ETHICAL STEWARDSHIP:  Expanding our Notion of Ethical Choices

By Tim McGuire*

            A letter writer responded to one of my recent syndicated columns with kindness and concern. She agreed with me that taking turns, being on time, and meeting deadlines are important to keep order, to be respectful of others, and to be an ethical person. But the letter writer had a comment about deadlines:

                In my last two positions—one in the corporate world and one in government—deadlines became moot because they were imposed with unrealistic expectations that they could be met.   Although I was in a position to manage programs at both jobs, deadlines were imposed by my own company, and by those agencies we reported to, with no regard for resources to meet them. I found that I could work 60 hours a week and still never meet the deadlines; that even though my  company/agency knew about deadlines I was trying to meet, more were added; that no additional resources of people or funding were available.

                        I realize this is not unusual and I saw it happen to my colleagues and professional peers.  However, after awhile, even the most responsible worker sets his or her own boundaries such as: no more never-ending overtime, no more never-ending stress, no more guilt about not meeting deadlines.  I guess the word "deadline" just loses its meaning when it is impossible to achieve. 

            This letter writer raises the issue of what I call “ethical stewardship.” Her employers demanded more and more and more, and many good, responsible employees checked out.  The employer was not a good ethical steward of his business.  His demands were unreasonable and his focus on business efficiency overwhelmed his responsibility to his employees.

            We all know about ethical decision making–the process of making the right choices about complex moral or ethical problems and choices.  Most basic ethics books tell us that ethics observes the moral choices people make and the reasons they give for those choices.

            In 1924, in an impromptu speech later reprinted by Atlantic Monthly, Lord John Fletcher Moulton talked about ethics, or “manners” as he called them, as “obedience to the unenforceable.”  He said between positive law and absolute freedom lies a domain in which “there is no law that inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel we are not free to choose as we would.” Lord Moulton went on to say, “It grades from a consciousness of duty nearly as strong as positive law to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice.”

            This vague, ephemeral land of   “obedience to the unenforceable” can be uncomfortable because it forces us out of our own self-interest and demands that we consider the needs and expectations of others. My ethical standards and yours may differ, but for both of us to be ethical, there must be something beyond self-interest that leads us to that set of ethical standards—to that “obedience to the unenforceable.”

            The most elemental process used to make ethical decisions is a set of three questions. We must ask:

• What rights should a person have?
• What responsibilities should you accept?
• Do you have a duty to fulfill a certain role in society?

            My friend Bob Steele at the Poynter Institute has provided specific fodder for our journalistic discussions by giving us 10 questions to ask when making an ethical decision about a story.  Bob’s insightful questions are important when we’re thinking about all ethical decisions. It’s always good to ask questions such as:  What do I know? and What do I need to know? and What is my journalistic purpose?  We are fortunate that scholars like Bob Steele, Jay Black, Lou Hodges, and others have spent so much time developing solid models for ethical decision making in journalism. Ethical decision making about minimizing harm and protecting innocents is a crucial part of ethical thinking.  We should value it, study it and become expert at it. Throughout it all, ethical decision making should not be an academic pursuit, but instead it should be about doing the right thing.

            But people don’t always know what the right thing is, and often there is honest disagreement about what is right. The answer in many professions, as it is in journalism, is to adopt codes of ethics and prescriptions.  Some of those are so technical they give you a headache. Some are so general LeBron James and his hummer could drive right through them.

            When codes of ethics are principle-driven they are good things.  When they are legalistic, cover-your-butt documents they are not so good. A look at any State Bar code of ethics makes you wonder if that code were designed merely to protect rule-breakers or to guide the good lawyers.

            Ethical codes of conduct are also valuable and important to our business. I personally never could get beyond the legalisms and preferred to operate with a set of ethical expectations, but I think that was probably a mistake.  Writing out a specific set of expectations has real value.

            While I celebrate the development of processes for sound ethical decision making and at the same time applaud codes of ethical conduct, I want to talk today about a dimension of ethics many of us don’t think about: ethical stewardship. I think ethical stewardship should become the third leg of a journalistic ethics stool.

            Allow me to plagiarize from myself and quote from my presidential speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors last April. I said this:

                                 I’ve been thrilled recently to see the word stewardship used next to the word journalism. At a Poynter conference in January, Howell Raines talked about the Methodist stewardship he learned as a child. He says it reminded him that the most important thing is to be a good steward of The New York Times.

                                When Jerry Roberts resigned as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, he said, “I want to offer two words of unsolicited advice that I believe shape all great newspaper people:   practice stewardship. The Chronicle is a living, breathing thing. It was here long before any of us arrived, and it will be here long after all of us have gone. We are all stewards of a great and historic institution that defines our community. Being on the paper is a privilege and a public trust, and we should go about our work with reverence, caring and passion that honors the paper’s past, builds its future, and above all else, serves its readers.”                

                                Stewardship is uplifting and essential. Stewardship needs to be at the heart of our values. Stewardship instills and personalizes the sense of obligation we should all feel if we are to find the right blend of profit and public service.

            I am proud that people like Raines, Roberts, and McGuire are talking about such an important concept as stewardship in journalism. Stewardship in faith means a financial responsibility to provide for the least of our brethren. Peter Block in his book Stewardship says, “Stewardship means guiding and caring for an institution, or a value, with values and principles.”  Block adds, “Stewardship depends on a willingness to be accountable for results with using control or caretaking as the means to reach them.”

             It’s my contention that there is an inevitable nexus between stewardship and ethics. Sissela Bok, in a recent lecture at the Poynter Institute, said: “Ethics is the rational discussion of the process of a person realizing there is a difficult problem to be overcome. Choice becomes a matter of ethical or moral debate only because of the intentions behind them, their results, and the values of society or the individual they reflect.”

            I propose today that ethical stewardship is the concept of instilling in an organization the values and ethics required to make the right moral choices to overcome the problems that organization faces.

            I further propose that in journalism ethical stewardship expands our notion of what those ethical choices are, because it requires us to take into account all of our stakeholders and, most importantly, it demands we consider our very reason for existence—fulfilling our public responsibility by ensuring full, robust public debate.

            If we use Rushworth Kidder’s model of care-based thinking, rules-based thinking, and ends-based thinking, many of our day-to-day journalism ethics questions fall under care-based thinking. We often test ourselves and our position by walking in the victim’s shoes or in the shoes of the potentially wounded party.

            Our ethical codes are rooted in rules-based thinking.  We want to govern our actions with rules that we would want everyone else to follow.

            My notion of ethical stewardship in journalism would force us to consider as ethical issues many things that we now view as routine corporate imperatives:

• Allocation of resources

• Time spent on stories

• The editor’s role in the newspaper

• Training

• Cultivating healthy skepticism and fighting cynicism        

• Public service values

• Rewards

• Job design

All of these are issues the ethical steward must consider. They are all issues which would be dealt with in a far healthier way if we recognized them as ethical issues.

            We would reach better outcomes on all these issues if we used an ends-based analysis or utilitarianism.  That is, all of these issues would be handled more ethically than they are now if decision makers chose to do whatever would produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

            Right now, in corporate offices and newsrooms around America, the people who run journalistic enterprises are operating according to accepted business rules-of-the-road. In most cases these individuals are not illegal or immoral. They do, however, often abdicate their ethical responsibilities when they invoke what I call the “Wall Street Devil.”  Many of these executives tell us that the market, the shareholder, the Street, or the analysts insist we produce ever-larger short-term profits. If we don’t, we are told, that devil will come and take our businesses away from us.

            Certainly individual investors are looking for the best returns on their pension plans and other financial holdings, but that does not mean and should not mean that executives abandon the sense of duty, obligation, and responsibility to the greater good just to serve those financial desires.

            News media executives are obsessing about financial returns, but their decision-making template does not often include the public service function of journalism. If it did, more decisions would be made that benefit a greater number of people—the public—rather than just a limited number of shareholders.

            Let’s look at some of the issues that most media executives would tell you are outside the purview of ethics.  They would tell you these are decisions made in the normal course of business and most of them would resist viewing their decisions in the context of ethical decision-making.

            Allocation of resources is absolutely an ethical issue.  If we consider the appropriate profit level versus the appropriate amount of news resources to serve the public interest, we clearly have a difficult choice to make.

            In my ASNE President’s speech I quoted Polk Laffoon, a spokesman for Knight Ridder. He said this about newsroom cuts to Rick Edmonds from Poynter: “How deep is too deep? I suppose it’s when you can’t get the paper out. An awful lot of papers that get very thin still sell just fine.”

            I’m here to argue that Laffoon’s thinking represents a bad ethical choice of profit over serving the public’s right to know. If getting the paper out is the accepted standard, it stands to reason that not much value is going to be added for readers.  Their right to know gets severely compromised by that kind of approach.

            Think of the countless papers that put profit above serving readers. They squeeze the number of reporters on the street; they squeeze the editing functions; and they deprive readers of serious and important information.

            Now certainly if the choice were to be made to sacrifice the interests of stakeholders or the long-term interests of the franchise in favor of news resources that could be just as unethical. The ethical choice of the good steward has to be to find a balance between news resources and the profit needed to sustain the franchise.

            The eternal threat is that if the managers don’t maximize profit then Attila the Hun will buy our newspapers and really squeeze the profit line. That begs the ethical question. Is it the ethical choice to ignore the acceptable level of news resources in favor of profit? I argue that a public interest enterprise, like a media outlet, must be bound by an ethical obligation to its public service responsibilities.

            If the local utility company cut off electricity to a poor part of town because it was too expensive, we would certainly accuse the utility of unethical behavior. When auto manufacturers cut corners and cars like the Pinto caught fire, we found their actions unethical. I think it stands to reason that if newspapers and broadcasters choose profit over responsibly serving the public, a bad ethical choice has been made.

            I know a small newspaper in flyover land that a few years ago had ten editorial people. One of these investment groups that buy small newspapers gobbled the paper up and today it has five editorial people. Were five news people sitting around doing nothing of value? I doubt it.  Are there fewer city council meetings? No.  Are there fewer public issues of import? No. Are there fewer people with interesting stories to tell? No.  Are there more ravenous corporate pocketbooks to fill?  The answer of course, is a resounding YES.

            I argue that the journalism profession and society must stop looking at that as a routine business choice and start considering it an important ethical issue to be resolved in favor of the public interest.

            In the same vein, an important ethical issue is developing over time spent on stories.  In an increasing number of newsrooms zoning demands are forcing reporters to do perfunctory reporting on several stories a day just to fill the empty stomach of the beast.  Important issue stories that require old-fashioned shoe leather are getting short shrift because the big shots have decided local news is the key to higher circulation.  And while local news is crucial to growing readership, perfunctory local news is not the key to anything positive.

            The correct ethical choice is to give readers more local news of depth and substance in zoned editions by investing in more news gathering resources rather than pounding current reporters for more local dreck.  When major issues like the Savings and Loan scandals go uncovered, and months or years later we find out that wrongdoing or mistakes could have been avoided, we often decry news gatherers, but we don’t often call attention to it as an ethical failing. Squeezing reporters’ time and keeping them off the street when stories crucial to the community go uncovered is indeed a poor ethical choice.

            One of the most disconcerting ethical failures I encounter these days comes from beaten down editors who say their publisher is so demanding, so unreasonable, and so intractable that the editors have checked out.  These editors have given up the fight, and in so doing are making unethical decisions. I’m pretty sure their paychecks don’t say, “This is for services rendered as long as you’re always getting your way.”  Nor does it say, “This paycheck means you get an easy job with an easy boss.”

            No, if journalists accept their paycheck and all the perks that go with it, they carry an ethical responsibility to do their best work, to provide ethical leadership, and to keep their shoulders and backs straight while they do it.

            In my ASNE speech I called for publishers and editors to make a personal contract to create a sound business AND to serve the public interest. I said our news franchises are not going to survive if publishers and editors are squabbling, or worse, not talking at all. Editors must be key players in making our news franchises strong.

            Certainly, they need to do it by being creative about new products and new methods. But the most important contribution of editors must be as leaders of great news products. That requires time, focus, and commitment. If publishers prevent editors from serving in that role, or if editors refuse to step up to that responsibility, both are making unethical choices. They are not accepting their appropriate obligations.

             Training is becoming a big national issue, and rightfully so.  Many major journalism organizations and funders are recognizing that better training is crucial in journalism. But I have heard few people talk about training as an ethical issue.

            Let’s imagine a case in which a reporter fails to call a key player—let’s call him Harry—in a complicated embezzlement scheme.  The reporter prints a story that says Harry joined with several other players to steal his company blind. We later find out that Harry, in fact, blew the whistle on the scheme and is completely clean. Furthermore, Harry’s position is such that a smart business reporter should have known Harry couldn’t be a perpetrator. You would quickly conclude that the reporter failed ethically and Harry has suffered.

            But, what if the reporter is a young education reporter who was thrown into this complex business story without a speck of training? She doesn’t know business. She doesn’t understand embezzlement, and she doesn’t have a clue about how the connections are made. Suddenly the case looks very different and it would be fair to conclude that the editors who sent an untrained reporter into a big-time complex story are in fact guilty of the ethical failure.

            I know personally that training budgets have been slashed in the last four years.  Whenever a publisher asks an editor to clamp down a little harder on the budget—to squeeze that lemon a bit harder—it is training that gets slashed. The very real result is that many reporters are not learning new specialties. Many newsrooms have not had a legal briefing in years, and even the basics of reporting are being neglected because training dollars have disappeared.

            But when mistakes are made, when innocent readers are victimized by poor or negligent coverage, will anybody question the ethics of sending unprepared reporters into battle? They will not, unless we can raise the profile of decisions such as cutting training budgets to the level of an ethical choice. Unless we can make editors and publishers realize that when they cut the training budget they are unethically putting their reporters, their reputations, and their franchises at risk, then such bad decisions are going to continue.

            The way we look at stories can be an ethical choice too. A few weeks ago I judged the Commentary category for the Pulitzers. I was struck by one particular columnist who commented on a kind act by some people of faith.  You could almost see the head-shaking of the columnist who could not believe in the basic goodness of  people. The distaste for faith was palpable and stunning. Unfortunately, that column was all too common.

            Our profession has crossed a line from skepticism to cynicism.  Any good reporter or editor must be skeptical. Too many self-interested people will try to twist the truth unless we are vigilant and skeptical. But when we allow that skepticism to turn into a sour cynicism, which prevents us from relishing human triumphs, spiritual victories, and old-fashioned love of our neighbor, then we have crossed an ethical line.  We have chosen meanness over hope, and our readers will suffer. We will too.

            I sat with a television executive at lunch the other day and we talked about young people like my 19-year-old son, who are planning to enter the broadcasting world.  The executive joked about all the pretty faces who want to be stars on TV. Then he said, “but you know, the ones who really make it are still the ones who believe they can make a difference in their communities and those who know that their journalism can enrich people’s lives.”

            Many people enter the media business for selfish reasons:  prestige, money, power and agendas. For them the term “public service values” has as much meaning as a used ticket to last week’s movie. We have to have the moral courage to call those people out.  As ethical stewards we must make the ethical choice to fulfill our obligations to public service values and we must make sure that the people who share those values are the ones who are promoted and lauded.

            We all know that the time-honored path to the top in journalism is to start out in small towns for little money and work your way to the big city where there is much more handsome compensation.

            Those of you in education know that for several years print journalism and broadcast journalism have suffered a brain drain.  Many of the top students at this university and many others are choosing other professions over journalism.  We are told that one of the key reasons for this brain drain is that many top students are reluctant to go to “No-Where City” in the Midwest to work for $18,000 in the hope that they will one day hit it big.

            While our industry has heard that complaint for years, we have done little but complain about it.  Increasingly we’re now concerned about the quality of the young people entering our business; but few have had the courage to say we made a bad ethical choice when we refused to alter our thinking about career paths or when we  refused to guarantee that all media outlets pay decent wages.  Good ethical stewards would recognize that our stubbornness has been a bad ethical choice.

            In the same way, many editors just wrung their hands when copy editors complained their jobs were unfair, depressing, and bad for their health.  To this day I believe our effort in Minneapolis to make those copy editor jobs more palatable, by making them a part of the front end production of stories, was not only good business; it was the right ethical choice.  I specifically remember thinking that if I allowed copy editors to continue to suffer I would be making the wrong ethical choice.  But too seldom do we consider the ethical implications of that kind of problem.

            Many smart people of conscience are trying to raise the level of debate on issues like allocation of resources, time spent on stories, the editor’s role in the newspaper, training, cultivating healthy skepticism, public service values, rewards and job design. Most of those people are trying to do it by using strict, empirical standards and mathematical formulas such as one reporter for every thousand circulation. These smart people hope to marshal considerable evidence for media executives that says that serving the public better will be more profitable.  Those are laudable efforts and I support them.

            Even so, I remain convinced that that kind of empirical argument misses the ethical implications of the decisions we are making about media franchises.

            Early on in this speech I quoted Lord Moulton’s definition of ethics as “obedience to the unenforceable.”  Moulton went on to say that the true test of the greatness of a nation “is the extent to which the individuals composing the nation can be trusted to obey self-imposed law.” In the same way the greatness of media executives and editors is going to be tested by their ability to see the ethical context of their business decisions. Nobody is going to be able to impose standards or laws on media executives. Media executives are going to have to make the free will choice that allocation of reporters, rewards, job design, and news hole are not simply balance sheet issues but are actually ethical obligations to serve the public’s right to know. If training and skepticism and public service values are viewed as optional and not as ethical obligations, our franchises will erode and the public’s right to know will be jeopardized.

            Ethical stewardship is an unenforceable concept of ethical obligation to readers that must come from willing media practitioners and executives who believe deeply that they must become ethical stewards of their businesses and of the public service mission of media companies.

            I suggest that ethical stewardship requires media practitioners to adopt the following ten actions and attitudes to make ethics a greater part of the decision-making process:

1.      We need to get rid of  our baggage, our hang-ups and our helplessness.

2.      We have to look at all sides of an issue.  Our frame of reference may not be the same as another person’s frame.

3.      We must take personal responsibility for our group’s successes and failures. 

4.      We know we are personally responsible for the success of our people. Our people bloom only if we let them.

5.      We must bring passion to our decision-making.

6.      We must be compassionate to all stakeholders.

7.      We must concentrate on the Golden Rule.

8.      We must properly assess and assign rights and responsibilities.

9.      We must constantly assess our judgment of which issues are ethical issues and seek the broadest definition possible.

10.   We must clearly and completely explain our thinking to peers, subordinates and all stakeholders—including the public.

            But these are not issues that ethicists can simply consign to practitioners. There is a clear role for ethicists in this debate about ethical stewardship. The scholars who have done so much to provide us with practical templates for thinking about ethical decision-making in the news gathering process must help us develop templates for thinking and acting on ethical stewardship.

            I  contend that utilitarianism, which is thinking about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, is a good way to think about the obligations media executives owe to the reading public. However, I am sure that well-trained, sophisticated ethicists can discover new and better ways to frame the routinely made business decisions of  media executives in an ethical context.

            Ethical stewardship needs to be an essential part of our study of journalism ethics.

Publishers and editors are making countless decisions which profoundly affect the long-term health of the journalistic franchise, but those decisions are seldom being made with the informed, considered thought we give to ethical decisions.

            These crucial decisions about allocation of resources, training, staff attitude, rewards, and job design are too often being made without a proper assessment of rights, duties, and obligations.

            In the past couple of years American business has been under intense attack for accounting irregularities, insider trading, short-sighted financial decisions, abuse of corporate power, and outrageous management salaries.

            American media management has been accused of ignoring readers, minimizing  obligations to public service, and being comfortable with the government line on crucial public issues.

            A firmly held sense of ethical stewardship would help our society overcome all these ills. A well-studied template for making ethical stewardship decisions would guide executives and media practitioners to decisions that would serve the public interest rather than take advantage of it. Ethical stewardship could help publishers, editors and readers develop an effective “obedience to the unenforceable.”