The very real need to heed an ethical creed

Sunday, April 1, 2007

By DALE BASS

There’s an old saying that journalists only have other journalists for friends because, eventually, we make everyone else mad at us.
And, if we’re doing our job right, it’s more than a saying — there’s a strong element of truth to it.
Being a journalist really isn’t a nine-to-five job.
We don’t really look at the world the way others do.
Everything is a potential story, every person a possible contact.
It’s a weird way to live.
We not only look at the traffic accident we’re driving past, we debate whether to stop, find out what happened, shoot a photograph and then head to work to write the story.
We’re always on the lookout for the next big story, the next super scoop.
It makes it difficult for us to be, well, just like the person next door, an average person living an average life, doing the kinds of things everyone else does.
Former school board trustee Lal Sharma still reminds me of the time when, as a parent and a member of the District Parent Advisory Council, I wrote a story on a school board meeting no other reporter from Kamloops had covered.
He didn’t like the story and rightly pointed out to me that I had been there in my other role — parent.
I explained that, as a reporter, I can’t ignore a good story — especially one the competition won’t have. And especially if it’s going to be on the front page, as was this particular story.
The Canadian Association of Journalists, to which I belong, takes ethical behaviour by reporters and editors seriously.
It has a long, detailed code of ethics. It spells out all the dos and don’ts and a detailed section on conflict of interest.
The CAJ says journalists should not hold office in community organizations “about which we may report or make editorial judgments. This includes fundraising or public-elations work and active participation in community organizations and pressure groups that take positions on public issues.”
It also says journalists “lose our credibility as fair observers if we write opinion pieces about subjects that we also cover as reporters.”
That’s why, for example, I won’t report on the current debate about the SHOP program.
I’ve volunteered there.
I have friends from my involvement with it. I have strong opinions about the way the program for sex-trade workers is being operated now.
My involvement came about from an assignment to write about the program several years ago.
I wrote the story, got curious about the entire issue, spent some time looking into it and writing more about it — until the time my objectivity, both as I see it and as others see it in me, was gone.
So now, I write columns about SHOP and other issues about which I care deeply.
And I don’t cover them as news stories.
And I satisfy the needs of my other side — parent and citizen — by helping small agencies, ones that aren’t likely to ever be on the reporting radar and, if they are, it won’t be in an area on which I report.
It’s crucial journalists heed an ethical creed.
If we don’t, we compromise what the CAJ states in its ethics preamble as “our privilege and duty to seek and report the truth as we understand it, defend free speech and the right to equal treatment under law, capture the diversity of human experience, speak for the voiceless and encourage civic debate.”
It’s a privilege we should never take lightly.
Even if it means we can’t do all the things we’d like to do as a private citizen.
Because, if we do our job correctly, we forfeit the very right that we defend so vigorously through our reporting.
dale@kamloopsthisweek.com
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© Copyright 2007 Kamloops This Week

1 comments: to “ The very real need to heed an ethical creed so far...

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    Wrote this column because I found it completely incomprehensible that the editor of the daily newspaper here doesn't see the conflict of interest he creates by sitting on the board of major lobbying agencies in town. When I wrote this one, he was going for the board of the downtown business association but I guess he saw a bigger platform, because now, he's on the city's Chamber of Commerce. Of course, he was a school board trustee while still the editor, and then took a leave to be mayour for a while, so I guess he and I really do have different criteria for journalists.