Honor counts

Straight talk from Kay Semion

Early in 2005, press credibility came into sharp focus. With each report of a breach of professional ethics, I found myself growing angrier because all of us hard-working journalists pay a price.

The year began with stories about Armstrong Williams, a conservative pundit (who professes not to be a journalist), who had accepted two hundred forty thousand dollars from the U.S. Department of Education in part to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in his syndicated column and talk show. He has both acknowledged and denied those points. Then quickly following those articles was a panel's report discrediting CBS for ignoring its own standards when it rushed into broadcasting a show about President Bush's National Guard records without verifying its sources.

Such ethics issues are not new. Yesteryear it was Jayson Blair and The New York Times; Jack Kelley and USA Today, Stephen Glass and The New Republic. There are more, of course.

Williams is not an NCEW member. The others are not eligible because they are not opinion writers. Yet all these incidents matter to NCEW and all journalism organizations. We get the bad mark as a profession in spite of years of honorable work by NCEW members and thousands of news or broadcast journalists. Most readers and viewers don't discern whether the violator is a columnist, an investigative reporter, or a broadcaster. It doesn't matter what political perspective the offender professes. For the past twenty years, polls and studies have shown that the public's perception of journalists is going downhill.

In "The State of the News Media 2004," Journalism.org summed up our profession's status (stateofthenewsmedia.org). Since 1985, for instance, the number of Americans who think news organizations are professional declined from seventy-two percent to forty-nine percent. Those who think news organizations are immoral increased from thirteen percent to thirty-six percent. Those who think their daily newspapers are believable fell from eighty percent to fifty-nine percent.

These are scary numbers. To be effective opinion writers, our readers and viewers have to believe our assumptions are based on facts that we have checked and double-checked. They have to believe that we would reject payola in any form. They have to believe we are professional, avoid conflicts of interest, and shun false or misleading reporting.

In its Statement of Principles, NCEW clearly outlines ethical obligations for opinion writers. "Editorial writing is more than another way of making money," it begins. "It is a profession devoted to the public welfare and to public service." (See Statement of Principles under contents at ncew.org.) Given the falling barometer of respect for the media in general, this statement offers fodder for reviewing our own behavior and our organization's and also for thinking about how we can work with others to further the integrity of journalism.

Think about it. Write me about it. I'm tired of lame excuses for unethical behavior. The rest of us don't deserve the bad rap.

Kay Semion is associate editor of the Daytona Beach News-Journal and president of NCEW. E-mail kay.semion@ news-jrnl.com

Copyright MASTHEAD National Conference of Editorial Writers Spring 2005
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