Tag Archives: ethics
I paid QWest $150 this week to prove someone fibbed about one of our reporters.
I was probably motivated by vanity (I hate to be wrong about a staffer), but we re-learned an important lesson: Feeling vindicated should refresh our commitment to independent buttressing of reports that bear on people’s character.
This started after I threw a [...]
Newspapers do a lousy job of labelling and explaining those odd stories that we call “Analysis.” I’ll stipulate that they do us a great deal of harm because readers know opinion when they see it and we’ve told them there’s only one section for Opinion. (see ethics code section on analysis)
But critics should confront the value [...]
In the “Simpsons” episode about the monorail coming to town- a dark parody of “The Music Man” - the chorus does one of those Broadway-stagey whisper chants: “Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! ” The outcome is, predictably, baaad.
Right now, the lemming chant in mainstream newsrooms is “Multimedia! Multimedia! Multimedia!” and I’m one of the busy rodents toting around a [...]
I’m unrighteously proud of the fact that we not only post our ethics code and standards of conduct online, but we also post enforcement examples in which we name names. After all, we hold public officials up to close scrutiny, so it makes sense that we who operate in the public interest should also disclose conflicts [...]
A code of ethics is just words on a page, until you act on it.
KPVI, Channel 6 walked the talk last week.
Anchor/News Director Brenda Baumgartner and a half-dozen staffers spent the night of Oct. 14th at Highland High School putting on a series of skits that are the background of a successful public workshop [...]
Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.
Forgive us, oh readers, for we have sinned. A couple members of the Post Register’s news staff have apparently broken the fundamental rules of journalism by blogging about politics, slapping candidate stickers on their cars and posting yard signs. Arrgh!
I threw a tantrum the last time this happened, publicly identifying the miscreant and [...]
A dead body lay on the steps of the church adjacent to Temple View Elementary School in Idaho Falls Friday morning. It was in plain view of kids who were walking to school and being dropped off behind the church. Principal Natalie Peters saw fit to send out a letter to parents alerting them to [...]
Few things are as stubborn as a fact, so I love the work of Clark Hoyt, the New York Times’ ombudsman.
He pulled together this list of the investigations of Sen. Barak Obama and Sen. John McCain published by America’s newspaper. If the Times (which by sheer number of reporters dominates coverage of the Presidential election) [...]
“…the photo in the Sunday paper of (Wayne Richards’) grieving widow was an invasion of privacy and very insensitive,” a reader wrote to me this morning. “It was very poor taste to display the raw emotions of the family like that. If you wanted to cover the funeral, surely you could have found a more sensitive photo to [...]
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