Journalist should remember ‘selling news is a public trust’

A year or so ago, I suggested to several journalism students at the University of Maine that they should take a course – immediately – in law and ethics of the press. This was after one student plagiarized without understanding the seriousness of the offense, another concocted half her story without distinguishing between fact and fiction, and still another wrote a controversial series without double-checking his sources for veracity.

All were fatal sins in my book, but then I was schooled in such old-fashioned principles of journalism that stated reporters could not accept freebies, not a pass from the agriculture commissioner to the state fair or a steak dinner sponsored by the local electric company. I was taught we could not use a quote without full attribution, use material obtained off-the-record, nor serve on boards or in public positions when covering those news beats.

Somebody, either a teacher or editor – many of both, actually – drilled into my head early on the obligation reporters had to their readership for “accuracy, brevity and clarity” in news stories. We cub reporters were taught the ABCs of reporting by the old salts who manned the city desks or wire desks, pounding out headlines on manual typewriters and cutting and pasting stories with, you got it, scissors and a pot of intoxicating glue.

These veterans of newsrooms could smell trouble in a lead as quickly as they could type; they instinctively knew when a reporter was getting too chummy with his sources; they could spot bias in an instant and with the slash of a black pencil, edit it out while chewing out the writer.

Those were the days … before electronic story filing, before absentee owners of giant media conglomerates, before anonymous sources were allowed, before competition became driven by commercialism rather than for the mere fun of the scoop. Before news organizations grew too big for their britches and reporters grew egos they couldn’t contain.

Those were the days before reputable publications such as The New York Times were shamed by erroneous news stories, before editors of the Times or USA Today resigned in disgrace for not guarding against such blatant abuses in their newsrooms. This was before pressures from the reading public demanded ombudsmen to be stationed throughout the mass media to protect against unethical behavior.

Those were the days when Times national correspondent James B. “Scotty” Reston reminded reporters of their obligation “to the people.”

“I do not want to overstate or overemphasize the reporter’s role; much of it is routine, much of it raises no such moral questions as I am suggesting here,” wrote Reston. “But more and more, it seems to me in this generation of big government, big labor, and big newspapers, it is necessary to keep remembering and redefining this essential relationship between the reporter and the community.

“The principle that governs the press, or should govern it, is that the selling of news is a public trust. When the reporter writes a story that affects the interests of the people and the newspaper sells it, they in effect say to the reader: here is the truth to the best of our knowledge; these are the true facts: you can base your judgment on them, in the full knowledge that in this country the judgments of the people determine our actions of a nation.” Amen, then and now.