than to be overly protective of what we’re writing.”34 Steve Weinberg, former head of Investigative
Reporters and Editors, routinely allows prepublication review because “the offer of review makes
sources more willing to talk on the record” and “it doesn’t compromise the writers’ control over their
stories.”35 Sources who wish to alter the interpretation or tone of an article should be reminded that
their review is limited only to confirming the accuracy of the information. Supporters of at least limited
prepublication review also point out that the ultimate goal of ethical journalism is the truth, which can
be compromised by inaccurate in- formation. According to this view, if sources can insure the accuracy
of information, which is frequently the case in complex stories involving tax policy or scientific
discoveries, reporters should not hesitate to consult with them prior to publication.

While most reporters embrace accurate re- porting as a first principle of ethical journal- ism, time and
competitive pressures sometimes compromise the accuracy of news coverage. The biggest blunder in
recent memory occurred when the four major broadcast networks, CNN, the Associated Press, and
many of the nation’s leading newspapers incorrectly named Democrat Al Gore as the winner in the 2000
presidential contest.36 The critics could not agree on the cause of this debacle. Some blamed faulty data
from the service that provides exit polling and raw vote counts to the networks and the Associ- ated
Press. Others blamed Florida for produc- ing flawed election results.37 However, there was virtual
unanimity on one point: The news media, particularly the television networks, had suffered an
incredible loss of credibility. Representative Billy Tauzin, chair of the House Telecommunications
Subcommittee, even accused the networks of “disenfranchising Americans from their right to vote” and
promised to hold hearings on the networks’ election night faux pas.38

Battlefield coverage is particularly vulnerble to accusations of inaccurate reporting, a re- sult in part of
heavy dependence upon military sources of information, the inherent complexi- ties of modern military
operations, and the rapid pace of battlefield engagements that is antithetical to journalistic reflection
and per- spective. During the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, for example, the term embedded
quickly attached itself to the public conscious- ness as the Pentagon permitted reporters to ac- company
military units as they marched on Baghdad and engaged the Iraqi military in an effort to unseat Saddam
Hussein. Journalists were thus provided with a ringside seat for the engagements of individual units.
Nevertheless, from the outset the war coverage was plagued by numerous inaccuracies precipitated by
the reporting of rumors and information frequently based upon faulty intelligence. An article in USA
Today, for example, attributed some of the inaccuracies to the “fog of war, a place where fact, fiction
and battlefield exaggeration merge into a muddle.” Among the incidences cited were reports that
Saddam Hussein may have died in an air strike when in fact his fate remained unclear; that a captured
chemical plant produced banned weapons, which was false; that thousands of Shiites had revolted
against Saddam in Basra, also false; and that bodies found in a warehouse in southern Iraq were victims
of Saddam’s brutal regime when in fact the remains were from the war in the 1980s against Iran.39

A second requirement for journalistic truth is that, in addition to being accurate, a truthful story should
promote understanding. Time and space limitations preclude providing a compre- hensive
understanding of any situation. The goal should be to provide an account that is essentially complete. A
story should contain as much relevant information as is available and essential to afford the average
reader or viewer at least an understanding of the facts and the context of the facts. This places the
working journalist somewhere between the extremes of full disclosure and no disclosure.40

The fact is that the whole truth can proba- bly never be known about any situation, but ethical issues
arise when moral agents inten- tionally withhold all or some facts relevant to the public interest. This
practice is antithetical to the journalistic imperative of reporting all of the known relevant facts, but
sometimes threats to the lives of individuals or the public’s welfare lead to withholding or delaying
certain kinds of information. Fast-breaking stories re- lating to terrorism and hostage takings are two
prime examples.
There are other occasions when the journal- istic imperative to report the truth is held hostage by more
powerful forces that are just as determined, for their own ends, to control the flow of information to the
public. As noted ear- lier, media coverage of military conflicts is a challenging undertaking, particularly
when, in the heat of battle, journalists attempt to provide perspective and understanding for what is ad-
mittedly a complex story. Chastened by what they believed to have been unrestrained nega- tive
coverage of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon, many of whose senior brass were veterans of that
unpopular conflict, was determined not to repeat their earlier mistakes during Operation Desert Storm,
which successfully thwarted Iraq’s aggressive intentions in Kuwait in 1991. In this relatively short
hundred-day campaign, the military severely limited media access to the combat zone. And reporters,
many of whom were covering their first war, seemed so mes- merized by the Pentagon’s relentless flow
of sanitized information that Newsweek described them as “callow children of the video arcades,
stupefied by the high-tech at press briefings.” “At times,” Newsweek observed, “news organi- zations
seemed so busy courting generals they forgot to ask questions. Competing correspon- dents, papers and
networks played right into the Pentagon’s hands.”41 The more restrained commentators chided them
for being uncriti- cal. Their less charitable critics accused them of being government collaborators.

Twelve years later, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the press was
accused of jumping to unwarranted conclusions that seemed to change by the day conclusions that did
little to enhance the pub- lic’s understanding of the military or public policy implications of that
engagement. Media critics accused journalists of mood swings, mor- phing rapidly from a sort of prewar
optimism to predictions of a quagmire (invoking memo- ries of Vietnam) shortly after the
commencement of hostilities. These mood swings, according to this view, “magnified both expectations
of an instantaneous victory and grumbles about mili- tary stumbles, resulting in schizophrenic cover- age
that distorted public perceptions of the military campaign.”43 “Bounding between spurts of overly
optimistic expectations and overly pessimistic fits of defeatism may fill newspapercolumns and TV air
time,” declared an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. “But it doesn’t neces- sarily reflect reality.”44

However, some reporters and editors coun- tered that journalists simply recorded the progress of the
war, both successes and setbacks. In their view, the media justifiably reported the Pentagon’s
predictions of an early victory, but when current and retired military officers ex- pressed consternation
about the war strategy and the stiffer-than-expected guerilla resistance in southern Iraq, the media also
reported these concerns.45 Regardless of one’s perspective on the media’s performance in this
particular con- flict, professional journalists should strive for clarity and promote understanding and
thus should avoid the temptation to render judg- ments unless they are reasonably supported by factual
assertions and accompanied by source attribution.

The third criterion for a truthful article is that it be fair and balanced. These twin concepts involve, first,
the avoidance of any discernible reporter bias. While reporters, like the rest of us, bring a certain
amount of cultural baggage to their jobs, is it asking too much to expect them to leave their prejudices
at the newsroom door? No accusation is more frequently heard against the news media or has the
potential to be more damaging to credibility than that of biased coverage. Consider, for example, the re-
sults of a study conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Jour- nalism
concerning the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign. Based upon a survey of 2,400 newspaper,
TV, and Internet stories during five different weeks, researchers found that a staggering 76 percent of
the coverage included one of two themes: that Al Gore lied and exaggerated or was marred by scandal
and that George W. Bush was a “different kind of Republican.”46 The Pew study also included this
damning indictment of the press, a conclusion also supported by an anecdotal survey reported in the
Columbia Journalism Review: “Journalists’ assertions about Bush’s character were more than twice as
likely than Gore’s to be unsupported by any evidence. In other words, they were pure opinion, rather
than journalistic analysis.”

In addition to avoiding bias, fairness and balance require that journalists accord recogni- tion to those
views that enhance the under- standing of the issue. Every effort should be made to represent them
fairly and in propor- tion to their significance to the issue.

The greatest threat to journalistic truth is likely to occur during periods of crisis. Reporters covering the
horrific events of September 11, 2001, for example, confronted unprecedented ethical challenges in
attempting to convey accu- rate information to a nation gripped by fear. On that date, Americans
watched in horror as two passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City and
another left a gap- ing hole in the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the symbol of our nation’s military
might. These aircraft had been converted into weapons of mass destruction by Arab terrorists moti-
vated by their passionate hatred for the United States. A fourth plane crashed into a field in
Pennsylvania when several passengers success- fully confronted their hijackers, thus heroically thwarting
their captors’ plans for further de- struction of American institutions. While the nation was attempting
to cope with the fear generated by these attacks on American soil and the loss of thousands of innocent
civilian lives, a bioterrorist attack in the form of anthrax was launched through the U.S. mail, placing
political leaders, journalists, and postal workers at risk. Several deaths resulted from this assault from an
unknown source.

Coverage of any national tragedy is risky, from an ethical perspective, but the enormity of 9/11 and its
aftermath confronted journalists with a daunting challenge—how to provide an accurate account of
events within a context that promotes understanding while not fueling the flames of fear and panic. In
the weeks following the terrorist attacks, reporters were confronted with a deluge of information, much
of it con- tradictory and inaccurate, emanating from the White House, various public officials, and other
sources. In the process, factual information sometimes became a casualty. In the anthrax story, for
example, editors struggled to provide useful information to the public to help them guard against
anthrax infection, while trying to avoid creating hysteria. As one commentator frankly acknowledged in
the American Journal- ism Review, “The media were being held hostage by an unfolding drama over
which they had no control.”48 And the fact that some journalists were targeted by the perpetrator(s) of
the an- thrax scare made it difficult for those affected to retain the emotional detachment usually ex-
pected of professional journalists. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, himself a target, may have ex- pressed the
feelings of some of his colleagues when he closed his evening news broadcast of October 15th displaying
a vial of pills and pro- claiming, “In Cipro we trust.”49 Cipro, a popular treatment for the anthrax virus,
soon became a household name.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the public accorded the news media high marks for their coverage.
For example, in a survey con- ducted by the Pew Center following the attacks, an impressive 89 percent
of respondents rated the coverage as “excellent” or “good” in mid- September. A month later this figure
still stood at 85 percent.50 Perhaps one reason the public was favorably disposed toward the media’s
treatment of the events surrounding 9/11 was because of the patriotic fervor that seemed to embrace
news organizations themselves. American flags appeared on news sets and lapels of news anchors, and
reporters uncritically ac- cepted information provided by government leaders and other officials. Some
of the coverage assumed a decidedly patriotic tone, an under- standable response to a horrific act
perpetrated against innocent civilians. “One problem,” noted Jane Kirtley, Silha Professor of Media
Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, “is that it’s difficult to be critical when the audience is
swept up in patriotism.”51 However, public approbation may also have resulted from the fact that the
predictable flood of rumors and un- substantiated facts was carefully evaluated by credible
journalists,52 not an easy task in an en- vironment in which reporters had no prece- dents to guide
them.

Nevertheless, there were dissenting voices. Some critics faulted journalists for abandoning their
traditional role of independent govern- ment watchdog and of reporting on the foreign policy
implications of the “war on terrorism” with an uncritical eye.53 In a democratic society committed to
the free flow of information, factual accuracy is clearly an ethical imperative, even when it reflects
unfavorably on govern- ment policies. For example, once the shock of the terrorist attacks had subsided
and journal- ists attempted to regain some measure of per- spective, they increasingly turned their
attention to stories concerning America’s policies in the Middle East and the societies that were the
breeding grounds for terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.

Efforts to enhance the American public’s understanding of the context surrounding the 9/11 story, of
course, necessitated interviews with Arab subjects who could provide unique insights into the culture in
which bin Laden grew up. Such journalistic overtures run the risk that the subjects will attempt to
control the interview agenda. Such was the case when ABC and CBS sought an interview with Carmen
bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s estranged sister-in- law. To get the interview, Carmen bin Laden’s
attorney insisted on a number of conditions, including his right to prescreen the interview and to make
changes, a violation of the stan- dards of both news organizations. To their credit, the networks refused
these demands. ABC was eventually granted the interview.

CNN raised some ethical eyebrows when it apparently gained the inside track on being the first Western
media outlet to question Osama bin Laden following the September 11th at- tacks. According to
Broadcasting & Cable maga- zine,55 CNN said it had been contacted by Al Jazeera, the Arab-language
network, regarding the submission of questions for an interview with Osama bin Laden and had pursued
the arrangement. CNN defended its actions by ad- mitting that such preinterview submissions were not
consistent with its policy but that the unusual circumstances warranted an exception. The network tried
to counter expected criti- cism by declaring that it had not agreed to any preconditions regarding
questions nor had it committed itself to airing bin Laden’s responses. Bob Steele, a journalism practice
expert with the Poynter Institute, also defended CNN’s de- cision on the grounds that “[t]here is value in
hearing what’s inside bin Laden’s head, even if it is propaganda.”56 Steele also noted that CNN
promised appropriate editorial oversight and that there was no guarantee they would use the material.
“It’s a chip out of journalistic inde- pendence, but it’s not a shattering of that inde- pendence,” he
concluded.

Withholding Information. Journalists are in the business of revelation, not concealment. In the minds of
some it is antithetical to the practice of journalism to sit on a story. The stakes are high—the erosion of
the public trust if readers and viewers believe vital information is being concealed from them.
Nevertheless, there are frequently competing claims on the loyalties of journalists. They may “kill” a
story to avoid harm to others or perhaps pull their journalistic punches in anticipation of gaining an
advantage at some future date.
But regardless of the reasons, whether noble or self-serving, public trust is frequently the first casualty
when news organizations suppress the truth. This was the concern in the spring of 2003 when Eason
Jordan, CNN’s chief news ex- ecutive, acknowledged in the New York Times that for twelve years his
network refused to re- port stories of Iraqi brutality and atrocities out of concern for the safety of its
employees and sources.58 Eason stated he made numerous trips to Baghdad to lobby the government
to keep the CNN bureau open and to arrange in- terviews with Iraqi officials. During these visits he
became painfully aware that some of CNN’s sources had been tortured and that the regime had
threatened to kill CNN employees.

Critics accused Jordan of trading “truth for access” and betraying the public trust.59 Several journalism
professors and commentators said the CNN news executive had compromised his network’s journalistic
mission so that it could continue to report from Iraq. Jordan responded that the issue was not about
access but life and death. “It’s very simple,” he replied. “Do you report things that get people killed? The
answer is no.” Jordan also stated that his network’s re- porting on the Iraqi regime was “fair and tough-
minded.” 60 However, CNN never reported these death threats, prompting one commentator to remark
unsympathetically, “If it couldn’t tell viewers how its newsgathering was shaped by implicit death
threats, it was time to get out of Baghdad.”

But Jordan also had his share of supporters, who believed he was being unfairly singled out. “If we
thought that we were endangering some- body we had hired to help us to report, that would be
something that we would weigh very heavily,” proclaimed Michele Grant, director of development for
the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United States. Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Sorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, agreed: “I think every news organization has to make
those kinds of calls from time to time.”

The “Feeding Frenzy.” One disturbing ten- dency that compromises all three standards dis- cussed here
is the media’s rush to judgment in covering a sensational story, sometimes referred to as a “feeding
frenzy” or the “herd mentality.” If such journalistic stampedes are also accom- panied by inaccuracies in
the original account, then the harm is exacerbated and media credi- bility again stands indicted in the
court of pub- lic opinion. Consider, for example, the media feeding frenzy set off by an article in the New
York Times. In its March 6, 1999, edition the Times reported that China had used secrets stolen from the
Los Alamos National Labora- tory to advance its nuclear weapons program. The story did not identify the
suspect but noted that he was a scientist at the lab. It also quoted a CIA operative as comparing the case
with that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple exe- cuted in 1953 for allegedly supplying secrets to
the Soviet Union.63 The Times’ story quickly moved onto the national agenda, with unset- tling
consequences. “While a few journalists and news organizations took a skeptical view of the mounting
near-hysteria,” observed an arti- cle in the American Journalism Review, “many others did little original
reporting, settling for wildly simplified versions of the Times cover- age.”64 Two days following the initial
report, Wen Ho Lee, a 60-year-old Taiwanese American working at the lab, was fired. Despite his denials
that he had supplied China with official secrets, Lee spent 278 days in solitary confinement but was
never charged with espionage. The govern- ment eventually dropped all but one of the 59 counts
against him.65

In a postmortem of its Wen Ho Lee cover age, the Times acknowledged “flaws” in its orig- inal coverage
and an uncritical reliance upon government sources. But as U.S. News noted in its own assessment of
the situation: “Normally, a newspaper’s blunders wouldn’t attract so much attention. But lapses by the
Times take on added significance because the newspaper is the national agenda setter.”

However, feeding frenzies do not always begin with such prominent news organizations. Consider the
biggest story of 1998 concerning what transpired in the Oval Office between President Clinton and
White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The story broke first on the Internet site of Matt Drudge, whose
stock in trade was rumor and gossip, not accurate and reliable news. Because this relationship, among
other things, was the subject of an investigation by a federal special prosecutor, no one can seri- ously
deny the news value of this event. How- ever, the quality of reporting, particularly in the early days, was
distressing. In a cover story two months after the first reported accounts of the affair, Quill magazine,67
the publication of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), ques- tioned whether there had been a
rush to judg- ment. Steve Geimann, former SPJ president and the chair of its Ethics Committee, provided
this assessment:

Instead of seeking the truth—the foundation of the SPJ Code of Ethics—newspaper and broad- cast
journalists were more interested in copying and chasing each other. Instead of identifying anonymous
sources, otherwise respected jour- nalists abdicated their responsibilities to other reporters and editors
who often seemed to fol- low a looser set of ethical guidelines.

This appraisal is supported by a study com- missioned by the Committee of Concerned Journalists that
evaluated the performance of major TV programs and newspapers during the first six days of the story.
The conclusion? Forty-one percent of the coverage was analysis, opinion, speculation, or judgment
instead of factual reporting.69 Attribution was noticeably lacking from much of the early reporting. And
this distressing conclusion did not go unno- ticed by readers and viewers. In an opinion poll conducted
just one month after the story broke, the top two adjectives Americans agreed they would use to
describe news media coverage of the story were excessive (80 percent) and em- barrassing (71 percent).
When provided with two options as to why the media were focusing heavily on the story, 81 percent
said that the media were more interested in attracting a large audience, whereas only 14 percent
believed they were mostly interested in getting to the bottom of the story.70 Space limitations preclude
any meaningful reprise of the many ethical lapses that occurred in this case, but the reader is re- ferred
to the March/April 1998 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review for an interesting appraisal on the
media coverage of the Clinton– Lewinsky affair.

Such feeding frenzies, of course, are the result of instant news and the herd mentality, exacerbated by
instantaneous electronic com- munication, and follow a predictable pattern. In the early stages the
media are caught off guard and scramble to catch up, usually report- ing as much opinion and innuendo
as they do fact. Depending on the nature of the story and its duration, the mainstream media may settle
into a more responsible form of reporting. Then there will be a period of self-flagellation in which some
journalists lament their rush to judgment. And just as predictably, the next time that such a story breaks,
the lessons of the past will be conveniently ignored in the passion of competition.

Deception in Journalism. Any ethical debate about the use of deception in news gathering and reporting
must take into account its vari- ous nuances and forms. Some moral purists argue that because truth is
an animating princi- ple of the journalistic profession, any form of deception is taboo. According to this
Kantian view, such behavior erodes the bond of trust between reporters and their audiences. Others are
not so austere in their ethical approach, ac- knowledging that sometimes deception must be used to
uncover stories of overriding public importance.
As the media continue to be plagued by a public crisis of confidence, certain journalistic devices have
increasingly been put under an ethical microscope. One such practice is the use of surreptitious
investigative techniques, such as undercover reporting and the use of hidden cameras and microphones.
Journalists defend such tactics on the grounds that as fiduciaries of the public, they are sometimes
required to employ deception to uncover a greater truth. In other words, the end justifies the means.
Such was the case when freelance reporter Jonathan Franklin posed as a mortician and entered Dover
Air Force Base, where casualties of the Persian Gulf War were processed. In so doing, he confirmed that
the military had underesti- mated the number of casualties. Franklin’s article was eventually published
in the Bay Guardian, a weekly paper in San Francisco. The managing editor, acknowledging that he
usually turned down stories based on undercover work, justified this exception on the grounds that the
decep- tion was directed against government miscon- duct, not an individual.

Some undercover activities, however, are based on less noble motives. Take, for example, the sweeps-
week exposé of security in the public schools undertaken by a TV station in Portland, Maine. A member
of the station’s investigative team, posing as a family friend of a particular second grader, arrived at an
elemen- tary school and said he had been asked by the family to take the child to the dentist. In reality,
the student’s mother was a station employee and was waiting in the car outside. Because the man was
without a note, the child’s mother could not be reached, and the dentist’s name provided by the
undercover reporter did not match the name of the dentist in the student’s file, the principal correctly
refused to release the child into the visitor’s custody. The school superintendent accused the station of
an “abuse of trust” and charged that the station “had en- gaged in a deliberate, cynical deception of the
school staff in order to manufacture a news story.”

Although the use of deception is probably as old as journalism itself, many news managers are
uncomfortable with the practice and have instituted policies that, while not banning un- dercover
reporting altogether, are designed to prevent its abuse. However, one could hardly fault a news
organization if it chose to ban the use of deceptive undercover reporting practices altogether. After all,
adherence to the truth hardly needs any justification. Those who find such moral conservatism too
restrictive in a highly competitive media environment must still defend their use of deception based on
some overriding principle and some fairly de- manding criteria. Investigative techniques, such as
undercover reporting and the use of hidden cameras, should be employed only after a full and
deliberate discussion in which the principles of sound moral reasoning are employed. Bill Kovach and
Tom Rosenstiel, in their illuminat- ing book on the enduring principles of journal- ism, have apparently
rejected the Kantian view of deception as too austere for practicing jour- nalists but suggest that
reporters should use a test similar to the concepts justifying civil dis- obedience in deciding whether to
engage in the technique. According to Kovach and Rosenstiel, a three-step test should be applied for
employ- ing deceptive news-gathering techniques.

1. The information must be sufficiently vital to the public interest to justify deception.

2. Journalists should not engage in masquer- ade unless there is no other way to get the story.

3. Journalists should reveal to their audience whenever they mislead sources to get infor- mation,
and explain their reasons for doing so, including why the story justifies the deception and why this was
the only way to get the facts.
News staging is another deceptive practice that raises serious ethical questions, and, unfor- tunately, it
is not that rare in either print or electronic journalism. Take, for example, the photo that accompanied a
story in the Indianapolis Star in the summer of 2002—a photo the news- paper later acknowledged was
staged. The photo and caption depicted a nurse giving a boy a vaccination when in fact he was at the
Health Department for a different procedure. The boy was asked to pose for the photo as though he
were getting a shot. The Star subsequently apol- ogized for the misrepresentation. “Such distor- tion of
the truth is a violation of our policy on ethics and our commitment to readers to always be honest in our
delivery of the news,” the news paper wrote.

In still another ethical blunder, the conse quences were more dire for the perpetrators. When a reporter
at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis couldn’t find appropriate visuals to illustrate a story about underage
drinking, he purchased two cases of beer for six teenagers and then filmed them drinking the beer.
When this jour- nalistic duplicity was discovered, the reporter and photographer were not only fired;
they were arrested and charged with violating state liquor laws.

Closely related to staging is the practice of news reenactments or re-creations. Not surpris- ingly, such
techniques are controversial among professional journalists. The most severe criti- cism has been
leveled against the use of reenact- ments in catastrophes or tragedies. For example, in 1996 listeners of
WGST-AM/FM in Atlanta were treated to an almost two-minute cockpit voice recorder reenactment of
the last minutes of ValuJet Flight 592 as the plane plunged into the Florida Everglades. For the sake of
realism, the station added sound effects, such as wind rushing and people screaming. WGST news di-
rector Al Gardner defended the broadcast as an attempt “to put a face and a human behind the story.”
ValuJet officials called the report “outra- geous” and “irresponsible.”

Not all electronic journalists are willing to rule out the use of reenactments entirely, but caution their
use must be limited. For example, Nancy Sanders, assistant news director of WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New
York, notes: “I do think there are times when you have to cross the line and do re-enactments, and I do
think it possibly is helpful in crime situations. But in catastrophes, I don’t know that I would endorse
doing that. It smells of docudrama.” On the other hand, Paul Perillo, news bureau chief of Metro
Networks’ Philadelphia office, believes that any re-creation “flies in the face of all the basics of good
journalism.” He fears that com- petition for ratings may oblige more and more stations to embellish
their news reports for shock value.

As noted in Chapter 2, the introduction of computer-assisted digital technology poses still another
challenge to the moral imagination of media practitioners. Digital-imaging technol- ogy itself is ethically
neutral, but its deceptive capabilities are worrisome. Alteration of still pictures, of course, predates the
arrival of digi- talization, but the new technology makes such manipulation of both still and moving
pictures easier and virtually undetectable. Because of these factors, will media professionals now be
more tempted than ever to alter visuals?

The jury is still out on that question, but there are already some disturbing trends. Con- sider a photo
that ran in several newspapers, including the Hartford Courant, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times,
during the invasion of Iraq by the American military and its coalition partners. A Times photographer
took two pho- tos of a British soldier in front of a crowd of Iraqi civilians and, using his laptop, composed
an image using the left side of one photo and the right side of the other. He transmitted his composite
photo to the Times, along with twelve other images, but the altered photo was unwit- tingly selected for
publication by the Times and other papers. The digital manipulation was dis- covered when an employee
of the Hartford Courant noticed that several civilians crouching in the background of the photo
appeared twice.

And then there was the controversial deci- sion by CBS news executives in which they ap- parently
sacrificed journalistic principles to a clever market strategy. During the New Year’s Eve newscast from
Times Square leading into the new millennium, CBS technicians digitally removed a giant NBC logo, as
well as a Budweiser ad, from the video image of Times Square behind Dan Rather and replaced them
with their own CBS corporate logo. “It’s a classic case of technological expertise,” lamented media
ethicist Bob Steele, “at the expense of ethical principles.”

In November 1999 Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper for U.S. armed forces overseas, featured on its
front page a color photo of an Apache helicopter maneuvering high above a mountain range. The
accompanying headline read: “To better prepare for mountainous ter- rain, Apache pilots are getting
their training.” However, the photo was a phony, a creation of the paper’s central office in Washington,
DC, which had employed modern technology to produce “a picture of an Apache with a shot of an awe-
some mountain view.”

Even institutions of higher education, sup- posedly the bastions of intellectual honesty, are not immune
from the allure of digital manipu- lation. In September 2000 an attempt by the University of Wisconsin
to display its commit- ment to racial diversity turned into a public re- lations fiasco. The original cover
photograph for its new admissions brochure showed happy Wisconsin students attending a football
game. When university officials noticed that the pic- ture contained no black faces, they used photo-
design software to add the face of an African American. “Our intentions were good, but our methods
were bad,” declared the public rela- tions director once the deception was exposed. Similarly, two
weeks after the Wisconsin inci- dent the University of Idaho digitally pasted two faces—one black and
one Asian—onto white bodies in a photo at the top of the university’s website. An official from the
university blamed the episode on an overzealous computer tech- nician but acknowledged that “other
adminis- trators had urged the technician to find a picture showing minority students.”

Certainly the alteration of the “content” of visuals in such a way as to distort the reality of the event
raises serious ethical questions and erodes the confidence that readers and viewers have in the editorial
process. But what if the alterations are made primarily for considera- tions of design or taste, as when
the editors of American Photo digitally removed for matters of “taste” the nipples of model Kate Moss
who appeared on the magazine’s cover in a tight- fitting gauzy top?83 Under such circumstances, the
ethical slope becomes more slippery as media practitioners balance competing concerns.

Many news organizations have policies against alteration of the content of photographs, and the need
for new ethical constructs to deal with the deceptive capabilities of digital imag- ing is not yet manifest.
After all, if certain forms of manipulation are unacceptable under current policies, the arrival of a new
technology should not alter the unethical nature of that practice. The ultimate test is still, purely and
simply, one of honesty.

Fabrication: The Unpardonable Sin. To the loyal readers of the New York Times, it was in- conceivable
that an employee of the nation’s journalistic icon would fabricate information and steal material from
other news organiza- tions. And yet, as described briefly in the open- ing narrative of Chapter 1, in the
late spring of 2003 the Times declared in a lengthy front-page story that Jayson Blair, a prolific young
reporter who had recently been promoted to the na- tional desk, had resigned amidst allegations of
journalistic fraud. As described in the Times’s own account, an investigation revealed that at least half
the stories produced by Blair while covering national assignments were tainted by fabrications or other
forms of deception, and a spot-check of more than 600 of Blair’s stories written prior to that time also
contained appar- ent fabrications. “His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer,” wrote
the Times, “which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts—as well as round-the-clock ac- cess to
databases of news articles from which he stole.”

The public remains blissfully unaware of most incidences of journalistic malpractice, but the Jayson Blair
affair riveted both the main- stream and tabloid press, fascinated the eager listeners and viewers of the
radio and TV talk shows, and was featured prominently as the cover story in the major news magazines.
Several accounts chronicled Blair’s troubled personal life and his disrespect for professional stan- dards
and deportment that dated to his days as a high school journalist.85 This publicity was accompanied by
some anguished soul-searching within the Times that focused on the controver- sial executive editor,
Harold Raines, who prided himself on nurturing new talent and ignored complaints from other editors
concerning Blair’s job performance. Three weeks after the Times published its exhaustive account of the
Blair debacle, Raines, along with Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, resigned after deciding that “the
backwash from the Blair affair was keeping them from providing the effective leadership” the paper
needed.

Most journalists are hardworking and hon- orable and are a credit to their profession. But as Newsweek
candidly acknowledged in the wake of the Blair revelations: “Jayson Blair isn’t the first journalist to
deceive readers—and he probably won’t be the last. It’s no wonder, then, that the profession is
struggling with a credibil- ity problem.”87 In what the magazine referred to as the Hall of Shame, it
briefly described a legacy of deception originating with the infa- mous era of Yellow Journalism in the
1890s during which New York publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst sensa- tionalized
and manufactured events to boost paper sales.

Newsweek was certainly prescient in its prediction that Jayson Blair “probably won’t be the last” to
commit journalistic malpractice. Less than a year after Blair and the Times parted com- pany, USA Today
veteran reporter Jack Kelley was fired for fabricating stories and plagiarizing other material. Some staff
members speculated that the paper’s managers were lax in their editorial supervision because of
Kelley’s poten- tial for enhancing the publication’s prestige (Kelley had been nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize, only the second such nomination in the paper’s 22-year history.

The profession of journalism is built on trust. The loss of credibility can be ethically fatal to a news
organization. Journalists who approach a story with an ax to grind or who intentionally slant their
reporting to favor one ideology over another are kindred souls with propagandists. Of course, journalists
are not perfect. Under time deadlines they frequently make mistakes, and some are unnecessarily
careless in gather- ing the facts. And the public is frequently will- ing to forgive the trespasses of those
who make mistakes and acknowledge them.

What is unpardonable in the practice of journalism, however, is the fabrication of sto- ries or quotes.
This has not become common fare within the industry, but several highly publicized cases in recent
years have raised some profoundly disturbing questions con- cerning the ethical direction of the
profession. The highly respected Washington Post is cred- ited with running what one author has de-
scribed as “the most famous hoax of the modern era.”90 The Post was forced to return a Pulitzer Prize
for feature writing after the paper’s edi- tors discovered that one of their young re- porters, Janet
Cooke, had fabricated a dramatic account of an 8-year-old heroin addict. Al- though the case was
dismissed as an isolated incident, other cases have arisen in some of the nation’s leading publications. In
August 2000, for example, ABC News’ John Stossel apolo- gized to millions of TV viewers for his role in
an incredibly distorted report on the news magazine show 20/20. Seven months earlier Stossel had
reported that “organic” foods were not safe or more nutritious than food grown with chemicals. His
report was based upon tests commissioned by ABC that found no pesticide residues on either organic or
regular produce. In fact, the network later admitted that no tests had been done on produce, and
environmen- talists concluded that some of the other re- search findings included in the story were also
misleading. Stossel was reprimanded and a producer was suspended, but the loss of credi- bility
resulting from such ethical indiscretions is incalculable.91

Two years earlier, the Boston Globe had asked a prize-winning Boston columnist, Patricia Smith, to
resign because of fabricated people and quotes in four of her columns.92 This case is worth pausing
over for a moment because of the reporter’s attempt to rationalize her unethical behavior. In her
apology to the paper’s readers, Smith said she wanted her writing to come across as exciting and wished
“to leave the reader indelibly impressed,” acknowledging that she sometimes quoted nonexistent
people to “create the desired impact or slam home a salient point.” But the Globe’s ombudsman, Jack
Thomas, was unimpressed with this morally ambiguous de- fense, accusing Smith of continuing to
compro- mise the truth. “Making up an entire column of fictitious people and fictitious quotations is not,
as she would have us believe, slamming home a point,” wrote Thomas. “It’s lying.”

It would be difficult to improve on Thomas’s description of the situation. In some ethical dilemmas
confronting journalists, there is room for legitimate disagreement on the most morally permissible (or
justifiable) solution. The fabri- cation of information is not one of them!

Where Truth and Fiction Collide: The Docudrama

The docudrama is probably the most popular version of fact-based entertainment, some- times referred
to as “infotainment.” Docudra- mas have appeal because they are based on actual incidents, and, in the
case of current events, the audience can usually identify with the featured characters. The blending of
histori- cal fact and fiction has a lineage that can be traced at least to Greek drama, but the docu- drama
genre, at least in its current incarnation, is a little over three decades old. Prior to the 1970s TV
documentaries were substantially fact-based, but the tragic political misdeeds and fall of Richard Nixon
afforded an irresistible temptation to blend historical facts with fic- tional episodes allegedly to serve a
“higher truth.” Thus was born the docudrama, and by the 1990s Nixon was “being depicted in film as an
epithet-swearing drunk who suffered from hallucinations.”

In assessing the historical relevance and value of docudramas we must remember the producers of
these films are not journalists. Their goal is to create an interesting story. In some cases modifications
are made or inaccuracies toler- ated primarily for dramatic effect; sometimes producers approach their
work with a political agenda. The question then arises whether the writers and producers of
docudramas should have the same degree of ethical commitment to the truth as practicing journalists.
Some produc- ers have been careful to note the fictionalized nature of their creations. But when a
producer markets a revisionist version of history and cleverly disguises theories and rumors as fact, then
serious ethical concerns must be addressed. The docudrama genre is not new, but it has be- come
increasingly controversial.

The most severe indictment of docudrama- tists is that they frequently alter or distort his- torical facts
to support a preconceived bias. A classic example was Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which was savagely
characterized by critics as entertainment masquerading as history and as little more than propaganda
for a huge conspir- acy theory of the Kennedy assassination.96 Stone himself acknowledged that his
version of events was not a “true story” but said his film spoke to “an inner truth.” And JFK star Kevin
Costner admitted that the film’s whole case might be dismantled and discredited but that the “movie as
a whole has an emotional truth.”97 Such lin- guistic spins led columnist John Leo, writing in U.S. News &
World Report, to offer the following rebuttal:

But inner truths and emotional truths are the stuff of fiction, or used to be. What I think Stone and his
actor are saying here is that it doesn’t much matter whether this is literally true or not, so long as it
steers the culture where we want to go. This has become an increasingly modish opinion as the line
between fact and fiction grows ever more blurry in the culture.

Following the release of his historically based film Amistad—the story of fifty-three captive Africans who
revolted aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1839 and then were recaptured and finally freed by the
Supreme Court after a two-year battle—producer Steven Spielberg came under fire for his excessive use
of dramatic license in depicting the historical truth of the event. Spielberg’s coproducer, Debbie Allen,
de- scribed the movie as an allegedly “suppressed” story of black rebellion and victory. However,
historian Warren Goldstein was unforgiving in his denunciation of the film as “frequently in-
comprehensible, and misleading when it isn’t just plain wrong.” In castigating the producers for
compromising historical accuracy for dramatic license, Goldstein referred to Amistad as “down- right
slanderous.”99 Other academics defended the film’s overarching political perspective of African
American empowerment, even at the risk of historical inaccuracy.

Even if we accept the notion that docu dramatists should not be held to the same stan- dards of truth as
journalists—after all, some artistic license is inevitable in transforming his- torical events into a dramatic
structure—they nevertheless owe a duty to their audiences to present a faithful re-creation of at least
the sub- stantive aspects of those phenomena. They should not offer as fact what is clearly fiction or
mere theories or unsubstantiated rumors. “It can be argued coherently that the public has a legitimate
interest in knowing the amount of truth in historical films, docudramas, and simi- lar productions.”

Of course, time is an ally of producers who wish to tap the rich annals of history for arrest- ing topics
that lend themselves to dramatic re- creation. Reflection and perspective are essential to the search for
truth. Unfortunately, the re- cent plethora of TV docudramas, ripped from today’s headlines, is lacking in
both.102 Con- sider, for example, the made-for-TV movie Saving Jessica Lynch, a dramatic account of
the capture and rescue of an American soldier during the early days of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that
aired on CBS in November 2003. As the New York Times observed in a review of this made- for-TV film:
“The facts surrounding Private Lynch’s capture and rescue were [hazy], with so many conflicting reports
that despite countless news articles, magazine show segments and television biographies, there is still
no complete picture of what really happened during those fateful days in Iraq last spring.” Nevertheless,
the article concluded, “its makers did the best they could without access to primary sources to fill in the
blanks.”

The docudrama feeding frenzy has be- come so frenetic that some scripts go into pro- duction even
before the stories have run their course, which compromises any sense of his- torical perspective. A case
in point is the emo- tionally charged and fatal confrontation between federal agents and the Branch
Davidians in Waco, Texas, the first docudrama about a real- life tragedy that was filmed while the
tragedy was still unfolding. Similarly, a USA Network movie about the highly publicized case of Scott
Peterson, accused of murdering his wife and unborn baby, was produced even before Peterson had
gone to trial. The filmmakers claimed to be unfazed about the potential impact of the docudrama on
jury selection, but Court TV anchor Nancy wasn’t so sure. “You’ll have to ensure which jurors have seen
it and what im- pact it had on them,” she remarked in an in- terview for TV Guide. “Sometimes, frankly,
even the most honest juror doesn’t know the impact.”

Critics complain that docudramas pulled from today’s headlines are driven more by rat- ings than any
allegiance to balance and propor- tion and that these made-for-TV movies simply repackage real-life
tragedies as home entertain- ment.105 In the process, as Newsweek observed in its rather terse
assessment of what it referred to as “headline TV,” truth often falls prey to fan- tasy.106 Defenders of
docudramas based on cur- rent events respond that such programs often address important social
issues. Indeed, con- temporary docudramas can illuminate social issues and even provide psychological
insights into the dimensions of human tragedy. In a highly competitive marketplace, using today’s head-
lines as the artistic cue for a TV movie is not in- herently unethical, as long as producers adhere to a
“truth-in-labeling” standard. They should not promote as reality a product that is nothing more than a
fictionalized account of events. But ethical concerns do arise when fantasy subtly and skillfully replaces
truth and the audience remains an unenlightened hostage to the pro- ducer’s deception.

Truth in Advertising and Public Relations

Clearly, the standards outlined for journalists cannot be entirely applicable to the other forms of media
practice with which we are concerned in this book. Advertisers and public relations practitioners, for
example, are in the business of persuading. They come to the marketplace with a bias, and there is
nothing wrong with that. Public relations practitioners have a right to defend their clients’ interests in
the court of public opinion, and in such circumstances the audience expects that the dissemination of in-
formation will be more selective.

Although the ethical expectations of mass persuaders may vary from those of journalists, we still expect
advertisers and public relations personnel to adhere to the threshold require- ment of truth—that is,
that they not knowingly disseminate inaccurate information. The vari- ous professional codes of the
public relations and advertising industries commit their practi- tioners to standards of truth and
accuracy. Un- fortunately, such standards are ignored when company executives allow their allegiance
to the bottom line and unharnessed competitive instincts eclipse their responsibility to the soci- ety that
has given them their corporate privi- lege. Such was the case when Columbia Pictures executives had an
advertising department em- ployee pose as a movie critic to lavish praise on such movies as The Animal
and A Knight’s Tale. The studio also confessed to using actors and its own employees in testimonial ads
for such movies as The Patriot.107 Apparently the practice is widespread in Hollywood, which is puzzling
since such lies apparently have little impact among consumers. “No one believes these people anyway,”
proclaims Tom Sherak, a partner in Revolution Studios. “Even well- known critics have trouble getting
people to believe them.”

Although mass persuaders are just as morally culpable as journalists for deliberately telling a lie, they
are under no ethical obligation to provide balance in their public proclamations. A cereal company, for
example, while extolling the health benefits of its oat bran flakes in a TV campaign, is unlikely to
acknowledge the pres- ence of sugar in its product.109 Nor would a spokesperson for a “low-fat”
product, which appeals to the health-conscious consumer, vol- untarily admit to its high caloric content
result- ing from sugar. Likewise, a public relations spokesperson for a corporation will attempt to put the
best foot forward and not dwell on the company’s shortcomings.

In other words, mass persuaders—public relations practitioners and advertisers—employ selective truth
to construct their messages, and there is nothing inherently unethical about this. As noted in Chapter 2,
persuasion is one of the legitimate functions of mass communi- cation, and society does not expect the
same level of truth here as they do from practition- ers of the information function (that is, jour- nalists).
We expect accurate information, but we do not expect balance or objectivity. Public relations
professionals, for example, to retain credibility should provide accurate informa- tion, but, as Professor
Deaver cautions us, “we should know that it is not necessarily objec- tive and unbiased, that it is
certainly not the whole story.”

Advertising is a little more problematic because of two related and controversial tech- niques: linguistic
ambiguity, in which no spe- cific product claims are made (for example, Allstate’s “You’re in good
hands”), and puffery, which is the use of superlatives, exaggerations, and subjective opinions that do not
implicate specific facts (such as “the best deal in town” and “number one in sex appeal”). Most people
would probably agree that intentional ambigu- ity is unethical in situations “where accurate in- struction
or efficient transmission of precise information is the acknowledged purpose.”112 But in a competitive
media environment often driven by entertainment values, advertising’s purpose transcends the
provision of accurate information. Its purpose is to create a favorable image about the product or
company and thus to increase sales or to hold onto market share. In most advertising messages,
therefore, ambi- guity is usually recognized as such and accepted by consumers.

Puffery is also a ubiquitous technique in contemporary advertising, but it isn’t without its critics. Ivan
Preston, for example, in his book The Great American Blow-up, argues that all puffery is false by
implication and should be illegal. Philip Patterson and Lee Wilkins, in their illuminating discussion of the
ethics of persuasion, assert that “[t]he absence of a veri- fiable claim, for example ads employing ridicule
or commercials promoting ‘image,’ should alert the consumer to a potentially unethical approach to
persuasion.”114 Opponents might counter, however, that this is ethical prudishness and that such a
narrow posture is neither realistic nor desirable. And indeed, it isn’t at all clear as to why an advertising
message designed to cre- ate an image or a “feel good” mood among con- sumers is unethical, even if it
is devoid of information (unless, of course, the advertiser promises accurate information and fails to de-
liver). If consumers expect information from ads, they will demand it. In a marketplace econ- omy, the
audience should assume some degree of responsibility and must be discriminating and ponder
commercial messages with a healthy degree of skepticism.

However, when advertisers omit important information that could mislead consumers and that actually
affects a consumer’s purchasing decision, such ads are deceptive and raise more serious ethical
concerns. For example, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that an advertisement by Beneficial
Corporation, a finance company, stating that it would provide customers with an “instant tax refund” if
individuals’ tax returns entitled them to a refund was misleading. What was unstated, according to the
Commission, was that the customer had to first qualify for a loan, and “there was nothing instant about
the loan procedures.”

Public Relations and Journalism: A Love Hate Relationship

Public relations practitioners and journalists often view each other with suspicion. Some journalists
consider the practice of public rela- tions as parasitic, populated by “flacks” who de- rive their livelihood
by using the media to their own advantage. Public relations practitioners, on the other hand, often look
at newsrooms as repositories of cynicism, where journalists ea- gerly survey the landscape for
governmental or corporate malfeasance or irresponsibility. “Good news,” according to this view, is an
oxymoron.

The fact is, however, that neither profession can claim moral superiority over the other be- cause they
derive their principles from different intellectual moorings. The mission of journalists is to uncover facts,
report on society’s institu- tions, and present a fair and balanced account (some would describe this as
“objectivity”) of the day’s intelligence. Ethical journalists, according to the traditional view, should have
no causes to promote, no axes to grind. Public relations prac- titioners, on the other hand, are by
definition ad- vocates and are committed to achieving their organizations’ goals. They, too, provide
informa- tion for public consumption, but they usually do so in a manner that will achieve the most
favorable results for their company or client.

The journalist’s stock-in-trade is revelation, the public dissemination of as much relevant and significant
information as possible. On the other hand, confidentiality of information and relationships plays an
important role in the life of the public relations practitioner. Proprietary information that might work to
the advantage of a competitor is one example. As advocates, public relations practitioners usually view a
certain degree of confidentiality as essential to advancing a positive image for their companies and
clients. Thus, they are more likely to be selective in the information they provide the public and the
media. However, when the pub- lic interest requires full disclosure (as noted earlier), even when to do
so might be initially detrimental to the public image and corporate profits, the long-term public relations
benefits can be tremendous. Sincerity and self-criticism can be ethically invigorating in the arena of
public opinion.

Despite this apparent mistrust between reporters and public relations practitioners, the relationship is
really more symbiotic than ad- versarial. News organizations depend on public relations information (in
some cases quite heav- ily) for both economic and journalistic reasons. The cost of gathering
information from every possible organization within a community would be prohibitively expensive
without the assis- tance of representatives from those organiza- tions. In addition, company officials and
their public relations representatives are good sources of information that might not be available else-
where, and they provide a constant flow of free information to the news media. In this respect, public
relations practitioners serve as extensions of the news staff: “They play a specific, func- tional,
cooperative role in society’s information- gathering network, even though they owe no loyalty to
specific news outlets, are not paid by them, and may never set foot in the building in which the news is
produced.”

In return, the media serve as a willing and sometimes uncritical forum for the dissemina- tion of
governmental and corporate messages and information. Public relations releases pro- vide an
opportunity for companies to tell their side of the story, especially in an environment where public
relations practitioners distrust the media’s objectivity in their own accounts of events. The most visible
and controversial evi- dence of this symbiotic relationship is the widespread dissemination and use of
video news releases (VNRs). VNRs resemble typical TV news stories in their packaging but are pro- duced
on behalf of a client in attempt to get free airtime to promote a cause, product, or service.117 They are
distributed free to stations and often come with scripts for local anchors or reporters to read as “voice-
overs.” In other cases, they are downlinked from satellites. VNRs are an efficient and effective way for
public rela- tions firms to represent their clients to a mass audience. And in economic hard times VNRs
are a cost-effective means for a station to pro- duce more material for local broadcast without adding
more employees.

Charitable and nonprofit organizations are just as aggressive as commercial enterprises in competing for
the public’s attention. In the fall of 1998, for example, when an autopsy revealed that the three-time
Olympic gold medalist Florence Griffith Joyner (“Flo-Jo”) had died of a “seizure,” the Epilepsy Foundation
swung into action, blan- keting the country with publicity releases, includ- ing a VNR designed for
transmission to every TV station in the country. The tragic death of Flo-Jo provided the catalyst for the
normally low-profile Epilepsy Foundation to raise public awareness of an often-ignored disease.

The production and use of VNRs impose ethical obligations on both public relations practitioners and the
stations to which they disseminate this material. Some practitioners believe, for example, that as long as
the infor- mation contained in a VNR is accurate and true and the production standards are high, they
have conducted themselves in an ethical man- ner. The rest is up to the journalists.120 News
organizations then have an ethical obligation to identify the source of the VNR, regardless of whether it
is substantially edited or aired in its entirety. And yet, in a Nielsen survey of news directors several years
ago, only 60 percent of the respondents said VNR sponsors should be iden- tified when a VNR is
aired.121 And unfortunately, unattributed VNRs are not that rare among news departments.

INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY

The unauthorized or unacknowledged use of someone else’s literary or artistic creation is dishonest.
Society does not abide theft of the fruits of one’s physical labors. There is no rea- son that it should be
any more tolerant of the piracy of intellectual property. For the sake of simplicity, we can divide
intellectual dishonesty into two categories: plagiarism and misappro- priation. Although
misappropriation also has a specific legal meaning, within the ethical con- text we shall take it to mean
“the unauthorized use of someone else’s literary or artistic expres- sion.” Plagiarism, on the other hand,
refers to “the taking of another’s ideas or expression and passing it off as your own.” Plagiarism often
revolves around the question of attribution, whereas misappropriation occurs when a use of intellectual
property is not authorized by the owner. It reflects the moral right of creators to control the use and
dissemination of their in- tellectual property. Such misappropriation not only raises ethical concerns but
can also run afoul of copyright law. A classic example, and one that has precipitated an angry and
aggres- sive response from the recording industry, is the illegal downloading of music (and movies) from
the Internet. Companies such as Napster have facilitated the practice of file-sharing, the process by
which computer users all over the world can share music stored on their hard drives. Napster was
eventually forced to the side- lines through litigation, but others have stepped in to fill the vacuum. File-
sharing is particularly rampant among the young, a generation nur- tured within an Internet culture
where every- thing appears to be free for the taking. In the meantime, the music and film industries
claim they are losing millions of dollars because of illegal downloading.

Plagiarism has been described as “the un original sin.” Take, for example, the following unfortunate
events: During the 1991 David Duke campaign for the Louisiana governorship, the Fort Worth Star-
Telegram published a story under the byline of political writer James Walker, a thirteen-year veteran at
the paper. Quotes in the story were attributed to various speakers but not to the Louisiana television re-
port and the New Orleans Times-Picayune from which they were lifted. Walker resigned, attribut- ing his
indiscretion to an “error in judgment.” A reporter for the St. Petersburg Times resigned after she
claimed as her own about a third of an article on credit cards from Changing Times magazine. On the day
of her resignation she apologized to her colleagues, describing her in- discretion as a “stupid mistake.” In
November 2000 the Sacramento Bee fired a political writer for plagiarizing and fabricating material in his
stories on the presidential campaign. Shortly thereafter, a reporting intern was suspended and later
fired from the Mercury News for plagiariz- ing material from other newspapers.“Plagia- rism is
unacceptable in our newspaper and in our business,” declared managing editor Susan Goldberg in a
memo to the paper’s staff. “It is an inherent violation of the trust we have with our readers and with our
professional colleagues.

”Each fell from journalistic grace for al- legedly committing the mortal sin in media communications,
plagiarism—using someone else’s intellectual property without attribution. Because a media
professional’s stock-in-trade is artistic originality and creativity, the unattrib- uted use of someone else’s
work violates the virtue of honesty. When it is necessary to bor- row from another source, that source
should be attributed.

Although attribution is the cornerstone of media credibility, the practice of nonattribu- tion is quite
common, as reflected in this lament from columnist Garry Wills:

[P]rofessional writers, who take on subjects of their own volition, regularly commit plagiarism. Very
intelligent people do this, some of them repeatedly. What are they doing in their line of work? Why do
they talk on subjects about which they have nothing of their own to say?

The excuse regularly used is that the writers have made the words of somebody else, encountered some
time ago, part of their own “mental furni- ture,” so that they can no longer distinguish what others said
from what they think.

Writers should have some pride in their own style. If they cannot identify their own words, why should
others value them?
A classic illustration of Wills’s concern is the Boston Globe’s decision in the summer of 1998 to fire and
then reinstate star columnist Mike Barnicle after he published a column that used, without attribution,
jokes that resembled those in George Carlin’s book Brain Droppings. When confronted by his editors,
Barnicle said he had not read the book and had received the material from a friend without checking its
origins.129 The Globe’s editor apparently did not consider Barnicle’s indiscretion serious enough for ter-
mination. But Barnicle’s reinstatement brought an angry response from the newsroom staff, with at
least fifty employees signing a petition of protest. One complained that the reprieve “not only cripples
the paper’s integrity but un- dermines the efforts of staff members who work daily to produce a
newspaper that is be- yond reproach.”130 When questions later arose concerning another column,
Barnicle abruptly resigned.

While it is tempting to dismiss high-profile cases, such as the Jayson Blair affair, as aberra- tions, the
incidence of plagiarism cases among journalists does appear to be on the rise. For example, in its March
2001 issue, the American Journalism Review chronicled twenty-three episodes that had been
acknowledged during the past two years.

This rash of cases involving intellectual dishonesty is particularly disturbing to jour- nalism educators
who spend much of their time attempting to instill high standards of professional deportment in their
young charges. When the highly publicized cases of fabrication and plagiarism in the professional ranks
are combined with the proliferation of cheating on college campuses, it should not be surprising that
such pathologies should infect the college newsrooms. In early 2004, for example, the editor- in-chief of
Clemson University’s Tiger News resigned after acknowledging he had borrowed outside sources.
Shortly thereafter, a columnist for the Iowa State Daily newspaper was fired for plagiarism for lifting
material from other sources.

It is ironic that in the news business in par- ticular, which depends so heavily on attribution for its
credibility, journalists are so careless in identifying the real origins of their information. Some reporters,
for example, often incorporate information from stories in their newspapers’ morgues for historical
background and perspec- tive without sufficient verification or attribu- tion. Wire stories sometimes
appear under the bylines of local reporters. Broadcast and print reporters often steal from each other to
preserve the myth of exclusivity.

But ethicist Deni Elliott, commenting on plagiarism in the news business, says there is a greater need for
attribution today and in the future, “not because of declining morality, but because our notion of news
is changing.” In the days when news was “out there” waiting to be discovered, observes Elliott, everyone
was chasing the same story, and not much counted for plagiarism. Competitive reports often re-
sembled each other. But in today’s journalistic culture reporters’ accounts are more likely to be
individualized, the result of painstakingly syn- thesizing, analyzing, and interpreting.

There is a lively debate within journalistic circles as to what actually constitutes plagia- rism. The excuses
range all the way from “a lack of clear industry standards” to “the line be- tween ethical behavior and
plagiarism depends upon context.” However, such relativistic argu- ments are nothing more than an
attempt to rationalize the predatory practices of both charlatans and those who surrender to deadline
pressure or moments of weakness. It is ironic that journalists, who have always embraced at- tribution
as one of the “first principles” of ethi- cal reporting, should equivocate on the issue of plagiarism.
According to Elliott, such ethical in- discretions violate the moral duty owed to at least three parties:
A reporter who passes off some other reporter’s reporting as her own cheats her boss by violat- ing a
rule of research that she knows she is expected to follow. She cheats the original author by not
recognizing her claim of ownership. Most importantly, she cheats her reader because she doesn’t have
the background that she implicitly promises with her byline or on-air appearance.

Like most ethical thickets concerning media practitioners, there is undoubtedly some room for
ambiguity in what constitutes plagiarism. But in searching for guidelines, you might ask yourself two
questions: (1) Have I clearly attrib- uted all information derived from other sources? (2) Will the average
reader, viewer, or listener be able to clearly distinguish my work from others in terms of style, structure,
and expression? These two questions should not exhaust your in- quiry into what constitutes plagiarism,
but they can serve as a barometer in measuring the intel- lectual honesty of your own work.

TRUTH TELLING AND APPROACHES TO MORAL REASONING

In working your way through this ethical thicket involving truth telling, you should re- turn to the various
approaches to moral rea- soning discussed in Chapter 3. You may recall that deontologists, represented
by the views of such philosophers as Kant, hold that something other than consequences should
determine the rightness or wrongness of an act. The impor- tant thing is the “rule” against lying, despite
the fact that telling the truth might result in bad consequences, as when a journalist reports the facts
about a public figure that might injure that person’s reputation.

Because of its absolute prohibition against lying and deception, the Kantian (nonconse- quentialist)
model has been rejected by some as unrealistic and even undesirable. However, some contemporary
authors have suggested that we should not construe Kant’s categorical imperative so narrowly. All lies or
acts of de- ception are not, after all, on the same moral footing. Under this more moderate Kantian
view, the touchstone test would be whether there was a compelling reason to deviate from the truth,
and even then the burden of proof would be on the one who was engaging in the deception. This
compelling-reason test would require the following: (1) the reason(s) for the deception must be
extremely important, (2) the deception must be done for humanitarian pur- poses devoid of self-
interest, (3) the arguments in favor of deception must far outweigh the ar- guments against the
compromising of the prin- ciples of truth telling, and (4) the moral agent must act with good motives
based on the respect for persons as ends unto themselves rather than means to an end.

A different perspective on the question of truth and deception is provided by the teleolo- gist. As noted
in Chapter 3, teleologists (repre- sented by the utilitarians) are sometimes referred to as
consequentialists, because they gauge the consequences of an act before making an ethi- cal judgment.
Because utilitarians believe in promoting the greatest good for the greatest number, a media
practitioner following this approach would weigh the relative harm or good done to various individuals
or groups that re- sults from deceptive behavior. However, utili- tarians do not assume that lies and
deception are harmless. In fact, “liars are presumed guilty until proven innocent, rather than innocent
until proven guilty.” In other words, the bur- den of proof is still on the moral agent to prove that a lie or
deceptive act will promote the greatest good for the greatest number of people and that the benefits
outweigh the harmful consequences.
Aristotle’s golden mean, the example of virtue ethics described in Chapter 3, is also a valuable approach
in providing a sense of bal- ance and proportion in cases involving how much truth to reveal about a
situation or the kind and scope of coverage to provide for a news story. In news stories in which there is
a tendency toward excessive and sometimes sen- sational coverage—for example, in the case of a
terrorist hijacking—the golden mean can be a helpful guideline in exercising more restraint in reporting.
There are also occasions when this approach can be applied by advertisers and public relations
executives in an attempt to maintain that delicate balance between social responsibility and corporate
self-interest. A case in point are beer commercials that contain a subtle admonition to the audience not
to drink and drive.

TRUTH AND DECEPTION: HYPOTHETICAL CASE STUDIES

The following cases give you an opportunity to examine a variety of issues dealing with the prin- ciple of
truth. The scenarios cover a wide range of deceptive practices, from communicating out- right
falsehoods to withholding information and using the literal truth to deceive an audience. Several kinds
of moral agents are represented in these cases: reporters, advertisers, public relations practitioners, and
those who make decisions re- garding television entertainment.

Each case begins with a set of facts and an outline of the ethical dilemma. Next, I briefly discuss the case
study and the role that you are asked to play. You are asked, in some situations, to assume the role of a
moral agent. In every case you should apply the material and the moral reasoning model outlined in the
first three chapters of this book.