This typewriter symbolically shows a lot of use to achieve ethical fitness. Image by Imad Alassiry on unsplash.
Evaluating Ethical Fitness, Red and Green Light Approaches
“To be a journalist, ethics must be a part of you — not a page in a book or framed parchment on a wall.” – Gerald M. Sass, The Freedom Forum
The above statement by Gerald M. Sass really sets the stage for the mission, goals and evidence journalism teachers seek to frame their strongest, most effective lessons. Story dilemmas created from actual situations, faced by real people who live the outcomes.
This ethical dilemma focuses on how journalism students respond to an unnamed faculty member who asks for a private conference with the editor. She tells the editor she has information about one of our principals changing a football player’s eligibility and disciplinary status. Startled, the editor asks questions and takes notes. She would handle the story. *Names, facts and identification have been altered.
Many in the school had heard the school suspended a “significant” number of athletes for alcohol use, except one rumored to be the leader. No one had shared proof of the player’s involvement.
That player was the team’s star quarterback, the school quarterback sought by 50 colleges and universities. He was sought because of his talent: undefeated in high school football and top ranked QB in the nation. A son of a board of education member.
If his rumored absence is true, he is lost for the rest of the season and from the state’s football playoffs. And he has been projected as Sports Illustrated Teen Football Player of the Year.
The faculty member shared basic details of who, what, why, when, where with the editor She told how she learned of this information and why she was surprised. She said this because it was selective, unfair treatment of athletes. She wanted something done. If others were punished for violation of school rules why should one player escape?
Ethical decision-making can sometimes be a long path that requires collaboration among the staff, the editorial board and the adviser. Image by Lloyd Dirks on Unsplash.
The editor brought the information back to the edit board for discussion. What does the edit board need to do?
- Initial discussion by student editorial board whether there is a reportable story here, and why?
- Determine if there should be additional sources?
- Find local, background, authoritative sources/comments?
- Questions still to be asked?
- Issues possible during information gathering? Responses? How to handle?
- Other possibilities than mentioned, so far?
- Sources, live and non-live?
- Board final decision of coverage and why?
Even if this was a simple discussion with suggested solution, it has its quirks and hidden possibilities. What might some be, and how would you handle them?
What three pieces of information must you have to publish. Three solid reasons to stop publication?
Next day’s assignment
Review your notes from the activity. Be ready, in the next class, to respond to and share with others in class points still unmade. Students should work with others on how to gather more information and from who.
Thoughts for consideration and discussion? What are key activity outcomes
- How we deal with these choices, especially in journalism where they are more common than legal decisions, will shape how we help our students think and act ethically by increasing their ethical fitness.
- As students learn to handle ethical and other choices, they will learn which decision-making approaches are most effective and how to discern the use of one instead of another.
Ethical fitness
Ethical fitness is not passive. To make strong decisions, students, advisers and teachers must use it with care, with consistency and with commitment to truth, accuracy, contextual reporting and intellectual growth.
When it is time to take action, solution thinking is ongoing, and individuals are prepared to act.
In situations where right ideas pull in opposite directions, participants cannot easily reconcile which is more suitable without significant experience in decision-making and strengthened critical thinking. Additionally, students must make decisions without fear of censorship or the threat of prior review.
It’s the best way to pair Journalistic Responsibility and Ethical Fitness.
General ‘right’ decision-making
Rushworth Kidder, founder of the Institute of Global Ethics, stressed the imperative of students learning to think for themselves to resolve ethical dilemmas. In “How Good People Make Tough Choices,” Kidder speaks of ethics as a learning practice to make “right versus right” choices.
The right-versus-wrong choices, he said, involve matters of law versus non-legal ideas. Important in deciding either kind of choice the freedom for students to make authentic decisions and to learn from them.
“Right-versus-right, then,” he wrote, “is at the heart of our toughest choices. Does that mean there are no right versus wrong choices? Is ‘wrong’ only someone else’s definition of what I think is right?”
No, he said, right-versus-wrong choices are different from right-versus-right ones. Right-versus-right teach us depth in shaping our deepest values.
Learning to explore and solve these dilemmas, he said, involve the really tough choices and are the times when crucial learning is attained.
And that’s where we want scholastic journalism to have its greatest impact, not only in information gathering, reporting and presentation, but in demonstrating life-long learning skills are evident and maturing.
“Core values are like moral reagents,” Kidder, speaking about ethics in the 21st century, said. “They sometimes clash together with plenty of energy and fervor. There are no conflicts as challenging, long-lasting or intractable as those that grow out of moral issues. Yet there are no more important issues to resolve than those on the ethical landscape.”
Journalism’s core values speak to the need for both an understanding and practice of legal and ethical issues – and how to handle them with courage, idealism and skepticism.
Some decisions may take more time
Considering long-term ethical decisions, the adviser, sources, administrators, school board members and politicians should not make final decisions of content. Their role in this process is to support student ethical fitness by enabling and empowering its growth.
This process is ethical fitness for students. The outcome is trust of student journalists and their work. The ultimate future is the spread of a democratic society where free expression is more than parchment under glass.
Journalism is an essential and demanding piece of any 21st century educational process.
Journalism ethics can play diverse roles in the decision-making process important as student media participants learn to:
- Build ethical fitness
- Verify information and sources
- Establish credibility of sources and information
- Reinforce personal values
- Seek truth, avoid deception
- Understand the importance of the forum for expression
- Learn independence through critical thinking and decision making
- Learn accountability and responsibility
- Accept responsibility
- Incorporate journalism’s social roles
“Ethics is what you do,” someone once said, “when no one is looking.”
Red Light v. Green Light. Which can best produces journalistic responsibility?
In a “Plea for Balance in Ethics,” The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark (Poynter refers to itself as a college for journalists) speaks in favor of green light ethics compared with the typical red light ethics.
Red light ethics typically focuses on reportorial misbehavior, emphasizes restraint and caution and suggested what reporters “ought not” do.
Green light ethics, Clark said, emphasizes duty, “how to” and how to achieve even the most difficult goal.
“Red light says: Let’s back off. Green light says: Let’s pin it down,” Clark wrote.
Green light means report, dig into the issues that need digging into, reporting them in a way that brings light but does so by demanding verification, accuracy, thoroughness and transparency.
Laws indicate what journalists must do while ethics indicates responses journalists should apply.
Future impact of preparation for ethical fitness
Commitment, creativity and confidence will help journalists determine what kind of reporting is just beyond the next hill. Image by Karsten Wurth on unsplash.
Media decisions have widespread effects on society. As media professionals, student journalists and journalists beyond students deal with ethical decisions chosen to best represent values and outcomes of that particular situation.
Journalistic responsibility, truly the cornerstone of democracy, starts at the scholastic media level. Citizens first learn of the legal and ethical implications of free media that made, until now at least, the United States, unique among nations, gives us our identity. Seeing journalistic decisions done professionally – in context, accurate in fact and implication, thorough – all serve the best interests of a democracy.
Working knowledge of ethics can be helpful in reporting sensitive or controversial issues. A staff working its way through a list of questions to make reasonable, ethical decisions can solve problems before they occur.
In the process, students can generate valuable comments, discussions and considerations, flexing their growth in ethical fitness. Ethical fitness requires ongoing experience with more than one ethical process. Some favor employing Red Light and Green Light guidelines in decision making.
Still others talk of following golden rules and Potter Boxes.
The prime purpose of journalism in a democracy is to provide citizens with true, accurate and contextual information gathered by critical thinking. If democracy’s citizens are to trust news and views as guides for intelligent and free self-governing, journalists must be ethical, active watchdogs.
Termed Obedience to the Unenforceable by some, ethical guidelines suggest roles and processes journalists should, but are not required, to practice.
No laws require this journalistic responsibility. No rules, especially in student media, should punish ethical mistakes because ethics is not a yes and no, clear decision.
Students who seek “the right answers” as the goal for ethical discussions and actions, are in the wrong discipline.
In a Plea for Balance in Ethics, The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark (Poynter refers to itself as a college for journalists) speaks in favor of green light ethics compared with the typical red light ethics.
Red light ethics typically focuses on reportorial misbehavior, emphasized restraint and caution and suggested what reporters “ought not” do.
Green light ethics, Clark said, emphasized duty, “how to” and how.
“Red light says: Let’s back off. Green light says: Let’s pin it down,” Clark wrote.
Green light means report, dig into the issues that need digging into, reporting them in a way that brings light but does so by demanding verification, accuracy, thoroughness and transparency.