Guidelines for Final Paper - American Journalism Ethics

Auerbach covered the Lindbergh Kidnapping as a reporter/photographer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your final paper should be a straightforward term paper, 3,000-4,000 words long with standard footnotes and bibliography.

A wide range of topics is acceptable. One might take a general issue like plagiarism, protecting sources, invading privacy, cleaning up quotes, maintaining good relations on a beat, accepting gifts, identifying the race or ethnicity of people in the news, covering minority communities, identifying rape victims, sacrificing accuracy in the service of being first, sensationalism in the news then and now, treating New Age stories (pet psychics, astrology) seriously, refusing to treat New Age stories seriously, cooperating with authorities by suppressing information in war stories or crime stories or stories of “national interest.” One might choose to be extra provocative: Is it possible for television news to be ethical???

You might also tackle specific events – the Lindbergh kidnapping; the Janet Cooke fiasco; the run-up to the second Iraq war; famous undercover cases; the news media and Trump’s electon; the news media and Clinton’s defeat; the Duke rape case; the University of Virginia rape case – and probe their ethical dimensions.

I would keep in mind such things as: What are/the facts of the situation? What is/was the common ethical view of the situation by those most intimately involved in the situation? What is/was the common ethical view of the situation at the time by those outside the situation, the experts, the pundits, the public? To what degree do you think a more rigorous ethical analysis is needed? That is, once you have collected opinions about the ethical issue, tell me what you think, applying some of the techniques and ideas we have discussed during the semester. (This is, of course, a golden opportunity to talk about the strengths and the limitations of the Potter Box.)

Remember: To pass this paper, you must cite three journalists with whom you have been in contact – face-to-face, phone or email. They need not be currently employed as journalists, which means other journalism faculty are fair game.

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Due Dates: A Reminder

Week Twelve         Photojournalism. Showing those things we should not

11.6.2017           show. Turning away from those things that should be seen. Assignment: You will have read the assigned essays on library reserve or on Canvas. No reading response is due. Tentative term paper ideas are due Tuesday.

Week Thirteen    National Security vs. the public’s right to know.

11.13.2017         The patriotic press. Prior restraint. The Freedom of Information Act, the Patriot Act and the government control of information. Assignment: You will have read the assigned essays on Canvas, but no Reader Response on those readings is due. Lit review for term paper is due Thursday.        

Week Fourteen (Thanksgiving) Protecting sources. Advocacy journalism.

 11.20.2017        Assignment: You will have read the assigned essays on Canvas. No reading response is due. Tentative thesis statement and writing sample from term paper is due at class time next Tuesday.

Foghorn Editor: Is This a News Hook for You?

Notre Dame drops birth control coverage

The University of Notre Dame just became one of the first employers to take advantage of new Trump administration rules allowing exemptions to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. Last week, the university announced that it would drop birth control coverage for its students, faculty, and staff.

The private Catholic university notified students and employees of the change on Friday, according to Indiana Public Media. Birth control coverage for the university’s more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students will end August 14, 2018. Faculty and staff, however, will lose their coverage in two months, on December 31. The school will still cover birth control if it’s used as treatment for a medical condition and not as pregnancy prevention.

Previously, Notre Dame offered contraceptive coverage through a third-party system devised by the Obama administration for religious employers. But the university had long been fighting to drop coverage entirely. New rules issued by the Trump administration in early October — allowing any employer to request an exemption from the birth control coverage requirement for moral or religious reasons — gave Notre Dame the opening it needed. Employers who are exempt do not have to offer coverage through a third party.

Future of Journalism: A Flicker of Light

Here's a hopeful bit.

It’s not an easy time to be a journalist in the United States. Since 2000, nearly half of newsroom jobs – more than 20,000 of them – have disappeared.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, CareerCast named “newspaper reporter” the worst of 200 jobs in 2016 for the third successive year. (Pest control worker and meter reader came in at 195 and 190, respectively.)

Yes, Journalism is a Dying Business

2 November: how you can help end impunity for crimes against journalists

The editor of Russia’s opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, winner of the 2016 Golden Pen of Freedom, is so worried about the safety of his staff, that he is to arm them with ‘traumatic’ weapons so that they can protect themselves. This follows the stabbing last week of a Russian radio journalist and the death in 2006 of the paper’s investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Extreme violence against journalists is not unique to Russia. Statistics collected by UNESCO since Politkovskaya’s death tell the chilling story: 930 journalists have been killed worldwide in the ten years to end 2016 one journalist is killed every four days only one in ten crimes committed against journalists over the past eleven years has been resolved 93% of those killed are local, only 7% are foreign correspondents. Next Thursday, 2 November, is an opportunity to honour those journalists who have died in the line of duty. It is the International Day to End Impunity For Crimes Against Journalists. Here is how you can commemorate fallen colleagues and draw attention to the need for justice: Commit space on your editorial pages on Thursday to tell the story. You will find a selection of graphics, facts and figures available online from UNESCO to illustrate the problem. Fuel and share the various 2 November social media campaigns using the hashtags #EndImpunity and #JournoSafe. Pressure your politicians for answers on colleagues who have died. In a letter to editors, which you can read here, UNESCO Assistant Director-General, Frank la Rue says: “It has proven to be of great impact when journalists from various media, beyond their differences and editorial lines, work together to publish a story on a killing of a colleague journalist in their country where the perpetrator has gone unpunished. Such cases should be thoroughly investigated and prominently published and broadcast. This can be a powerful means to denounce these crimes.”

World Editors Forum  Executive Director Cherilyn Ireton cherilyn.ireton@wan-ifra.org info@wan-ifra.org www.wan-ifra.org

Sexism and Influential Journalists and Pundits - Would a Reminder to 'Be Ethical' Help?

Well put, Ezra Klein

What does it mean that these men — and so many others liked them — held the power to literally shape America’s political narrative? What does it mean, as New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister noted on Twitter, that the story of, say, Hillary Clinton’s public career was told by these sorts of men?

We routinely underestimate what it means that our political system has been constructed and interpreted by men, that our expectations for politicians have been set by generations of male politicians and shaped by generations of male pundits. “Just the way that he talked about prominent women, it was clear they were second tier to male intellectuals,” one ex-New Republic staffer told Splinter of Wieseltier.

The most influential institutions in America have long had serial sexual abusers and deep misogynists at their apex. Those abusers didn’t just shape their workplaces or their industries; they shaped our politics, our culture, and our country.

Journalism Ethics Midterm Study Guide/F17

* Self-righting principle

* Prior restraint

* Seditious libel

* Libel law and the self-righting principle

* Hobbes and the social contract

* Locke and the social contract

* Voltaire as journalist

* John Peter Zenger

* Harry Croswell

* Benjamin Day

* James Gordon Bennett

* (short essay) Name three important Colonial American newspapers and explain why each is important

* Mindich’s five characteristics of objectivity

* the inverted pyramid and objectivity

* World War 1 and objectivity

* Vietnam War and objectivity

* naïve empiricism

* urbanization and the development of the penny press

* (short essay) The social conditions that gave rise to the penny press

* (short essay) How did the content of American newspapers change between 1700 and 1850

* (short essay) Thomas Jefferson’s contradictory views of free speech

* (short essay) 19^th Century newspaper ethics

* Several causal factors that help explain the American Revolution

* Cato’s Letters

* Ben Franklin and the price of truth

* The watchdog principle

* Exceptionalism and the American Revolution

* Sensationalism and the Penny Press

* Age of the Reporter

* The murder of Ellen Jowett

* According to Altschull, the “ideology” of the typical American journalist is drawn from what four sources?

* According to Altschull, there are four “general classifications” that describe the various degrees of freedom that the various founding fathers were debating when they considers exactly what it meant when they wrote, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of the press.”

* the inherent contradiction in the SPJ code of ethics

* Trolley problems and “double effect”

* James Madison and the Federalist Papers

* Yellow journalism

* Master Narrative

* Backfire effect

* Newspapers as Fourth Estate

* Isaiah Berlin’s notion of “positive” vs. “negative” liberty/freedom

* (short essay)Talk about the ethical implications of the following things during interviewing:  manipulating body language; laughing at jokes; laughing at risqué jokes; using the “some people say” or the “my editor insisted I ask this” technique as a preface for a question that you want to ask; using what you learn during your subject’s exit comments (those exchanges that take place when you have put up your notebook or tape recorder and are literally walking out of the interview)

* Areopagitica

* True or false. Through the 18^th Century, the American colonists were passionately committed to freedom of speech. Explain your answer

* Boston Newsletter

* Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick

* James Mill and advocacy journalism

* Citizen Kane and newspaper ethics
* William James and pragmatism

* moral confounding

* Marc Hauser and “Moral Minds”

* (short essay) Late 19^th Century reporters felt they could be both factual and

  colorful. How did they resolve that apparent contradiction?

* Hearst and New York Journal

* Pulitzer and New York World

* Richard Harding Davis

There will be an essay question in which I give you an ethical situation and ask you to run it through the Potter Box. It will count 35 percent of your exam grade.

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I want you to address all four PB quadrants: facts, values, principles and loyalties. In the “facts” quadrant, do not waste time re-listing all the information given but *only* those facts that are central to your ethical analysis. In the “principles” quadrant, I want you to very briefly comment on each of the six we considered: Aristotle, Confucius, Kant, Mill, Rawls and Judeo-Christian, plus your initial gut reaction before concentrating on the one or two you find most useful. You may, of course, add additional principles we have not discussed in class.