The Pressures of Journalism

Logan Rice

Lr977309@ohio.edu

 Most people see journalism in the best light, as if they are looking at a ray of sunshine. Most of the public believes what they see in the newspapers, news stations and on the radio. Journalists should be getting a true story, giving away the appropriate details they know to inform the public about what is going on. Instead many newsrooms “care most about protecting themselves, their jobs, their newsrooms,” according to the Poynter article. I believe in many cases there is a lack of guidance on what needs to be published and what is not acceptable to publish. Newsrooms should have leaders that make the final decisions on each article, or story. A lot of the time this is not the case, or the people in charge of different newsrooms do not have the same idea of what is ethical. I believe journalists need to have a more specific code of ethics, because the one they have now has a few loopholes. It stops a lot of negative situations from happening, but in other cases it does not.

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Deni Elliott, who teaches media ethics at the University of South Florida said, "The more pressure that is put on journalists to produce more, faster, quicker, cheaper, the more the industry encourages cutting corners, which is just another way of saying 'cheating.'" There are many examples of journalists taking the easy way out, or lying about what the truth is when the pressure is on. Just take Johann Hari, a star columnist at Independent Newspaper, for example. Johann would interview a person for a story and as he was typing he found that points the interviewee had made in person did not match on paper. He would make up quotes that the interviewee said and make the story sound completely different than it actually did. He did this to get a “good story,” even though the story was completely false. Unethical journalists go to the point of lying and making up stories before they post the actual truth.

Unethical journalists also steal. In August Fareed Zakaria, a CNN host and Time magazine editor, confessed to plagiarizing from New Yorker writer Jill Lepore in a column for Time. He admitted to this and apologized, but the damage to his reputation was done. 

Finally, unethical journalists also cheat. The poytner article gave an example that ABC News cited anonymous sources when reporting Scott, a Hollywood director who committed suicide, had inoperable brain cancer. ABC News later said it would wait for word from the family before correcting its report. Nothing was ever corrected in ABC News about this error. It just goes to show that journalists cut corners sometimes and when they get a story wrong they do not always fix the error gracefully.

There are always going to be journalists who break the code of ethics. Most of the time these individuals get caught. There is even "The Unethical Timeline," which the American Journalism Review posted. "The Unethical Timeline" is a brief look at the journalism industry’s recent plagiarism and fabrication cases. Even though some choose to break the rules, many do not. These are the journalists that keep the core values in consideration and always seek to help people find the truth about a story. These are the kinds of journalists that I strive to be.