ethics in practice and under pressure

Mark Lewis

If done properly, staging can allow a journalist to tell a more compelling version of news events by alleviating the twin burdens of tenacity and creativity. Is that not true in some rare instances? Far more worrisome than newsroom policy is the young reporter or photographer who’s not yet been caught.

I don’t think any “believer” journalist would set out to lie in telling a story. More likely a scenario is that the journalist, for whatever reason (flat tire, etc.), misses a photo assignment with deadline looming. The clock is ticking and a red-faced editor is waiting. What if the ethical solution – finding another way to tell the story – is less effective than staging would be? What if the photographer knows it will not be good enough to fulfill the assignment?

In my undergraduate days, a slacker I knew fabricated a story that ran in the student newspaper. He was subsequently banned from its pages and became somewhat of a pariah in the J school. While the rest of us were writing stories for class credit, he had to write term papers. His infraction haunted him for a full two years, I think. People knew him as the guy who lied.