All men should take a stand to curtail the shenanigans and misconduct by fellow males and at all-male occasions, writes Joe Hight.
“We as males should emphasize the importance of treating women and everyone civilly and with respect. We should pledge never to condone, participate in or hide blatant sexual misconduct. That’s what a man would do.”
Opioid crisis collateral damage is a lesson for journalists, writes Byard Duncan.
Many states hit hard by the opioid crisis also are seeing a spike in foster care placements. In most cases, the broad designation of “substance abuse” is all that gets logged by social workers.
“Sometimes the information we don’t have is even more important than what we know,” writes Duncan. Think about who else is affected, keep an open mind.
“After three hours, I was the only reporter left in the room. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
Hank Stephenson tells the story of an Arizona education beat reporter who discovers a blacklist of 1,400 school employees despite a teacher shortage. Patience and digging pay off.
Correcting Twitter mistakes with transparency: Steven Potter tells how Thomson Reuters and the Associated Press correct Twitter mistakes.
“We don’t believe that an incorrect tweet should just be deleted without any further comment,” says a Thomson Reuters source. “To us, that would be lack of accountability.”
Journalists typically avoid reporting vulgar language, but they were tested over how far to go in repeating President Trump’s comments about “shithole countires,” or words to that effect.
Michael M. Grynbaum surveyed media and found they differed, some explicit while others nuanced. In this case, the profane quote was not incidental to the story, it was the story.
The reporting appears to follow the direction of a cultural shift to coarse language.
Observers note that Trump’s remarks follow others that forced journalists to consider their standards, like “pussy.” They also note that Trump is not the only president to use offensive language. President George W. Bush used an expletive to describe a New York Times reporter.
A generation of so ago, words like “hell” or “damn” were not seen in daily newspapers, or heard on radio or television, much less the F-word. These appear fairly commonly now.
President Lyndon Johnson often used colorful language, sometimes off-color. In 1965 Johnson ordered U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic, and reportedly said, “Those people couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if they had instructions on the heel!” The disparaging remarks could have upset U.S.-Latin American relations if they had been widely reported.
President Gerald Ford fired his agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, in 1976 for highly offensive remarks quoted in Rolling Stone Magazine about why African-Americans don’t vote Republican.
In the ongoing discussion of what to report or not, retired journalism professor Robert Buckman offers this thought from from Arthur Brisbane, American journalist, editor and author: “A newspaper is a mirror reflecting the public, a mirror more or less defective, but still a mirror.”
Covering a time span of 84 years, iMediaEthics releases its annual report on the top media ethics issues.
Leading the list, writes Sydney Smith, is behavior in the workplace — the explosive story of top media figures who lost their jobs because of sexual misconduct.
In tenth place, the Associated Press releases a yearlong review into its working relationship with Nazis in Germany before World War Two.
International coverage of gender and power: Pete Vernon writes about BuzzFeed News’s global women’s rights and gender reporter.
Women spend much of their lives and energy preparing against being attacked by a stranger, she says, when in fact more than 95 percent of the time we are violated by people we know.
New poll, same results: Public trust in the media is at an all-time low.
Knight-Gallup survey shows Americans can’t name an objective news source.
Half of Americans say more news sources make it harder to be informed.
Concern over “fake news” is high.
Avoiding Twitter snafus: Sydney Smith says tweets caused media and staffers problems in 2017.
Among them: Old tweets, hoax or parody Twitter accounts, false tweets, tweets that cost jobs, flippant tweets and racist or anti-Semitic tweets.
Touchy subject — using the term “racist” while covering President Trump.
“Placing labels on speech by any public figure runs the risk of editorialization, and newsroom decision makers are wary of overstepping conventional norms,” writes Pete Vernon.
Bottom line: It’s time reporters do what columnists and opinion writers do, says Vernon.
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 