By Richard P. Cunningham
Quill © 1992
The Washington Post has hired Joann Byrd, a veteran journalist with a brand-new graduate degree in philosophy, as its ombudsman, and she is coaching readers in which ethical questions they ought to be asking the newspaper.
“One reason any institution ignores people who call is that people don’t know the institution’s process and therefore can’t ask the right questions,” she says.
In her first column, Byrd told Post readers she has “an obsession with journalism ethics.”
“I find ethical implications under bushes,” she wrote. “To my mind ethical journalism is a reasoning process, a careful weighing of moral principles and real-world consequences that can result in several morally right answers. I want newspapers to have good-enough reasons when they offend or harm people.”
In her second column Byrd looked into potential reader questions about Post coverage of the presidential campaign. Among these were:
“Is what the paper has published on this subject accurate? Fair? Balanced? Informed? Sufficient? Offered with enough context? Given the right attention and weight? Consistent with the paper’s obligation?
“If this decision had obvious ethical implications, did the reasoning weigh the competing principles such as serve the public interest, respect humans, act justly, and tell the truth?
“Were the reasons for this good enough to outweigh whatever harm could be expected?
“What were the alternatives? Why were they rejected?
“Would reasonable readers accept The Post’s justification?”
The questions are part of Byrd’s proposed system for making ethical journalistic decisions on deadline. Byrd has been working on the system for years, and it is still a work in progress. (“Decision- making clinic: Privacy and ethics on deadline,” Quill, November/December, 1991, p. 13.)
From the start she rejected a general model designed to cover all cases as “almost useless.” Instead she has established 14 categories of ethical dilemmas, like privacy, internal conflicts in the newsroom, personal lives of public officials, and reporting on terrorism. She is making and refining lists of questions specific to each category. The point is to avoid opening up a “very interesting” but boundless discussion of principles each time a problem arises. “You’d never get the paper out,” she says.
In Byrd’s system there is a final test for each decision particularly appropriate for news people: Someone, a reporter or editor, must write a story about how the decision was made. The story may or may not be published. “But anybody who has ever written a story knows that the writing exposes the weaknesses, the holes in the thinking,” Byrd says.
Journalists must be able to mitigate potential damage that can come from their journalistic decisions, Byrd says. For example, if a newspaper is going to publish a picture of the grieving family of a drowning victim, a reporter could call the family and discuss the decision to run the photo. These procedures are essential and compassionate, and help the journalist sleep at night, Byrd says.
Byrd is dismayed that a number of critics have adopted the view that newspapers are unethical. Because of that, she says, if a situation looks too ethically difficult, the response of many papers is often not to run an article.
“That’s wrong,” she says. “What we do is put things in the paper.”
Byrd came to The Post in June after 36 years of newspapering in the Pacific Northwest, the last 10 1/2 as executive editor of The Herald, a 60,000-circulation daily in Everett, Washington. At the age of 13 she started as a school reporter for her hometown paper, the East Oregonian in Pendleton, and [she] received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon. She has worked as a general assignment reporter and assistant city editor at the Spokane Daily Chronicle, and then city editor and executive editor of the Herald.
She began studying philosophy part-time at the University of Washington, and finished her final paper for her master’s in her first week at The Post. She did most of the work on her decision-making model as a fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in 1989.
One story that has bothered Byrd is the coverage of murder victims in Washington, D.C., the majority of whom are black men. A reporter can work on a murder story for hours and get nothing more in the paper than a short on an inside page. “Every once in a while it becomes possible to get the information and [publish] something that makes an individual person out of the victim,” Byrd says.
The Post did just that in August with the story of the killing of two high school students, one of them the story of a woman who works for the Washington, D. C., mayor. The Post stayed on the story for three days, making human beings out of the young men and making it clear that they were killed only because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time — a not unusual fate in a city where there were 293 murder in the first eight months of 1992.
Good coverage? Perhaps, but also unfair, complained the mother of another young black man whose death had been recorded inside the Metro section and with only one story.
“It’s a stab in my heart to read this,” said the caller. “To glorify one and ignore others is simply unfair.”
Later some callers reacted the same way when The Post focused on the killing of a young white woman on Capitol Hill. “People were angered,” Byrd says. “They look back in the Metro section to see the report of the killing of their brother while a white, fresh-faced young woman is on page one of the same section. We don’t treat people equally in our news judgments.”
In response to Byrd’s questions about the treatment of the August killing, city editor Phillip Dixon said it is not usual for The Post to “do more” when a story “advocates our understanding of what is happening in the city.”
“Did we pay too much attention to this story?” Dixon asks. “Maybe. Should we pay more attention to the others? Yes. But we can’t. We’re selective. We have to be.”
As a former editor, Byrd recognized the problem, but she described in two paragraphs in her own column what she called an ethical duty that ought to fall on the newspaper when it deviates from routine coverage.
“Fairness does ask the paper to know what’s different when it makes exceptions to its typical coverage and to act for reasons rational readers can sanction.
“And in a perfect world, when the paper does something different, the people adversely affected — the families whose sons’ deaths were treated routinely — can comprehend, even accept it.”
Byrd succeeds Richard Harwood, who has continued as a columnist for The Post. She has been signed to the two-year contact The Post pioneered as a device for guaranteeing the ombudsman’s independence.
She had planned to stay at Everett another year, but when The Post offered her the ombudsman job, she jumped at it. “It’s the perfect job for someone who wants to wallow in this stuff,” she says.
The late Richard P. Cunningham, former readers’ representative for the Minneapolis Tribune and associate director of the late National News Council, was a teacher of journalism at New York University. This article appeared in the November/December 1992 issue of Quill.
