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By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

Fracking, the controversial process of forcing oil and natural gas from the Earth, was added to the tumultuous history of Southern Illinois, a land known as “Little Egypt.”

Journalists joined a long list of combatants going back more than a century when a publisher hung a sign in his newspaper’s window saying: “No anti-fracking info welcome. If you have a problem, see my lawyer.”

Fracking was coming fast to the rural county where the newspaper is located as a gas company bought up mineral rights in the area. The publisher was feeling pressure from businesses that stand to benefit financially from the gas production business.

Both sides debated

The publisher decided that his paper, and a sister paper, would not accept articles or material from groups that oppose fracking for environmental reasons. Prior to that decision, both newspapers published articles for several weeks on both sides of the debate about fracking.

Then came the sign in the window. It was too much for a freelance writer working for one of the newspapers, who contacted AdviceLine and took action of her own.

“I resigned from writing my regular human interest column in protest because I think this is a violation of journalism ethics; but I wanted to get the judgment of some other people who know about this,” the journalist told David Ozar, the AdviceLine advisor.

Stands by standards

No doubt, the freelance writer stands with the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, which urged journalists to seek truth and report it, and to recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs without favoring special interest groups.

The final article the freelancer wrote for her newspaper explained why she was resigning, and the publisher agreed to publish it. The freelancer also allowed AdviceLine to report details of the case for educational purposes.

This episode emerged in an area known for bloody feuds, gun battles with rivals and authorities, and a distinct southern flavor inherited from its earliest settlers who came from America’s hilly backcountry in the southeast. Although Illinois was an anti-slavery state, some Southern Illinoisians owned slaves and fought for the confederacy in the Civil War. They are culturally aligned with Western Kentucky, Southwestern Indiana and West Tennessee – where people all speak with similar Southern accents.

Towns boast of “old fashioned southern hospitality,” inviting visitors to “come experience our scenic beauty and enjoy the peace and tranquility of our small town.”

Little Egypt

The region got its name, “Little Egypt,” when early settlers compared the bountiful Mississippi River with the Nile and ancient Indian mounds in the area, like the Cahokia Mounds, to the Egyptian pyramids. The earliest inhabitants of Illinois arrived around 12,000 BC.

Once the wealthiest part of the state, and earliest to be settled, Illinois fell on hard times in a series of steps that transformed the region.

Vast tracts of forests covered southern Illinois, before they were clearcut to make way for farms. Forty-two percent of Illinois once was covered with forest. Today, about 10 percent is left.

The trees were seen as obstacles to be swept away. A 1818 booklet said: “To travel day after day, among trees of a hundred feet high, without a glimpse of the surrounding country, is oppressive to a degree…”

Forty acres of land sold for $5, fueling a land rush. In the early 1800s, 99 percent of the men in southern Illinois were farmers. Farming grew swiftly in the region and peaked arounder 1900, when dramatic crop failures led to severe economic hardship for farm families. 

Century of farming

“The general region has been farmed for 100 years and much of the farm soil is worn out,” said a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service report. “Many of the farms have been abandoned on account of worn out soil and erosion. A large percentage of the row crops are on soil which should not have been cleared of timber. It was suitable only for tree crops. Practically the whole region has been logged from one to ten times.” That also led to catastrophic floods.

Log houses from that time still are scattered along backcountry roads, although stone chimneys often are all that remain.

Coal mining next took its toll on the land in the region.

Goaded by conservationists, state and federal government officials moved to reclaim what became known as “the wastelands of Illinois.”

In 1931, the Illinois General Assembly passed an act inviting the federal government to establish a national forest in the state, in addition to one created in 1925.

A planted forest

This led to the 280,000-acre Shawnee National Forest in 1939, much of it exhausted farmland. It includes the Ozark and Shawnee Hills of southern Illinois and covers parts of nine Illinois counties. Illinois cities in or near the area are Carbondale, Marion and Cairo.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted pine trees to prevent erosion and help rebuild the soil, although the region includes hardwood trees and other plants and animals typical of the area. 

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the region was swept by more conflict as local, regional and national environment groups campaigned for the preservation and expansion of Shawnee National Forest and a wise use management plan.

The newspaper publisher who wanted no more information about fracking seemed to be carrying on a long tradition in southern Illinois of combative disagreement.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

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By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists.

Mental illness places a special responsibility on journalists to be sensitive to those involved in a story, which can become unusually complicated.

For example, the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was contacted in a case involving a missing 23-year-old woman last seen in a Lake Placid, New York, hotel. Her father posted information about her disappearance on his Facebook page.

A reporter for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, New York, interviewed the father, who said his daughter had been on anxiety medications and exhibited “bizarre behavior” during a Skype call with her. The missing woman was off her medications, her best friend told the father.

“We had some reservations about publishing all this information about her,” the newspaper’s managing editor told AdviceLine, “but we went ahead and published it anyway.”

Missing person stories pose a familiar dilemma for journalists. They sometimes are criticized for waiting too long to inform the public about a missing person. Worried families want immediate action from media. Experienced journalists know that the missing person in most cases is found safe and unharmed, although not always. Sometimes people are reported missing because of misunderstandings about where they were expected to be.

In the Adirondack Daily Enterprise case, the missing woman was found a few hours after the print edition hit the street.

“Subsequently, we received a phone call from the young woman’s best friend, in which she claimed she had communicated with her friend’s father in confidence, and would not have spoken so freely had she known that her statements would find their way into print,” said the managing editor.

The caller said that her friend, the formerly missing young woman, would be greatly upset to see such private information about herself made public, and that it might do her some harm. She asked the newspaper to redact the online story to remove references to her medical condition, and what the friend had told the woman’s father.

The managing editor asked the AdviceLine adviser if the newspaper should let the record stand, or if the story should be redacted.

In his report on the query, the AdviceLine adviser wrote: “We spoke at some length about the conflict between refusal to alter an already-published story and the ‘minimize harm’ issues raised by the case.

“The most troubling bit had to do with the communication of the woman’s best friend to her father being made public. But the whole question of her privacy, particularly regarding sensitive personal medical information, was an important one.

“She is a private individual, with a greater presumptive right to privacy and consideration of that privacy from journalists. Future employers doing an Internet search of her name, for example, might come up with the story in its unedited form, and it might raise unnecessary red flags for her.

“The issue is: does she have a particularly strong case for special consideration here? Would the public be harmed if the information about her medical condition were to be deleted? Did it really need to know that information at the time the story was first issued.”

The conversation highlighted the “minimize harm” issues of the case, and touched on the possibility that it also could serve as a public forum topic on how the media should cover cases involving people with mental illness.

The managing editor responded: “Oh, wow, this is even better advice than I expected. Thank you so much – I do in fact know a professor who would love to help moderate a discussion.” He also agreed to AdviceLine’s use of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise case “as a teaching example.”

The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics urges journalists to minimize harm in news reports.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

A church youth leader is accused of having a sexual relationship with a boy, a minor at the time of the alleged crime.

The youth is 18 years old by the time the case reaches trial. His mother is the first witness in the case, using her full name. In court, the boy is identified as John Doe.

The reporter covering the case calls the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists, asking if his California newspaper should print the mother’s name, which would identify the boy. They live in a small town.

The reporter is concerned about potential harm to the boy from being identified.

“I asked if the news organization has any policies or precedents that are relevant” to the case, the AdviceLine advisor said in his report on this case. The advisor also mentioned the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, which urges journalists to minimize harm while seeking truth.

The reporter responded that his newspaper had no policies or precedents that could help answer the question.

Looking for a second opinion, the AdviceLine ethicist contacted a member of the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists staff who is a professional journalist. Most of the questions AdviceLine gets are answered by a staff of ethicists who teach or taught ethics at universities. But the ethicists sometimes reach out to professional journalists to ask how the news media typically handle some ethics issues.

“I wanted to get a second opinion on this since the boy is now at the legal age of an adult, and his mother is allowing herself to be named,” said the ethicist. The journalist “agreed with my initial inclination to err on the side of caution without a compelling reason to identify him.”

The journalist pointed out that even though the complainant is 18 years old, he is still young and warrants some additional protection.

“That’s in keeping with what the SPJ code and ethics scholars would say about being sensitive to vulnerable parties, including young people,” said the ethicist in his report. When the ethicist called back, he learned that the reporter had discussed the case again with his editor and they had come to the same conclusion.

Here’s what the SPJ code of ethics says: “Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.”

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

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By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

George Orwell was right. Big Brother is watching, only now they are called algorithms, the list of instructions and rules that a computer needs to do a task.

In Orwell’s book, 1984, Big Brother included totalitarian forces that governed the thoughts and actions of people living in a dystopian science fiction society under mass surveillance and regimentation. In Orwell’s imagined future, Thought Police persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother is the dictatorial leader.

Now, 73 years after the English writer’s book was published in 1949, rigid and mindless computer algorithms do the job of governing human behavior. But now it’s not science fiction.

Orwell might be surprised to learn that Big Brother became senile.

Here’s an example: On April 6, I posted on Facebook a report explaining how an ethicist tells the difference between a genuine ethical dilemma and a difficult ethical choice. This is about ethics in journalism. I tried to boost that report, aiming to get a bigger audience through advertising.

The response from Meta for Business, the new corporate name for Facebook, said: “Your ad was rejected.” It went on to say the ad was rejected “because it doesn’t comply with our Cheating and Deceitful Practices policy.” Imagine that. Meta considers a report about ethics, the study of right or good conduct, as cheating or deceitful conduct.

Meta algorithms must have overheated a circuit or two to arrive at that conclusion. Or Facebook and its algorithms are unfamiliar with the term “ethics.” That might be the reason, a year ago, the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google faced congressional lawmakers who criticized them for algorithms that promote misinformation and online extremism, such as baseless election fraud claims and anti-vaccine content.

Back to the issue of ethics being cheating or deceitful conduct, Meta stated further: “Ads may not promote products or services that are designed to enable a user to engage in cheating or deceitful practices.” The rejection notice gave eight examples of cheating or deceitful practices. None of them mentioned ethics.

One of the prohibited examples: “Ads many not promote fake documents, such as counterfeit degrees, passports, immigration papers, or fake currency.” Another discouraged “Incentivizing or soliciting reviews in exchange for free products.”

None of them seemed to justify banning an ad about ethical practices intended to help journalists.

It appears Facebook and its algorithms need to be smarter about ethics, including the welfare of their users.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.