Competitive Instinct vs. Journalistic Principle

By Gene Foreman*

            One of the most challenging tasks we face in teaching journalism ethics is preparing students to cope with the competitive pressures of the real world, even as we seek to instill the principles of ethical behavior. Aspiring journalists need to be coached to recognize competitive drives for what they are – nonethical values, which are morally neutral. Note that I did not say unethical. All of us want to get the best story we can, to beat the competition, to sell newspapers or raise broadcast ratings. There is nothing wrong with those goals; in fact, a news organization that does not achieve them often enough could well be going out of business. Where we go wrong is to sacrifice ethical values to achieve those nonethical goals – for example, to violate someone’s privacy to get the story.

            In our ethics classes we typically analyze a case study. We assume the role of the moral actor, or decision maker, and place our proposed course of action on the scales of ethical conduct. We first define the values that argue for or against that course of action. If there is an ethical value on each side – for example, truth-telling versus right to privacy – we face an ethical dilemma. Which ethical value outweighs the other? To arrive at an intellectually defensible decision, we must thoughtfully apply ethical theories and consider how all the stakeholders will be affected. Ultimately one ethical value is trumped by another ethical value, which we have deemed to be more important in the case at hand.

            The ethicist Michael Josephson notes that decision makers, including those in journalism, sometimes delude themselves into thinking that all their difficult choices are ethical dilemmas. To the contrary, Josephson argues, many are false ethical dilemmas. They are false for two reasons. First, the value or values on one side of the equation are nonethical. If we violate someone’s privacy to get a story that might interest the public even though it has no legitimate need to be informed, that is a false ethical dilemma. The right to privacy is an ethical value; getting a story that is interesting but lacking legitimacy is a nonethical value. As an example, I would argue that USA Today fulfilled a nonethical value in 1992 by forcing the former tennis star Arthur Ashe to go public with the news that he was dying of AIDS, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion. The second reason these dilemmas are false is that the decision makers want to persuade themselves that they are acting out of ethical concerns when their goals are purely nonethical. In the Arthur Ashe case, the USA Today defense was, in part, that his case would alert the public to concerns about the safety of the blood supply. The paper overlooked the fact that these concerns had been thoroughly aired and that authorities were already routinely testing the blood supply for HIV, a policy not in effect when Ashe’s transfusion occurred.

The moral response to a conflict in values, as Josephson notes, is to choose ethics over expediency. In our profession, this means choosing journalistic principle over competitive instinct.

            The theme I intend to explore today is how journalists’ behavior is too often shaped by competitive instinct rather than by journalistic principle. This seems especially true in the biggest stories, when the fever of competition is most intense. It is true even though our profession has made undeniable strides toward more ethical and more thoughtful decision making. And it is true even though the nature of the competitive environment has changed in every imaginable way.

            I have chosen two cases, nearly a half-century apart, to illustrate the theme: the coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in the early 1950s and the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in 1998. As we proceed, I think you will see the similarities of journalistic failings that can be traced to sheer competitive instinct. I also will call attention to the revolution that occurred in news media in the intervening years.   [At the outset I wish to acknowledge the research of two distinguished journalists. John Herbers, the former New York Times reporter, analyzed the McCarthy case for the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Marvin Kalb, the former television commentator, has just published a definitive account of the Clinton-Lewinsky case in his book One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky and 13 Days That Tarnished American Journalism.]

            On February 9, 1950, before the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, an obscure senator gave a party pep talk that ended with this shocker: “I have in my hand a list of 205 names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The managing editor of the Wheeling newspaper filed a story with the Associated Press, and soon the AP was distributing a 110-word story about Senator McCarthy’s charge of Communist infiltration of the State Department.

            When McCarthy arrived in Denver the next day, reporters asked him for the list. He said he had left the list in a suit on the plane, but if Secretary of State Dean Acheson would call him he would be glad to read him the list. The reporters wrote just what he said.

            Acheson said he did not know what McCarthy was talking about. In later speeches McCarthy kept making the charge, changing the numbers – “dodging and bluffing,” in Herbers’ description – and promising to reveal his list at some point. He never did. Based on their private conversations with McCarthy, several reporters suspected that he lacked evidence to support his inflammatory charges. Few of them ever pursued those doubts. As Edwin R. Bayler wrote in a 1981 book: “Reporters covered politics then as if it were a stage play; only what happened in public counted.”

            The issue of Communists in government became a political issue that polarized the country in those anxious early days of the Cold War. McCarthy rode it to a reelection victory in 1952. He was shrewd in his dealings with the press, exploiting the unwritten rules that the reporters worked under. Because he knew all the deadlines of the major newspapers, he would make a charge that the papers could not check out before going to press. He parceled out stories to the morning and afternoon papers, always serving his own interests while appearing to be even-handed.

            McCarthy’s popularity rose to the point that he would even challenge the popular new Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower. Eventually he took on the United States Army as another haven of suspected disloyalty. That dispute led to a charge in 1954 by the Army that McCarthy had exerted pressure in an unsuccessful effort to get preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a McCarthy associate who had been drafted. A bipartisan Senate committee held hearings on the Schine case. Television, then in its infancy, covered those hearings live. As the hearings ground on, McCarthy’s public support began to slip away. James Reston wrote in The New York Times that the hearings “demonstrated with appalling clarity what kind of man he is.” Later in the year, after the Democrats regained control of Congress, the Senate censured McCarthy. From then on he was ostracized by his colleagues, and he was out of the news until his death in 1957.

            To understand the McCarthy phenomenon better, we need to review how Americans got their news in the 1950s. The fledgling television industry was, like radio, largely an entertainment medium. Nearly every city had a morning newspaper and an afternoon newspaper, in some cases several of each. These papers scrapped vigorously for every morsel of news. To exploit breaking news, the afternoon papers replated their editions repeatedly and lavished undue emphasis on developments that occurred in their “cycle.” The wire services competed just as vigorously to service the newspapers’ appetite for breaking news, boasting that they broke this story or that by a matter of minutes over their rivals. And there were three wire services then – the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service.

            McCarthy would make a charge of Communist infiltration; the first stories would move on the wires and be published without a response from his targets. Eventually the response would be reported, but by then McCarthy and the nation had moved on. The damage was done. The mid-century reporters’ protocol of so-called strict objectivity only magnified the problem. Even if they knew from private conversations that a charge was wrong, reporters felt they had a duty to report what a United States senator had said, and they considered themselves powerless to go beyond the public utterances of the senator or his target. Objectivity was itself a reaction to the excesses of a partisan press of an earlier era, but it led to the mindless reporting of charges and responses without context. There was no device for reporters to introduce information, no matter how relevant, if the players in the drama did not do it themselves. It was not until later that the labeled “news analysis” became an accepted journalistic form.

            It is noteworthy that McCarthy’s star did not plummet until ordinary Americans began seeing him in action in the televised Army hearings. One has to wonder if McCarthy could have succeeded even for a short span of fame under the intense scrutiny of modern television. That leads to another question: whether 1950s print journalists disserved the country by not depicting McCarthy’s character for their readers.

In the decades that followed McCarthy, journalists honed their professionalism.    Just before the McCarthy period, the Hutchins Commission had offered its ground-breaking definition of press responsibility. Many of its recommendations – most notably the commandment to report the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning – found their way into the revised codes of ethics that journalism organizations and individual newsrooms adopted in the second half of the 20th century. These ethics codes not only spelled out strict guidelines to avoid conflicts of interest, they also injected an element of compassion into the reporting of the news. It was now acceptable to weigh the consequences of one’s reporting on the people and the events being covered. In a popular metaphor, journalism became not just a wood-cutting business; it also was a chip-falling business. Scholars and working journalists alike contributed to a continuing, well-received discussion of ethics in the field. The new journalism form, the news analysis, took hold. In this new era, journalists resolved that their mission was to seek the truth and acknowledged that the truth might not lie merely halfway between the statements of two rival newsmakers. Journalism schools refined their curricula to add courses in law and ethics to the standard courses that trained students in the skills of writing and editing. Journalism became a field in which a college education was effectively a prerequisite. In the 1950s, fewer than half of journalists were college graduates; now well over 90 percent are. Finally, a business populated almost entirely by white males opened its doors to women and racial minorities, at the same time applying a dimension of diversity to news coverage.

            As we review this period of dynamic reform, it seems inconceivable that competitive instinct would overcome the new dedication to journalistic principle.

            That brings us to the Clinton-Lewinsky coverage in 1998.

            Since all of us are familiar with that episode, I will not retell the story here. Allow me to summarize by saying that the media got the basic facts right: The President really did have an affair with a White House intern; he did lie about it; there actually was a semen-stained dress that provided key forensic evidence in the case. I also point out that the involvement of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr made it impossible for journalists to avoid the story, as they could have 10 years earlier when The Miami Herald staked out Gary Hart’s townhouse while he had a tryst with Donna Rice. No, the media had to cover Clinton-Lewinsky.

             The problems have everything to do with the way they did it. Drawing on Marvin Kalb’s post-mortem, I will list some of those problems:

            The first of these was the clamor among normally responsible journalists to match a story that was, quote, “out there.”  There was an undue haste to match competitors’ scoops. If a story could not be confirmed, then report it anyway and attribute it – or not. The Internet gossipmonger Matt Drudge broke the Lewinsky story. Interestingly, he intervened only after a mainstream news organization, Newsweek, had made a careful and agonizingly debated decision that more reporting was needed. Drudge had no such qualms, even though his own report had scant factual basis. Once he had put the story  “out there,” it was reported by The Washington Post and ABC, and everyone leaped in. We were to witness a binge of copycat reporting. As the media scholar Ellen Hume has suggested, copycatting demeans the traditional news organizations because they sink to the level of less-principled competitors. The practice squanders the hard-earned reputation for trust that is their chief asset in the new media environment.

            The second problem was reporters’ excessive reliance on anonymous sources. From the beginning, the story was based on statements from people who would not allow their names to be used. Even reporters who are ordinarily judicious about the use of anonymous sources gave in because the competition for new information was so great. If they turned down a source’s insistence on confidentiality, the source could easily find a competitor who was not so particular. In the end, the public was done a disservice. Readers and viewers often had no idea of the bias of an anonymous legal source. Naturally, it would make a world of difference if they knew the speaker was a Starr lawyer or a Clinton lawyer. This was a field day for sources whose intent was to manipulate.

            A third problem was reporters’ rush to judgment. From the beginning, Washington reporters were convinced of Clinton’s guilt, and this assumption showed in their stories. They do not get absolution because their hunch was right. Nor should we excuse reporting fueled by cynicism about the President, such as the second- and third-hand reports – never confirmed – that White House staffers had seen Clinton and Lewinsky in a compromising position.

            A fourth major flaw was the blurred line between reporting and commentary. Finding themselves in great demand on the talk shows, print reporters responded with gossip and speculation that rightfully are off-limits in their own publications.

            The competitive environment of the late 1990s and today is far different from the one that existed in the time of McCarthy. We may not have three wire services, nor afternoon papers in every town. But we do have the three traditional broadcast television networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – and five cable news networks – CNN, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox, and MSNBC. We have the Internet, with its multitude of sites of uncertain reliability. The traditional networks all have added prime-time news magazines. Talk shows have expanded on radio and television. The exponential increase in the amount of time allocated to broadcast news and news-related talk has translated into an insatiable demand for news – or at least for the new. The print media are responding to the same competitive pressures. All this has created a climate in which the process of careful verification of facts is routinely sacrificed in the haste to broadcast or publish. After Clinton-Lewinsky, we saw this phenomenon repeated in the Condit-Levy story of last summer. The trend is as debilitating to contemporary journalism as flawed objectivity was to the journalism of the 1950s.

            What we have is a paradox. During the second half of the 20th century, the news media matured in professionalism while technology transformed the delivery of the news. Then along came a high-profile developing story, and once again competitive instinct – not journalistic principle – shaped media performance. This is a classic illustration of the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

            But do things have to stay the same? The hope I express here is that the progress of the last 50 years is not going to continue to be discarded when the going gets tough – that enough media professionals will stick by ethical principle in the face of competitive pressure.

            How can this be made to happen?

            First, the next time they are tempted to match a story that is “out there,” journalists of good will should resolve to stick to the tenets of the profession. We all know what these tenets are: Do your own reporting. Do not publish or broadcast anything you do not know to be true. Be fair. Use unnamed sources judiciously; when you must rely on them, try to tell your audiences what their biases might be and how they have first-hand knowledge of the facts. Do not gossip, do not speculate, do not editorialize.

            Second, journalism professionals should apply the moral reasoning process we use in the classroom. It is practical, not merely abstract. As I mentioned earlier, moral reasoning  begins by identifying the values that argue for or against a proposed course of action. This might lead to the realization that there is an ethical principle on only one side of the equation. And that realization should promptly resolve the question in favor of doing the right thing. If the nonethical value – getting a story of questionable merit – is chosen over an ethical value, at least the decision makers should admit that they have sacrificed journalistic principle to competitive instinct. Nor should the decision makers take solace from the likelihood that competitors will publish the story if they do not. Such a rationalization also should be recognized for what it is: sinking to the level of one’s least ethical competitor.

Doing these things will mean that principled journalists will lose an occasional story to their rivals. But over the long term, I believe they will be rewarded by the trust of a public that recognizes and appreciates their devotion to accuracy and fairness. We in the academy need to be able to tell our students that in journalism, if not in baseball, nice guys do not finish last.

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*Gene Foreman—Larry and Ellen Foster Professor of Communications at Penn State University and former Managing Editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer—delivered this lecture at Washington and Lee, November 9, 2002.