A number of weeks ago, I presented you with three journalistic ethical dilemmas and asked what you would do if you were in a journalist’s shoes.
To refresh your memories, the cases dealt with digging into the background of a public person, now deceased; whether a reporter should be able to march in a demonstration about something that isn’t on her beat; and whether to print a photograph showing a young person killed in gang violence.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that ethics are not something that we just talk about. They guide everything we do — and don’t do.
Last week offered an excellent example.
Some readers called to question us — and castigate us — about how The Courier-Journal first played the story about allegations that Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton used his office to damage the business of nursing home owner Tina Conner after she broke off their sexual affair.
Those who contacted me thought our first-day story should have been put on the front page, instead of on the front of the Metro section. They said our political bias kept it off the front page.
As I explained to them, the news editors were not comfortable in putting the story on the front page when our reporters hadn’t been able to interview the accuser and when she hadn’t filed her lawsuit. Once we talked to her, and once she filed her suit, it went on the front page. I think both decisions were correct.
Because we come into your home every day, because we present you with stories and photographs that impact your life and the life of our community, I think it’s important for you to know some of the reasoning that goes into the news decisions journalists make.
So, in today’s column and upcoming pieces, I’ll revisit the scenarios posed in that past column, offer you some answers from editors on the Courier-Journal staff, some firm and thoughtful opinions offered by readers, and the thoughts of other editors who wrestled with the dilemma.
Again, the scenarios come from the Media Management Institute, which is associated with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. We use their material with their permission.
Today, we’ll look again at Scenario 1:
”While investigating a story, one of your reporters comes across documents showing that a longtime community leader had been active with the Ku Klux Klan as a teen-ager. The man, now dead, had a distinguished career both in public service and as a private attorney — a building and a park are named after him. His family still lives in town. This revelation is not relevant to the story your reporter was working on, but it could make an important story in and of itself. Do you print a story?
”Questions to ask yourselves: Should you print a story about a prominent local figure or save his family from embarrassment? Does the community have a right to know? Does the family have a right to be protected?”
Of the dozen or so readers I heard from about this, most thought the newspaper should not print the story.
”No story need be published and his family should be saved from embarrassment, especially since the decedent’s activities with the Klan were done as a teen-ager and not as an adult. . . . The dignity of the surviving family should be respected,” wrote Joseph M. Robertson.
Vivian McDonald wrote there is no need ”to print things about his past unless they bear on the present. . . . We need to know the facts about the first 40 years of his life and the rest also, to better understand where he’s coming from.”
R.B. Carter wrote, ”How reliable are the ‘documents showing that a longtime community leader had been active with the KKK as a teen-ager’? What does ‘active’ mean? Does this have any impact on public policy or civic activity? Conclusion: Worth looking into and definitely a possible subject for a book or a broader story on the ironies and inconsistencies of public figures. But probably not a news story by itself.”
Only reader Tony Kinzel wrote, ”Run the KKK story. It’s part of the man’s life history, good or bad.”
I asked a Courier-Journal assistant managing editor, John Mura, how he would handle this scenario, and this was his response:
”By having a public park and a building named after him, this former community leader is an individual who has been honored and perhaps held up as an example to be imitated. And this public legacy overrides privacy concerns and makes it important that the newspaper reexamine his life after finding documents that show he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan as a teen-ager.
”If you believe that it’s the duty of a newspaper to report on the people and events that become history, it follows that the newspaper has an obligation to report on significant facts that could change the perceptions of an event, or person.
”Would we push for this story? Absolutely. If true, it could be an important story to tell. But a story that would best serve the public’s interests would need more than just verification that he’d been a teen-age Klan member.
”The questions that would be needed to be answered would include: Are the documents correct? If so, what was the extent of his involvement? How long did he do this? Are there living eyewitnesses to his involvement? Was his Klan group involved in incidents of intimidation and violence? Did his involvement manifest itself later in his life in bigoted actions, speech or writing?
”Since he can’t defend his reputation, our concern would be to make our reporting as thorough as possible and the story as accurate and fair as we can make it.”
The source material from the Media Management Institute touches on all the points of caution made by readers and the editor who responded to this scenario. But the bottom line in its ”Working Guide to Journalism Decisions”:
”For a community influenced enough by this man to have named a park and building after him, it is worth a public debate. . . . For the newspaper to withhold this information is not allowing the public the choice to determine its significance. Keeping a family from embarrassment is not the newspaper’s duty. Keeping a truthful historic record is.”
The aim here is high, not low. And that is to present a story that ”can bypass pure revelation and instead aim for thoughtfulness.” That would include talking with the man’s family to try to present a ”fuller profile” of their loved one, to really look at the scope of the Klan’s connections to other leaders or its role in the community’s history.
The institute concluded, ”Stories like this can be tricky. But doing more and better journalism can erase some of the difficult questions such stories pose.”
Watch for future columns discussing the other scenarios. And as always, let me know what you think.
