A revised ethics guide for public radio asks journalists to "remain reportorial" instead of spouting opinions when they're off the air, and it urges that they apply the same standards to call-in shows and websites as they do to newscasts.
CPB, which underwrote the project, will release the concise guide, Independence
and Integrity II, on its website this week. The web address is www.cpb.org/radio/ethicsguide.
The authors are Alan G. Stavitsky, associate dean of the University of Oregon
School of Journalism and Communication, who wrote the original pubradio ethics
guide in 1995, and NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin.
Though the pair consulted widely — discussing issues with pubradio and other journalists at the Poynter Institute last spring and then in workshops at three stations — Dvorkin says they didn't end up with ambivalence about what they wrote.
One reason is that the authors avoided hairsplitting in favor of brevity. The guide runs just 26 pages, compared to 104 for the original Independence and Integrity and hundreds of pages for the BBC's online guidelines.
Stavitsky and Dvorkin want to give busy journalists a quick reference that raises basic questions and gets them thinking.
"We were asked by some managers how long they should suspend a staffer who breaks rules," Dvorkin said, but the authors declined to address such details, leaving newsroom managers to wrestle with them.
Since NPR published the original ethics guide in 1995, says Dvorkin, the pubradio world has changed. Listeners question journalists' motives more frequently than when he became NPR's ombudsman in 2000. "There's a level of suspicion in general that might not have existed five years ago," he said.
The standards consequently favor openness, suggesting that reporters state
when a piece of information can't be confirmed or when the source has a vested
interest.
The guide will be useful not only to journalists and their bosses, but also
to listeners who have questions about journalists' accountability, NPR President
Kevin Klose predicted in an intro to the guide.
Frontiers for journalistic ethics
Stavitsky and Dvorkin urge application of pubradio standards beyond news programs — advising call-in hosts to challenge callers' questionable assertions and correct them if necessary, and music hosts to maintain news standards of fairness, accuracy and balance when they touch on current events.
Special issues arise when pubradio applies those standards to websites, according to the guide. For instance, a web editor should check out a site before linking to it and should make it clear that another organization is responsible for the linked site. But the guide adds a qualifier borrowed from the policy of WGBH, Boston: "Great latitude should be given personal or artistic expression [on linked sites] so long as the postings are not inaccurate or defamatory."
It may be harder on the Web than on radio to make clear separations between clearly underwriting credits and editorial content, the guide observes. "In such matters, the guiding principle should be to avoid online presentation that may lead readers to infer any relationships between editorial and fundraising content, and clearly label any sponsorship or underwriting."
Run your own gauntlet
On some of pubradio's perennial issues, the guide offers questions that journalists can ask themselves:
A sampling of one-liners excerpted from the guide:
In a concluding section, media ethicist Tom Bivins of the University of Oregon puts broadcasters on notice that their deliberations on ethical questions won't necessarily be the last word on an issue.
"We may be called upon to justify our decisions to others," Bivins
writes. "We must be prepared to do so with the expectation that we will
never satisfy everyone, but with the determination to try."
Web page posted Jan. 19, 2004, corrected Jan. 20, 2004
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