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Home > Letters > William F. Woo A Letter From William F.Woo Dear Students: There was a sickening story in the papers last week about some vandals who butchered a pet hamster named Marshmallow while trashing a classroom at a middle school in Palo Alto. Reading about it, I thought of Shakespeare's line from "King Lear": As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. Whether the vandals were kids remains to be seen. But the wantonness of the act -- its senseless and malicious cruelty - is self-evident. The power that a human being, whether child or adult, has over a tiny creature is unimaginable to the victim, and to use that power to torture and kill is a terrible thing. Hawthorne, I believe it was, said that intentional cruelty to the human heart is the one unforgivable crime. We are talking about a hamster here, of course, not the human heart, but the point is relevant nonetheless. Deliberate cruelty, the willful infliction of pain or suffering is unforgivable. But what about pain and suffering that comes from recklessness? Are these not also the results of felonies of character? Are these ever committed by journalists? Let me tell you about a man named Frank Prince. I should say, with some relief, that all of this took place before I had anything to do with editing the Post-Dispatch. Prince was a prominent St. Louis businessman and chief stockholder in the Universal Match Co. He gave $500,000 to Washington University, back in the days when a half million meant something. The grateful university decided to name a building after him and the Post-Dispatch assigned a reporter to write a story about the benefactor. The reporter found that the 71-year-old Prince had served 10 years in prison when he was a young man on charges of bad checks, forgery and larceny - white collar crimes. Very few people in the community knew that and when the story appeared, with all the awful details about a life long ago, readers were outraged. Speak about no good deed going unpunished. Readers thought the story was a piece of vandalism -- destructive, irrelevant and certainly not newsworthy. The public did not need to know that Prince had done time to understand his generosity. The journalistic justification for this trashing was what you might expect. The story was relevant to understanding Frank Prince and why, now many years later, he was giving back to society. Put another way, that argument declares journalists are psychologists and are qualified to assert why people act the way they do. Another journalistic justification was the newsworthiness of the story. When somebody is in the news, as Prince was, people want to know more about them. If Prince didn't wish to have information about his life made public, he could have made an anonymous donation to the university. You can decide for yourself which of these responses - the criticism or the justification - seems most reasonable to you. My view, as you can gather, is that the readers had it right. But regardless of where you and come out on this, the fact is that journalists often have to confront the issue of newsworthiness when privacy is at stake. That's true whether the journalism is a news article or a piece of commentary, such as you are writing. What is newsworthiness? A study not long ago by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that there are vast differences between what the public thinks is news and what journalists consider news. The study reported a question put to journalists and readers: If the mother of a drowned child begged a paper not to publish her child's name, citing the terrible pain it would cause to read the story, should the news organization withhold it? The readers said Yes. Almost unanimously, journalists said No. Ask a journalist what's news and you're likely to hear some version of the criteria set down by Melvin Mencher, whose book "News Reporting and Writing" is probably the most widely used text in journalism schools. Mencher said that news is information about a break from the normal flow of events, an interruption in the expected. News, he says, is information people need to make sound decisions about their lives. Decisions about newsworthiness, says Mencher, are affected by factors that include timeliness, impact, prominence, proximity, conflict, the unusual and currency. But which of these is most important? Obviously, news decisions involve subjective judgments. Now add to the equation the dimension of pain and suffering. Should a mother's grief over the death of her child affect our consideration of the newsworthiness of the details? Should the pain and humiliation of an elderly philanthropist be calculated into the decision about printing details of a nonviolent crime a half century ago? Here ethics enters the picture. Students, reporters and editors are often surprised to learn that I do not believe in "journalism ethics." That is, I do not believe there is a separate set of ethics that applies only to journalists but not other people - the baker, the butcher the candlestick maker. I believe that there is one set of ethics for everyone, journalists included. So while I do not believe in "journalism ethics." I believe strongly in ethical journalism - a journalism that adheres to the same ethical principles by which all people should live. This simplifies matters considerably. I've found that wherever in the world I go and whatever the audience, the relevant ethics have all been learned by the time the people were eight years old. It's not something you have to teach. People understand that you should not lie, that you should not kill or hurt people except in defense of life, that you should help those in immediate need of help, that you should respect other people and so forth. One important ethical precept is minimizing harm. That covers an entire spectrum of possibilities. At one end, minimizing harm means doing none at all. At the other, minimizing harm means softening the blow as much as possible when pain and suffering are inevitable. Between the two are many other possibilities. Another ethical precept, and one that is of great importance to journalism, is telling the truth. This also is a difficult one because the entire truth at any moment is probably unknowable. What is the truth about welfare, for example? What is the truth about Iraq? Even if journalists have done their reporting well and honestly and are lucky, all they can have are slices of the truth. Does journalism compel them to put all those slices in the story, which is another way of saying, does journalism compel journalists to write everything they know? The answer, of course, is No. We pick and choose among the truths at our disposal to create the story. Some of the slices are left out because they are not relevant to our assignment. If you have the text of a one-hour speech by a public official, you cannot print the whole "truth" of it in a 700-word story. But relevance is not the only consideration. Ethical decisions have to be made when competing ethical principles collide in a story. Minimizing harm is important. So is telling the truth. What if that truth is something the public should know about - the truth, say, about a drug ring operating out of the county hospital allegedly under the protection of a senior administrator? What if that truth also will result in pain and suffering, in this case to co-workers who inevitably will fall under suspicion, to family members who will suffer embarrassment or worse - ostracism, perhaps? And of course to the administrator, particularly if the reports are wrong. How do we decide between competing ethical principles? Is it all one or all the other? I say, usually it isn't. We should craft the story in ways that both principles - minimizing harm and truth-telling - are respected, though one or the other may turn out to be more important. The ethical journalist is always trying to navigate a way in which the important ethical principles are never neglected. The ethical journalist is always sensitive to the nuances inherent in every situation. This is hard work. It requires thinking. It requires a sturdy ethical foundation. It requires avoiding the easy, unthinking recourse to sloganeering - the people's right to know, for example. The people's right to know what? But unless we
journalists take on this difficult task as a condition of our work,
we risk the worst outcome of all - inflicting harm, say, and at
the same time failing to tell the truth that's pertinent to the
story we need to tell. In such cases, people may find it hard to
distinguish the journalists from Shakespeare's wanton boys who tear
the wings off flies for sport. Which is how I suspect old Frank
Prince felt.
Regards, Bill Woo
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