Deciding what the story is and getting the facts straight are only part of a journalist's task. In addition to reporting, they are faced with ethical decisions about how to cover the news. This was the message of the panelists at the spouse program during The Americans 1996 December meeting.
Andrea Montalbano, an associate producer for The Today Show, discussed the ethical issues she has confronted on the job. Ron Steinman, with a thirty-year career working in the networks, took a very dim view of current television news coverage. Funding for news is down, he said, the industry is driven by corporate greed, and the editorial content panders to the lowest common denominator.
Sandra Walker, the moderator of the panel, was a broadcast journalist for the PBS Seattle affiliate where she moderated a weekly program on medical ethics. In discussing some of her projects, she recalled the problems of obtaining informed, noncoercive consent from the interviewees. She recounted a story she covered in a hospital emergency room. She was granted permission in advance from the hospital but sought to obtain consent from the patients only after filming was complete. Evidently, these early experiences contributed to Walker's career change — she is now a resident in psychiatry and a candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute. Andrea Montalbano is a graduate of Harvard College and the Columbia Journalism School. She began her career as the English-speaking anchor of the Vatican radio station, and worked her way to the The Today Show, with its audience of 1.5 million. Although some of the elements of the five-minute segments she produces are taped, the anchor's interviews are often live. The anchor usually does not meet the guest prior to the interview and must rely on background information provided by producers and writers.
Montalbano illustrated different ethical dilemmas she encountered with three news stories. Leafing through a magazine on the flight home from covering the Value Jet crash in the Florida Everglades, Montalbano read a short piece about a woman who had converted a Boeing 727 into a mobile home. After interviewing the woman on the phone, Montalbano and her crew flew to Mississippi to discover that even a seemingly innocuous story can be fraught with moral dilemmas. The woman's “plane” had been stripped of its wings, and the fuselage was turned into a living space, complete with a lake-view Jacuzzi where the cockpit used to be. Before the shoot began, the woman laughingly confided that she and her neighbors had spent the night before removing their lantern jockeys, which accounted for all the post holes in their lawns. This confession not only offended Montalbano's personal sensibilities, but also raised concerns about the upcoming live interview with Bryant Gumbel. The interview went smoothly and a potential disaster was averted, but the burden of deciding whether to put this woman on live television weighed heavily on Montalbano's shoulders.
Achieving balance was the dilemma Montalbano faced in the second example, a story about two men who had spent eight years in prison after being convicted of murder in Traverse City, Michigan. The press initially reported that the prosecution witness, an FBI fugitive, had perjured himself during the trial. Yielding to public pressure, the prosecutor agreed to release the two imprisoned men to house arrest. Claiming he had additional evidence, he said he intended to retry the case. The two convicted men, who had always claimed they were innocent, wanted a new trial. The story was taped by Today when the men were still under house arrest. Jack Ford, NBC's legal correspondent, interviewed the two men with their attorney. The prosecutor refused to appear on tape, which often creates the impression of evasion. Montalbano wondered if her story achieved a standard of fairness without the prosecutor participating in the interview. She believed it had. The facts were correct, she broke no law, and the audience had a chance to judge for themselves the moral issues. A year after the men were placed under house arrest, the prosecutor decided not to retry the case. The two convicted men could not prove their innocence, and the prosecutor did not prove their guilt.
Intruding on the privacy of a grieving family when the public craves human-interest stories was the focus of Montalbano's third example. The Today Show producers asked her to find a grieving parent to interview shortly after the Value Jet crash in the Florida Everglades (in which 109 men and women who lost their lives). Pat Sterns, the father of Jennifer Sterns, a flight attendant, agreed to an interview, which went as follows:
STERNS: Jennifer was not scheduled to fly, but she filled in for someone who was ill. Jennifer had always wanted to be a police officer. Our family felt the work was too dangerous. I had been a fighter pilot and always enjoyed flying. I encouraged her to work in the airline industry.
COURIC: Do you blame anyone?
STERNS: No, I can't blame anyone. There are too many unknowns.
COURIC: The rescue, salvage, and search for bodies has been so slow and heart-breaking.
STERNS: We just want to get Jennifer back. She was a good and loving kid. She was always thinking of others.
COURIC: Pat Sterns, we feel so sorry about your loss.
Montalbano closed her presentation by asking, “Is there value in such interviews?”
Ron Steinman, a freelance producer for ABC News Productions, followed with a blistering critique of current network news-gathering. “When I think of network news, unfortunately I can only think in negatives. The present process is a dismal failure.” Continuing, Steinman found “most anchors are unctuous, talk too much, talk too slowly, talk too confidentially, but not confidently. They are shrill barkers in a one-horse carnival.”
Steinman said we live in an age in which news decisions are made by committees of people fearful of making up their own minds. “Hard news, where I cut my teeth, is almost dead. Reporters — and I do defend them to a degree — rarely have time to think. They have to serve too many masters and too quickly. Instant analysis is in; careful thought is out. It is dead.” Steinman further alleged that too often the person in the field takes instructions on the story from headquarters, that “mythical place” that decides not only the placement and position of the story, but often what the story means. “No, thank you,” he said. “Hardly anyone ever argues.” The threat of job loss haunts writers, producers, and directors, he added.
When Steinman was NBC News bureau chief in Vietnam during the war, he needed no approval to cover a story. “After all, the story was mine and the reporter and camera crews were working for me. For all of television then, we owned Vietnam. The story was ours.” Contrasting that journalistic paradise with the present, Steinman asked, “Where have all the flowers gone? Where today do we find the generation of reporters and news editors who are fearless in their convictions? They were covering their story the way it should be covered, not the way it currently is by distant editors at headquarters.” What Steinman did thirty years ago in Vietnam could not be duplicated today. “There are too many cooks. The anchors are wrongfully too powerful. Management at all the networks is weak and panders to the lowest common denominator.
Americans seem to be afraid of knowing too much.“ Steinman sees the future as very bleak. Funding for news is declining. Magazine shows have wide audience appeal and huge budgets. ”Magazine shows cater to that lowest common denominator. Because of rating wars, stories are about murder, often repetitious, about people who have no effect on our lives and whose experiences are rarely interesting.“ He said if the audience of the panel wants to learn the news, they will have to read it in the print media.