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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged ethics

1. July 15, 2011 10:51 AM

   Absence of Malice (1981)

   When bad journalism kills

   By Lauren Kirchner

   When I was a student in journalism school, in the beginning of my first semester, one of the professors of the required Ethics course assigned the 1981 Sydney Pollack film Absence of Malice. I was probably one of many incoming students who had cited All the President’s Men in my application essay, having been appropriately infected by its romantic portrayal...

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2. July 6, 2011 08:17 PM

   News of the World and U.S. Media Culture

   By Ryan Chittum

   I was asked an interesting question earlier today by a BBC producer who wanted to know about the American angle to the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. Could this type of thing happen in the American press? she asked. My immediate response was to say that it wouldn't. The American press is a different beast. We...

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3. April 19, 2011 10:40 AM

   WSJ Column Raises Ethics Issues

   By Felix Salmon

   Last week, Ira Stoll took issue with Dennis Berman's column on SharesPost and SecondMarket, on the grounds that Berman lied about his own identity: he pretended to be his late grandmother. Stoll likened Berman's behavior to Project Veritas's entrapment of NPR—something the WSJ itself said failed to "meet the ethical standards of elite journalistic institutions, including of course The Wall...

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4. November 19, 2012 02:40 PM

   A reporter is fired; colleagues quit in protest

   The Hudson Register-Star reporter refused to include information in his story

   By Peter Sterne

   On November 8, Tom Casey, a reporter at the Hudson Register-Star, a community paper in upstate New York, wrote an article about a city budget meeting. The next day, he was fired. The week after that, nearly half of the newsroom resigned. The story that Casey, 24, wrote contained a lot of interesting information—the proposed budget for 2013 ($11.9 million),...

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5. April 1, 2011 11:14 AM

   Another Cozy TV-Hospital Partnership

   Will the practice ever end?

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Once more, a large hospital system has climbed in bed with a friendly TV station to promote high-end services, using a TV health reporter as its pitchman. The St. Louis Post Dispatch tells us that Barnes-Jewish Hospital and KSDK health reporter Kay Quinn have teamed up for a ten-month project that will feature weekly news segments with Quinn answering questions...

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6. March 6, 2012 06:23 PM

   Bloomberg, Uncovered

   A news organization that won't report on itself

   By Ryan Chittum

   Gothamist flags this gem down deep in a Bloomberg News story on its new Billionaire's Index: Bloomberg News editorial policy is to not cover Bloomberg LP. As a result Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, won’t be considered for this ranking. Huh? Now, let’s see: Bloomberg does cover its founder Michael Bloomberg all the time, in...

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7. March 1, 2012 02:00 PM

   Heartland, Gleick, and Media Law

   Experts weigh in on leaks and deceptive tactics

   By Curtis Brainard

   When, if ever, are deceptive tactics legally or ethically permissible in journalism? An old debate over that question has raged anew for the last week, following a prominent scientist’s admission that he duped a libertarian think tank into giving him a cache of private documents. In mid-February, a handful of blogs began posting files—including a fundraising plan, a budget, an...

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8. September 13, 2012 03:00 PM

   It’s about the rider

   Sports reporters flex their scientific muscle in Armstrong doping coverage

   By Declan Fahy

   The decision to strip Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France titles after he refused to continue fighting claims he took performance-enhancing drugs led to in-depth reporting of the science of doping—but the expert coverage was written largely by sports, not science, reporters. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) charged Armstrong with doping and playing a central role in a...

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9. October 26, 2012 01:13 PM

   Journalism ethics in a digital age

   A Poynter conference this week provoked good discussion but presupposed an old definition of journalism

   By Kira Goldenberg

   On Tuesday, in the midst of wonky Poynter conference dialogue about how to reimagine journalism ethics for a digital age, Seattle Times columnist Monica Guzman told an anecdote that nailed the angst of a changing industry. Shortly after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropped its print edition, a bear got loose in Seattle, Guzman said. She and her P-I colleagues continually updated...

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10. July 25, 2011 11:11 AM

    No, Actually, News of the World Won’t Happen Here

    By Dean Starkman

    In a recent spasm of radio and TV interviews about #hackgate the last couple weeks, everyone wanted to know whether a News of the World scandal could happen here. I mean, we're just as bad, aren't we? After all, Howard Kurtz says: "British tabloid tactics are rampant in American journalism, too." The Wall Street Journal's special committee on editorial integrity...

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11. March 5, 2012 02:10 PM

    NPR Rethinks Its Reporting

    Will "he said/she said" go away for good?

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Last week, NPR released a new ethics document that the blogosphere announced would end the “he said/she said” reporting the country’s premier radio network has been known to use in its reports. Goodness, even Jay Rosen was ecstatic. “Bravo NPR,” said Rosen on his PressThink blog, noting that the new ethics handbook “introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of...

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12. October 27, 2011 02:11 PM

    POWs, Dead Dictators, and Journalistic Ethics

    Would any journalist have turned down the opportunity to interview Gilad Shalit?

    By Lawrence Pintak

    The young Iranian prisoner was no more than fourteen, still caked with a thick layer of dust from the battlefield. He was among thousands of old men and young boys being held in an Iraqi POW camp somewhere outside Basrah. It was September 1980, the early weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, and my CBS News crew and I had been...

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13. March 11, 2011 04:12 PM

    Risk Reporting 101

    What journalists should know about hazards and exposure

    By David Ropeik

    During my years as a daily TV journalist in Boston, I covered a seemingly endless string of risks: from the run-of the mill threats like car crashes and plane crashes and fires and crime, to artificial sweeteners (yes, I’m that old) and air bags and silicone breast implants and the “new” epidemic of child abductions, to a depressingly rich litany...

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14. April 6, 2012 04:02 PM

    The Ethics of Social News Apps

    By Ryan Chittum

    I don't know about you but my Facebook feed has gotten creepy and cringeworthy these days, and it's thanks to news organizations. Here's a list of stories that have popped in my news feed in the last few days with my friends' names and pictures attached and a message telling me they have read it: — Snooki Poses in a...

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15. March 11, 2011 05:15 PM

    UPDATED: Beck’s Blaze Comes To NPR’s Defense (Sort Of)

    By Joel Meares

    I spoke on a media roundtable today on a San Francisco public radio station about the NPR/Schiller(s) controversy. Before we began discussing that story, each of the guests on the program Your Say—myself, Slate's Salon's Justin Elliott, and NPR ombudswoman Alicia Shepard—was asked to talk about a good piece of reporting they had happened upon this week. Elliott and I...

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16. August 17, 2012 04:10 PM

    UPI shirks responsibility

    Raeburn takes wire to task for cribbing from Science News

    By Curtis Brainard

    The plagiarism, or problematic paraphrasing, parade continued on Thursday as several reporters from Science News complained on Facebook that the wire service UPI had cribbed their stories. Reporting on the charges, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s Paul Raeburn laid out three examples of passages from Science News articles that UPI reporters loosely rewrote and included in their own pieces. Raeburn...

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17. March 20, 2012 02:12 PM

    When Journalists Take Money From Wall Street

    By Felix Salmon

    Many thanks to Paul Starobin for getting to the bottom of the question of journalists being paid by Wall Street to give speeches. This is one of those issues, a bit like the exact meaning of “off the record”, where everybody thinks they know what the standard is, but everybody also thinks it’s different. It turns out there are lots...

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