Accountability in the Professions: Accountability in Journalism

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 19(3&4), 166–190 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Accountability in the Professions: Accountability in Journalism Lisa H. Newton Fairfield University Louis Hodges Washington and Lee University Susan Keith Rutgers University o Accountability is viewed as a civilizing element in society, with professional accountability formalized in most cases as duties dating to the Greeks and Socrates; journalists must find their own way, without formal professional or government regulation or licensing. Three scholars look at the process in a line from the formal professional discipline to suggesting problems the journalism fraternity faces without regulation to suggesting serious internal ethics conferences as 1 solution to the problem. Professional Accountability: An Introduction Lisa Newton Accountability means no more than answerability. I answer to my superiors; whatever I do, they have a right to ask, “What are you doing (and why),” and I have a duty to give an answer, or in older language, an account. I’m told there’s a police record from the 18th century, somewhere in New England, of one of my ancestors, arrested for, and I quote, “failure to give an account.” Meaning what? That the constable of the watch asked him, “Why are you out so late?” and he was unwilling (or, given the dipsomaniac history of my family, unable) to give an answer that satisfied the constable of the watch. Ordinary humans, citizens, can be “called to account,” asked to explain themselves; of the Lord, however, it is said that “none can stay his hand, or ask, ‘what dost thou?’” The Lord, being powerful, is not accountable to anyone. Accountability, then, is an aspect of hierarchy. Those with the power can demand that those over whom the power is held give an account, explain, or justify themselves and their acts—in order, and this seems to be implicit in the notion, that the superior may direct the accountable one to proceed Newton, Hodges, Keith 167 with, modify, or cease action, which the superior has the right to demand, and having demanded, the inferior has the duty to obey. Also implicit is the threat, that if the account is insufficient, the accountable one will suffer consequences. Note that the definition is neutral on direction. The servant, or the appointed official, is responsible up, to the master or the one who appointed him. The elected official is responsible down, to the voters who elected him. Professionals are answerable every which way, and that is the heart of the problem of professional accountability and simultaneously half the secret of professional freedom. To understand the forms and limits of professional accountability, in particular the accountability of journalists, we will need a quick conceptual derivation of the term. We may begin by putting accountability in one of its traditional conceptual frameworks, that of its cognate responsibility. The notion of responsibility dates back to Plato, who discusses it (in its usual translation, “cause,”) in the Phaedo. What causes, what is responsible for, Socrates’ presence in jail, when, the previous dialogue (Crito) has informed us, he could very well have escaped to the Phaeacians and lived comfortably for the rest of his life? That responsibility is very much in dispute (Plato, trans. 1993). According to Anaxagoras, Socrates tells us, his sitting there in jail has everything to do with the way his muscles and bones are arrayed and in general the necessities of his body, also (implied) the physical acts that brought that body into that location. According to Socrates, his sitting there has to do with the kind of person he is, and with the fact that he has decided, all things considered, that it is better to remain there than to depart for Phaeacia. Socrates’ sitting in jail … has to do with the kind of person he is. What were the Greeks, Anaxagoras and Socrates in this case, quarreling about? About nothing less than the ordering of the universe and about what parts were independent and primary, and what parts were dependent, secondary, and accountable (as it were) to the first. In this very early investigation of causality, they were not far from the original Hesiodic accounts of the world, in which the deliberate actions of the gods (in the context of free choices and social hierarchies) were not distinguished from the ordinary agencies of natural forces. Current usage recognizes at least six notions of “responsibility,” the multiplication coming from several fragmentations of meaning. First, we have separated out physical causation from human agency, nonexclu- 168 Accountability in the Professions sively—so when the sprinkler system goes off in the middle of the night on the third floor of the office building, we can agree that the presence of cleaning fluid in the heat sensor triggered the sprinkler control without excluding human agency. If we call the fluid’s role “causal responsibility,” we can then go down the line of human responsibility: Adam is the hapless rookie on the night cleaning squad who sprayed the cleaner into the heat sensor (he did it), Bob was the supervisor for the third floor (it was his job to make sure that nothing went wrong with the cleaning on the third floor), Bob was accountable to Clarence, the building manager who had hired Bob and Adam and was supervisor of the whole task. Clarence will probably be held culpable or to blame for the mishap, because it happened on his watch, but he might well blame Donald, who installed the heat sensors and failed to warn about their vulnerabilities, thereby failing to exercise due care and acting negligently. Or so, at least, Empire Properties, the owners of the building, will claim, when the renters of office space on the third floor sue them, or attempt to hold them liable, for the damage their offices have suffered as a result of the deluge. Accountability in the Professions The professional’s responsibilities, and therefore the dimensions of the professional’s accountability, reconstellate that hierarchy. The professional has some skill, knowledge, and ability above that of the ordinary person, or else what would he or she have to profess? The knowledge a professional has is sometimes called “esoteric,” although I can think of professions where that term is bizarre; whether acquired from experience or extended study, the knowledge is there and is valuable. That knowledge is the other half of professional freedom, or professional autonomy—if the layman cannot understand what the professional is doing, he cannot exercise oversight over the professional. The professional ordinarily has a clientele, a category of persons who directly or indirectly profit from that expertise, and who directly or indirectly pay the professional for making it available. On both counts—to beneficiaries, as judges of the extent of the benefit, and to paying customers, in return for their gold—the professional is accountable to the clients. There was a time when doctors and lawyers at least assumed they were accountable to no one else. Duty to clients rarely exhausts the dimensions of professional accountability today, but it remains. Before the beneficiaries of professional practice, there are the certifiers— the authorities who certify the professional, issue the license, attest to the competence, and sign the papers for hiring. That judgment of competence provides two more demands for accountability. First, in issuing a license (say, to practice medicine) the state implies the right to take it back for cause; the physician is therefore accountable to the state, with the periodic Newton, Hodges, Keith 169 obligation to show that the conditions that had to be met for the license still obtain and that the conditions for revoking it do not. Second, for an employed professional, like an engineer or teacher, the hirer, or employer, may be the only funnel through which the clients’ fees get to him; answerability is partly or completely transferred, then, from the clients to the employer. How completely or partly? If my employer tells me to treat my students in some way that is disadvantageous to them, does my duty lie to them or to the employer? When the HMO will not pay for a treatment the physician thinks necessary, and warns the physician not to mention it to the patient, the physician is in a bind that his fathers in his profession could never have dreamed. Does my duty lie to students or to employer? What happens when my employer and my clients decide to take bit in teeth and arrange matters for their own advantage, society be damned? My university, for instance, seems to be headed that way now. It wants to reduce the course load for the students (hurrah! say the students), also reduce the teaching load for the teachers (yes!), allowing it to fire lots of adjuncts while charging the same tuition. Everyone wins! Except the society that depends on us to produce students who know certain things. Probably, given the experience of the field, the society, not to mention The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (the accrediting agency for colleges and universities in New England) and its cognates, will be not unhappy with the developments, and life will continue as usual. However, what if we keep going? Suppose, the change having been implemented, the university secretly institutes a sort of Advanced Placement program where if students will but pay the tuition for a semester’s course and agree to buy the book, the student will be assigned a B– for the course, no further effort involved? (I actually had courses like that in graduate school, but let’s not go there.) Professors would be paid a half-overload fee for the course, without having to teach it; they could sign off for up to three of these courses a semester. What a great deal! Everyone’s interests are furthered. Except that, of course, the students don’t really know what we say they know, and eventually, we think, that’s going to hurt the society. Right now, it’s dishonest. Faced with such schemes, what should the professional do? He or she should surely do something: What that expertise confers, if nothing else, is the ability to see when corners are being cut and things are going badly wrong and that people are being cheated, no matter how willingly. Accountability in the Professions 170 Professionals have a duty to society at large, to the greater good for the greater number, whether or not their clients and their employers agree. This sort of situation spawned the somewhat odd notion of the whistle-blower. The whistle-blower is a subordinate, that is, someone who does not have the power to change the situation all by himself, or that’s what he’d do instead of blowing the whistle; on the other hand, he seems to have the authority in some sense to determine that something is going badly wrong and that it is his responsibility to make it stop. That combination seems to apply especially to the employed professional. Professionals have a duty to society at large … whether … clients and employers agree. However, for some professionals, the picture is even more complicated. If I find myself teaching at a traditional Christian college that suddenly decides it needs to honor its inheritance in the new right-wing Christian atmosphere, and my employer and my students and the law of the state all insist that they want, really want, me to teach creationism, and I know it is not true, what is my duty now? Or if my patient wants to believe that his condition does not need surgery, and the HMO that now employs me does not want to pay for it, and the state is trying to cut medical costs, but I know that tumor has to come out soon or it will become inoperable and the patient will die from it, what do I do? There is what Hippocrates called (with respect to medicine) “the Art,” and what scholars call “the Truth,” that has claims beyond what any human might assert. Even if all humans on the planet decide that 2 + 2 = 5, it is some professional’s responsibility to assert that it is not. We are accountable to the truth, the right, and the just, even when humanity has abandoned them. Responsibility, Freedom, and Trust To whom is the professional responsible? He or she is responsible to clients, to employers, to the state (current government), to society at large beyond the state, to the Art or to Truth (and occasionally to the professional association or code that is formed to uphold it), and occasionally, when culpable of malpractice, to some reinvention of the client or class of clients through the law of torts. On the one hand, no wonder the professional is frazzled. On the other, look how free. First, in his or her responsibility to the Truth, no layman may judge. The professional has the knowledge, and only the professional can say how it should be used. Second, because the Newton, Hodges, Keith 171 demands of all these masters cannot be met at once, and they stand against each other with the professional in the middle, no demand is sovereign. The freedom arises in the necessity of choosing, according to conscience, which of several conflicting demands will apply in any given situation. “Multiply your masters and be free.” How shall the professional be held accountable to all those masters? The traditional answer is simplicity itself: The professional shall hold himself responsible; that is part of his professional duty; and you may trust him to fulfill his duty because he is a trustworthy person. Trustworthiness has always been the defining virtue of the professional, for obvious reasons. The doctor has access to your dirtiest physical secrets, your impotence, your gonorrhea, your herpes infection. Your lawyer knows all your most questionable financial dealings; the teacher knows your weaknesses; the priest hears your confession. The usefulness of these professions to you would come to an abrupt end if you had the slightest suspicion that any of those secrets might be noised abroad, used for personal profit, or indeed given any use at all save for benefitting you. The entire weight of the beneficial professional–client relationship rests on your trust that this will not happen. The claim of professionalism, and the assurance of trustworthiness, goes on to include, beyond those previously mentioned, law enforcement officers (who are trusted with firearms), nurses, physical therapists, and psychologists. Until recently, that list included accountants, who audit the books of major corporations; more on that in the following. Trustworthiness extends as far as the definition of “professional”: We trust physicians, we don’t trust used car salesmen; we trust accountants, we don’t trust telemarketers; and so forth. Note that our trust is as essential to the success of the professions as is the professional’s trustworthiness; if for any reason good or bad, I start distrusting my doctor and my lawyer, I essentially render them useless to me. For professions to serve us, trust must be institutionalized. “Trustworthiness” (with its correlate “trust”) is an essential but limited and individualistic answer to the question, How shall we know that our professionals are doing their job? The integrity of the individual human being is a bulwark against dishonesty and betrayal, and we have counted on it for centuries. These last decades have reminded us that in vulnerable human beings, integrity can be dissolved in a flash under the influence of a powerful and corrupt culture. Then the trustworthiness breaks down; the greedy doctor starts prescribing a multitude of pills from his own pharmacy; the greedy accountant starts signing off on dubious deals to enrich himself; trustworthiness disappears in a matter of a few years, and trust is wiped away in a minute. What do we do when that trust is breached (which it always will be, professionals being human)? Beyond the trust there is the institutionalized 172 Accountability in the Professions distrust, the mechanisms that back up our assumption that sooner or later, trust will be betrayed. It consists in a network of overseers, and we rely on that network as our backup. This network is the second answer to the previous question. The “impaired physician,” as he is called in our law; that is the physician who is drunk, insane, drug-addicted, or otherwise unable to practice, is liable to apprehension by state committees that remove him from practice. Physicians are taught, from medical school on, that they have a duty to report impaired physicians to the state committees for everyone’s good—theirs, the physicians’, and the public’s. There are similar mechanisms for reporting, removing from practice, punishing, and rehabilitating impaired psychotherapists, lawyers, and engineers. Accountants do not have the category of “impaired”: They are either honest or dishonest, and if dishonest, the oversight boards (Financial Accounting Standards Board and the like) must overrule their judgments. There is a whole safety net for the professions, a system of watchers to make sure that the licenses the state has issued are still worthy. Otherwise they will be revoked. Beyond the trust there is the institutionalized distrust … [to] back up our assumption that … trust will be betrayed. How do these systems to insure integrity work? The first, and most amazing, observation is that the individualistic mechanisms work extremely well. Physicians, over the vast majority of the field, do not hurt or neglect their patients, no matter what. Lawyers are faithful to their clients. Engineers, despite the conflicts, hold paramount the safety of the public. In addition, for 60 years and more, the integrity of the auditors at Arthur Andersen and the other auditing firms was sufficient to guarantee the honesty of the reports of American business to the American people. How do the secondary mechanisms work—the institutionalizations of distrust? Not well at all. The state boards assigned to watch over physicians and lawyers are overworked, underfunded, and not very effective. When was the last time a lawyer was disbarred for unprofessional conduct? Engineers do not do much better, nor do the appointed boards to oversee the auditors seem to be able to do their jobs. In the end, the most effective secondary mechanism for enforcing integrity in the professions, once individual virtue has failed, is the law of torts. The malpractice suit, for law or medicine, the civil suits against the accounting firms after the Enron-series debacles, are the only really effective enforcement mechanism we seem to have. Newton, Hodges, Keith 173 Is there some way, some better way than the enrichment of greedy lawyers through a civil suit, to keep our professions honest? Is there some better way to institutionalize our right to distrust, our right to demand an account, our right to enforce professional accountability? Accountability in Journalism Louis Hodges How should we define Accountability? Accountability means answerability, but that observation is not helpful. One who gives an accounting of his performance to anyone to whom it is owed seeks to explain what he did and why, by offering justification for his choices between what to do and what to avoid doing. To make her point, Lisa went back to Plato; I will go back to my wife, Helen. She often calls on me to give an account of myself: “You did not mow the grass today; why?” She expects me not only to explain why I chose not to cut the grass but to give reasons that justify my choice, to reveal the circumstances under which any conscientious and caring husband would have rightly chosen not to run the mower. My colleague, Lisa Newton, equates accountability with responsibility. Although in some sense it is appropriate, I think it is helpful to assign the two words to distinctly different things. Each term represents a sensible and convenient label for society to attach to two distinct societal needs. The first need, in a world where specialization of labor is acute and essential, is to determine how to assign different areas of work and service to individuals and groups. Who will be primarily in charge of what? Whom should we designate to look after health care, for instance? To whom should we assign the running of legal systems? Who ought to be responsible for matters spiritual? Who should see to the accumulation and dissemination of information and opinion people need? In short, to whom are we going to assign the several responsibilities? To what will we expect journalists to respond ably? The second societal need is to determine how we can and should monitor the performance of those to whom we assign responsibilities. That is what has led us to design a wide variety of mechanisms of accountability. Accountability is the word that best fits efforts to require citizens to perform their assigned responsibilities well. Responsibility is the word that best fits our assignment of distinct areas of social concern to individuals and groups. In journalism, then, I have found it useful to distinguish the two terms. The issue of responsibility is: To what social needs should we expect journalists to respond ably? The issue of accountability is: How might society call on journalists to explain and justify the ways they perform the responsibilities given them? Responsibility has to do with defining proper conduct, accountability with compelling it. 174 Accountability in the Professions Responsibility has to do with defining proper conduct, accountability with compelling it. The distinction is clearly reflected in our common language. Notice the prepositions: we talk about being responsible for but accountable to. For example, we may be responsible for the accuracy of the information we deliver, for informing the reader about government, for not invading privacy or inflicting further hurt on victims of tragedy. However, we are accountable to a government, an editor, a court, or a reader. The question of responsibility is logically prior to the question of accountability. We can decide what we think the press should be responsible for without looking for ways to compel press performance. We cannot, however, reasonably seek to coerce responsible press performance until we have first defined responsible performance. That is important, because we cannot reasonably demand that the press give an account of itself or improve its performance until we determine what the press is responsible for. Whatever labels we put on these two social needs—assignment of duties on the one hand and monitoring performance on the other—it is essential that we be clear about what the two different issues are. Here’s why: I think that it was confusion of responsibility with accountability that led to the press’s negative, knee-jerk reaction to the so-called Social Responsibility theory of the press promoted by the Hutchins Commission in 1947. The Commission addressed press responsibility, but the working press read accountability. Journalists and news organizations did not want to be accountable to a bunch of intellectuals on the Commission who would judge their performance. The confusion may also be one of the underlying reasons the National News Council folded. How Is Journalism Unlike Other Professions in Accountability? Having addressed the basic matter of definition of terms, we can now turn to the issue of how the issue of accountability in journalism differs from that of other professions. (At this juncture I will hold in abeyance the question of whether journalism can meaningfully be considered a profession.) I shall mention only three differences, though I am sure there are more. Role of the law. In most professional occupations—including law, medicine, accounting, engineering, etc.—the ultimate instrument of pro- Newton, Hodges, Keith 175 fessional regulation and accountability is a combination of professional societies and government agencies. That is not the case, however, in at least two professions: journalism and the clergy. The First Amendment prohibits government interference with the free press and with religion. Governments cannot impose prepublication standards and controls on the press. The First Amendment has the effect of establishing that journalism is more than mere business. Governments, however, have considerable power to call the press to account after publication. The chief instruments are the torts of libel and privacy. (We may want to look further into this relationship.) Lisa noted previously, rightly I think, that tort law is our most effective secondary mechanism. Professional associations. Lawyers have two basic kinds of professional associations. One is the official state Bars that establish rules to govern lawyer conduct and procedures for implementing them through official committees. These are quasi-governmental institutions, backed by the courts. The other consists of regional, state, and national voluntary associations such as the American Bar Association (ABA). Their role is largely educational and inspirational for their members. Journalism has none of the quasi-governmental associations, and our voluntary or unofficial ones have never enjoyed the prestige and influence of the American Medical Association or of the ABA. Nevertheless, the influence of such organizations as the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Associated Press Managing Editors, Radio-Television News Directors Association, Society of Professional Journalists, and others has been helpful in persuading journalists to practice professionally. Perhaps we can look to law and medicine (and even other professions) to discover ways in which unofficial, nongovernmental associations might be more useful in journalistic accountability. Professional schools. All professions I know of, except journalism, rely heavily upon professional schools not only for specialized knowledge but also for the development of professionalism. The practice of medicine, for example, in the 19th century was a hodgepodge of fakery and quackery coupled with some minimal understanding of the human body. Formal education in medicine was not a requirement in a very unstructured profession. Around the turn of the century, though, medicine became thoroughly university based. It thereby benefitted from research and a growing sense of professionalism. Ties between the university and the clinic remain close. Journalism has not gone that route, and perhaps it could not and should not. Should it? 176 Accountability in the Professions To Whom Should Journalists Be Accountable? The formal answer is this: Basic morality dictates that individuals (or organizations) are accountable to all those whose lives and well-being are significantly affected by the professional’s conduct. In our professional lives we owe an accounting to those stakeholders for whom our professional performance has significance. Individuals (or organizations) are accountable to all those whose lives and well being are significantly affected by the professionals’ conduct. The list for journalists includes at least the following: oneself, society at large, members of the audience, subjects, sources, and maybe employers and the profession of journalism. There seems to be little dispute about obligations to the audience, subjects, and sources. We do have dispute about accountability to employers, the profession, and oneself. Look at employers first. Employers. Is the obligation to employers truly a moral one, or is it merely a contracted condition of employment? Klaidman and Beauchamp (1987) wrote: Although business executives of news organizations should be as concerned about profits as those who sell cars or soap, journalists should be indifferent to whether their daily work—reporting and editing—directly enhances profitability or otherwise affects an employer’s interests. Otherwise journalists would regularly entangle themselves in conflicts of interest. (p. 217) At first I found that assertion astonishing and off the wall. I cannot dismiss it, however. I think there are many parallels between a professional educator—say a philosopher—and a professional journalist. If they are to be in any meaningful way autonomous, and if they are to be distinguished from mere employees (such as hardware store clerks), their obligations surely must be primarily to the clients they serve, not primarily to the institutions in which they work. The professional journalist knows what her audience needs, and she knows how to meet those needs. The news organization simply employs her to make use of that knowledge. My own professional circumstance in the academy may be illustrative: I have never thought that I work for Washington and Lee. I work for my stu- Newton, Hodges, Keith 177 dents toward their enrichment. I work at Washington and Lee, an organization that also exists for its students. That dictates that my professional obligation to my clients (students) is to provide them the finest opportunity I can for their intellectual development. With Washington and Lee I have only a contractual obligation to obey certain organizational rules and to be a good citizen. I am not accountable to the University for the content of my courses in the ethics of journalism; that is my area of professional autonomy. I dare say that is what mainly distinguishes a professional occupation from a nonprofessional one. So too, the journalist’s primary duty … is to her audience, not to her employer. So too, the journalist’s primary duty qua journalist is to her audience, not to her employer. She must be accountable first and foremost to her clientele. The profession. Misconduct by one journalist often has the effect of damaging the reputation of the entire profession. For that reason journalists ought to hold each other accountable. The Hutchins Commission declared that “If the press is to be accountable—and it must if it is to remain free—its members must discipline one another by the only means they have available, namely, public criticism” (Leigh, 1947, p. 94). It is worth noting that only in recent years have we seen much of that. David Shaw at the Los Angeles Times and Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post are two excellent examples of professional journalists calling others to give an accounting. Subjects and sources. Subjects of stories are also people to whom journalists owe an account. Their lives are commonly more deeply affected by journalism than is any other constituency. That seems to make a sufficient case for accountability to them. Sources too can be severely harmed (or significantly helped) by journalistic practice. Accountability When It Cannot Be Compelled Because of the basic moral principle that we owe an accounting to those whom we affect, the party who affects another may well owe an accounting to the one affected even in circumstances where the affected party lacks power to compel one. It is a common occurrence in our profession that journalists can harm an audience, a subject, or a source. People in these categories often have no effective means of demanding an account of their performance, nor of seeking redress. Rape victims, for example, who are 178 Accountability in the Professions identified by the media sometimes suffer harm from their exposure, but they are often powerless to command either an accounting or reparations. The case of The Seattle Times and U.S. Senator Brock Adams is an example. In 1992, just days before election day, The Times published accusations of sexual misconduct against Adams by eight anonymous women. Citing his inability to defend himself against unnamed accusers, Adams withdrew from the race, and he had no effective recourse against the paper. Under other circumstances party A can be compelled to give account of itself if party B finds himself harmed, even if party A does not acknowledge a moral duty to account for its behavior. Libel suits often accomplish this accounting. I suggest, then, that the inability of the party who is harmed to demand an account does not diminish the affirmative moral duty of the harmer to provide one. That principle should become part of the journalistic moral canon. The existence of accountability systems opens the possibility of sanctions, which in turn encourages responsible conduct. The greater the certainty of being exposed for misconduct, the greater the likelihood of careful moral choice. What Should Journalists Be Held Accountable For? What should journalists be held accountable for? Should it be only for performance as journalists? Should a journalist whose professional practice is beyond reproach be sanctioned by her news organization for personal misconduct off the job? Generally, my answer is no. Consider the recent case of Bob Greene at The Chicago Tribune. He was almost universally respected as an important and extraordinarily talented journalist. But he was accused of having had an affair with a teenage girl— who by the way was of the age of legal consent, but whom Greene first met during a journalistic interview (Pickett, 2002). After he was fired, some readers called to complain that Greene had betrayed their trust (Wycliff, 2002). But the predominant sentiment among those who called, so the Tribune reported, was in Greene’s favor. The Tribune’s concern shows in Editor Ann Marie Lipinski’s statement that “journalists have a special obligation to avoid personal conflicts that undermine their professional standing and their trust with readers, sources, or news subjects” (Kirk & Davey, 2002). She is probably justified in that claim, because credibility is somehow at stake. But what does a journalist’s sexual misconduct have to do with his competence to gather important information or opinion and pass it on to his audience? In the Greene case, no one has made that connection to my satisfaction. Newton, Hodges, Keith 179 The basic issue is actually quite an old one. An early manifestation appears in the Donatist controversy in 4th-century Christianity. The Donatists held that the efficacy of the sacraments was abolished if the purity of priests administering them was compromised. Under Constantine in 314 AD, however, the Church insisted that the vitality and efficacy of the sacraments lay in the sacraments themselves and not in the priests who performed them. … the personal purity [of the journalist] has no effect on the quality of her journalism. Similarly, in the case of journalists, the personal purity of the journalist has no effect on the quality of her journalism. Good journalism must be judged by the moral standards of accuracy, importance, clarity, and so forth. It is preposterous to assert that excellent journalism can be produced only by journalists of noble character and moral purity. How many pure journalists can we name? A 64-year-old female reader of the Tribune put it nicely when she wondered how the paper could fire Bob Greene: “How could this happen?” she wrote. “[Is] this paper … run by a bunch of virgins or something?” (Wycliff, 2002). Greene’s misconduct (which he admitted) with the teenager could have no significant effect on the quality of his journalism. It could, however, affect his popularity with the audience, which in turn would likely affect the Tribune’s bottom line. In this case, it appears that more readers sided with Greene than with the editors who fired him. That fact, though, does not nullify the point that editors have every right to include nonjournalistic business decisions in matters of employment. Private lives of journalists—such as in the Greene case—must be distinguished, however, from other kinds of conduct while not at work. We do, and should, hold them accountable for conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest (e.g., accepting gifts from sources or subjects, holding public office, finding secondary employment with subjects) do affect the quality, accuracy, and framing of stories. That is to say, they do affect the quality of one’s journalistic performance. A Formal Standard What, then, should the formal standard be? For purposes of our further examination of this topic, I suggest the following: “Journalists should be held accountable for their private lives only under circumstances in which their private behavior directly and seriously harms their professional performance.” I reject out of hand Bob Steele’s (2002) asser- 180 Accountability in the Professions tion that “It’s a fallacy to believe that we can separate our personal and professional lives” (p. 1). I see no moral basis for journalists’ employers to think they have a right to control most of the private affairs of their employees. Private life includes matters such as sex and marriage relations, religious belief and affiliation, friendships, and political philosophy or affiliation. If we come to expect reporters to be as pure as the driven snow, we will simply have no reporters. “Journalists should be held accountable for their private lives only under circumstances in which their private behavior directly and seriously harms their professional performance.” Mechanisms of Accountability Susan Keith Lou Hodges asserts that journalists should be held accountable for their performance as journalists (and only as journalists), and notes that accountability systems hold the prospect of sanctions, which encourage responsible conduct. That raises this question: Which accountability mechanisms most effectively encourage responsible conduct? Although accountability mechanisms may be virtually invisible to journalism consumers, Bertrand (2000) listed more than two dozen. He, like others, divided accountability mechanisms into categories—internal, external, and cooperative—based on how they are used and by whom. Internal accountability mechanisms, used chiefly by journalists, are designed, in theory, to affect the practice of journalism from within. External mechanisms are generally employed by nonjournalists and seek to affect the practice of journalism from without. Cooperative accountability mechanisms, as the name suggests, rely on cooperation between journalists and nonjournalists, and affect or seek to affect journalism from within and without simultaneously. It may be profitable, however, to make a further division in these commonly used categories and break internal accountability mechanisms into two groups: those narrowly targeted toward a single media outlet or media corporation and those that aim to affect the entire field of journalism from within. The former might be viewed as mechanisms that allow specific media organizations to tend to their own stoops, and the latter encourage journalists to look at the performance of their peers. Newton, Hodges, Keith 181 Among narrowly focused internal mechanisms generally used by journalists are as follows: • Organizational ethics codes, such as The New York Times’ (2003) new 53-page code or the Gannett Newspaper Division (1999) Principles of Ethical Conduct for Newsrooms. • Published or broadcast corrections and clarifications, in which news organizations own up to their mistakes. • Ombudsmen or reader representatives, who act as newsroom advocates for reader interests, investigating complaints, and in some cases, offering public critiques of their employers’ performance. • Internal memos, in which senior managers may set standards of behavior for their newsrooms. The main broad-focus internal accountability mechanisms, which are generally employed by journalists with the goal of affecting behavior of their peers others, include the following: • Codes of ethics of professional organizations, such as the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ, 1996) Code of Ethics or the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Radio-Television News Directors Association, 2000). • Media coverage of the media, provided by programs like National Public Radio’s “On the Media,” produced by WNYC in New York; The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and other large newspapers; and, perhaps more important today, compilations of media-on-media reports in Web logs, or “blogs,” such as Jim Romenesko’s (2003) Poynter Institute hosted site, “Romenesko”; the SPJ’s “Press Notes” (SPJ, 2003); or Don Fitzpatrick’s broadcast-oriented “ShopTalk” (Fitzpatrick, 2003). While covering the media industry, these reports shed light on ethics-related issues. Journalists who make public missteps, for example, know they are likely to be the subject of references such as, “I read it on Romenesko.” • Coverage of the mainstream media by so-called “alternative” media, such as newspapers of the New Times chain, which often contain a column of criticism examining general interest newspapers and television news operations. External mechanisms for accountability focus attention on journalism from outside and are generally employed by nonjournalists, including the following: • Journalism reviews, which once were published largely by journalists, seeking to reform journalism from within (Bertrand, 1978). Today, 182 Accountability in the Professions the three surviving print journalism reviews (American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and St. Louis Journalism Review) as well as a Web newcomer, Online Journalism Review, are associated with universities (Maryland, Columbia, Webster, and Southern California, respectively) and so provide external journalism critiques (Bertrand, 2000). • Nonprofit media organizations, such as The Poynter Institute for Media Studies or the American Press Institute, whose faculty and staff comment on media performance and which provide, through Web sites and programs, forums for discussions of ethics-related issues. • Government regulatory agencies, chiefly the Federal Communications Commission, which exerts some limited control over the content of broadcast journalism. • Groups that assess media performance from a particular political viewpoint, such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR, progressive) and Accuracy in Media (AIM, conservative). • Projects associated with journalism schools or universities, such as Project Censored, a program of the Department of Sociology at Sonoma State University in Sonoma, California, which annually names a list of the most undercovered stories, or the Project for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University. • Research and commentary by individual academic scholars occasionally published in trade journals or journalism reviews. Cooperative mechanisms for accountability depend on interactions between journalists and nonjournalists for their success. They include the following: • News councils, such as the Minnesota News Council or the defunct National News Council, which hear complaints brought by citizens against the media and render published judgments (Bertrand, 2000). Although these might seem like purely external accountability mechanisms, they require some degree of cooperation (and perhaps funding) from news organizations if they are to be effective. • Letters to the editors and other commentaries, written by members of the public but allowed into newspapers and onto broadcast outlets only with the cooperation and approval of journalists. These include such innovative repositories of comment as Citizen’s Voice, a cross-platform feedback project of Media General convergence partners The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV, and www.tbo.com. • How well do these accountability mechanisms work? At best, they are a mixed bag. Among narrowly focused internal mechanisms, internal memos and corrections and clarifications may have the greatest force. A message from Newton, Hodges, Keith 183 a senior editor or producer that a behavior is unacceptable carries at least the implied threat of demotion or firing for those who routinely engage in it. Publishing or broadcasting correction and clarification is fairly common, perhaps because it often is not only the ethical but also the pragmatic thing to do, particularly in states where retraction statutes reduce libel damages recoverable from defendants who correct errors (Pember, 2003). Journalism’s dirty little secret, however, is that many errors go uncorrected because complaints are ignored, complaints never reach the right person or—worse—victims of errors feel so helpless in the face of a monolithic media organization they never call. This was brought to light after Jayson Blair was found to have concocted conversations, descriptions, and entire stories for The New York Times. One victim of Blair’s butchery told Columbia Journalism Review, “When it comes to the media, I leave it alone” (Hassan, 2003, p. 19). Journalism’s dirty little secret is … errors that go uncorrected. Codes of ethics and ombudsmen also are not as effective as they might be. Although codes written for particular organizations could be enforced by management, they often are not. In addition, studies have shown that individual journalists may not buy into codes if they had little to do with their creation or if the codes, or ethics in general, are rarely discussed in their newsrooms (Boeyink 1994, 1998; Pritchard & Morgan, 1989). Use of internal critics, ombudsmen, or reader representatives has never truly caught on. Although there were 1,468 U.S. daily newspapers in 2001 (Newspaper Association of America, 2002), there were only about 40 newspaper ombudsmen or reader representatives (Hentoff, 2003). Among the more broadly focused internal accountability mechanisms, codes of ethics of professional organization remain problematic because they are unenforceable. Major journalism organizations do not routinely kick out members who violate their ethics codes. More benefit is probably produced by coverage of media in mainstream and alternative publications. No journalist wants to be embarrassed among his or her peers, and coverage of one media outlet’s foibles by another media outlet offers the opportunity for public castigation. The instructive effect of such negative publicity may be limited, however, if it comes from a so-called “alternative” publication that is viewed as less than professional in its own practices or as having its own ethics-related problems (such as earning significant revenue from advertisements for sex-industry services). Even 184 Accountability in the Professions coverage by mainstream media outlets may be dismissed if it appears to be motivated by professional jealousy. External and cooperative mechanisms, institutionalizations of distrust, fare even worse. Recent studies have shown that the journalism reviews have little impact on the behavior of journalists because few journalists read them regularly (Fee, 2001; Keith, 2003; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1996). Research on media practices by academics is similarly doomed, because too much of it never reaches even the journalism review and trade press that most journalists aren’t reading. The media may also have a tendency to dismiss such research as irrelevant Ivory Tower ramblings. News councils have never been popular, largely because of the financing and effort required to sustain them, and the buy-in from media needed for them to be effective. Concerns expressed by groups such as FAIR and AIM have such ideological baggage they are easily ignored. That leaves three types of external or cooperative mechanisms: letters to the editor or other types of citizen commentary, which can be effective if produced in great volume; criticism voiced by or through nonprofit media organizations like the Poynter Institute, which may carry some weight with journalists because of their perceived neutrality; and government regulation, through such agencies as the FCC. Assuming that most practitioners and lovers of journalism would agree that increased government interference in journalism would not be good, we are left with only two tools for media accountability that are both effective and palatable. That hardly seems enough. Perhaps it is time to turn to other professions and trades for ideas If more than 30 years of intense focus on media ethics have not given journalism all the accountability mechanisms it needs, perhaps it is time to turn to other professions and trades for ideas. As Lisa Newton asked, are there better ways than now exist to institutionalize our right to distrust, our right to demand an account, our right to enforce professional accountability? Well, yes. Journalism could learn at least one thing from medicine, a profession it usually regards as an unfit exemplar because of its reliance on licensure, a mechanism at odds with journalism’s desire to remain free to investigate all authorities. In medicine, the worst outcome of practice—death—is investigated in weekly or monthly hospital morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences, which one renowned teaching program describes as “a cor- Newton, Hodges, Keith 185 nerstone of quality improvement.” At these conferences, “open discussion among residents and faculty is intended not to find fault, but to seek better understanding of the events, to educate, and to suggest changes in management or departmental protocols to reduce the risk of future complications” (Department of Surgery, Yale University School of Medicine, 2002). Postmortems do occasionally occur in journalism. The Washington Post conducted an investigation and published the results in the wake of Janet Cooke’s 1981 fabrication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story “Jimmy’s World” (Green, 1981). The Los Angeles Times had media writer David Shaw produce a fourteen-page expose on its involvement in the Staples Center scandal of 1999 (Shaw, 1999). In summer 2003, The New York Times held a meeting for several hundred newsroom employees to discuss Blair’s repeated plagiarism and fabrication (Perry, 2003) and printed a 13,900-word explanation of which stories were affected (Barry, Barstow, Glater, Liptak, & Steinberg, 2003). It seems, however, that no journalism organizations regularly conduct the newsroom equivalent of M&M conferences—call them “ethics and morality” meetings—designed to assess, in a spirit of learning, when the news organization has done well and when its performance has been lacking. The reasons are obvious. “We don’t have time for another meeting,” the busy editor or producer will say. Medicine, however, would suggest that there is always enough time enough to consider avoiding past mistakes. “We already do that in the morning meeting,” another editor or producer will add. But a morning planning meeting, however lengthy, occurs too close to the previous day’s news production cycle to allow for adequate hindsight about performance. In addition, a morning meeting is, of necessity, too dominated by planning related to dissemination of the current day’s news to provide adequate opportunity for the sober reflection, questioning, and evaluation that could occur at an ethics M&M conference. A newsroom M&M conference … should include staff from all levels; … have mechanisms for anonymous comment. A newsroom ethics M&M conference might be scheduled once a month or as rarely as twice a year. But it should include staff members from all levels—clerks to senior reporters and tape editors to news directors—just as medical M&M conferences include all members of a medical service: medical students, nurses, interns, residents, and attending physicians. Com- 186 Accountability in the Professions mentary should be sought from all levels, and there should be mechanisms for anonymous comment so that ideas from wise people low in the organizational hierarchy might be heard without fear of retribution. When possible, it might be worthwhile to have an outside facilitator—or at least the reader representative or ombudsman, where one existed—lead the discussion. Clearly, there would be risks involved. It would take a brave editor or news director to encourage public discussion of the “rightness” of past decisions, which probably were made largely by the editor or news director. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Howell Raines, and Gerald Boyd—the current publisher, former editor, and former managing editor, respectively, of The New York Times—could attest to this. When they met with staff members after Blair’s misdeeds came to light, the response was “a mixture of anger and sorrow” (Berkowitz, 2003, p. A4). Attorneys might fret that such discussions would become public, as what was said at the employees-only Times staff meeting did (Steinberg, 2003), and be used against the media outlet in litigation. It must be acknowledged, too, that there are qualitative differences between what is assessed at a M&M conference and what would be considered at a newsroom ethics conference. Death is a final, all-or-nothing condition, easily identified by a lack of vital signs. Whether an ethics misstep has even occurred might be endlessly debated. At least, however, an ethics conference might institutionalize a place for regular ethics-related discussions, which may not now occur in some newsrooms (Boeyink, 1994; Keith, 2003). Journalism also might learn from the ways police and state governments police themselves. Most large law enforcement organizations have an Internal Affairs Division that investigates suspected wrongdoing by those who are charged with apprehending wrongdoers. Many state governments have ethics committees that consider violations of ethics policies by those ostensibly committed to public service and sometimes offer advisory opinions before questionable action is taken. Although neither body may be a favorite of those whose actions it considers (and Internal Affairs Divisions are themselves subject to corruption), both have the potential to serve useful functions in protecting the public from rogue professionals. Such formal policing committees probably would not work in journalism. Journalists often are wary of authority, including that of their bosses. In addition, in a field dominated by corporate ownership that is perhaps overly responsive to market considerations, formal ethics disciplinary committees could be seen as, or turn into, mechanisms for staff reduction. That does not mean, however, that news organizations should not have a formal mechanism for considering ethical conduct of their employees. Most midsize to large newsrooms have some sort of annual performance review that assesses such issues as productivity and adherence to dead- Newton, Hodges, Keith 187 line. Could not adherence to ethics standards be made a part of such evaluations? Giving ethics as much attention during the annual performance review as making deadline or producing stories, pages, or packages would at least send the message that ethics was important. Journalism could also learn from the education and training requirements in a host of professions. Journalism could also learn from the education and training requirements in a host of professions, including medicine, architecture, and elementary and secondary education. Architects, teachers, and many types of medical professionals must take part in continuing education to retain their place in their professions. Although this continuing education is rarely, if ever, ethics-related, it does help professionals serve their clients better by allowing them to remain up to date in their specialized body of knowledge. Because journalists are not certified or licensed, they have no such requirements. In fact, so many get little or no postbaccalaureate training that a lack of training was the found to be the number one reason for job dissatisfaction in a survey commissioned by the Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations (Truitt, 2002). More important, significant numbers of journalists begin their jobs with no training whatsoever in ethical decision-making, because their university programs required no courses in philosophical or applied ethics (Keith, 2003). Journalism organizations could improve their accountability, and perhaps their credibility with sources and news consumers, with a real commitment to ongoing ethics training. Such training would need to go beyond repackaging information found in the organization’s code of ethics, and instead focus on how to make decisions in situations not covered by the code. It should be offered not only to front-line reporters and editors, who are likely to make low-level ethics-related decisions, but also to senior managers, whose macrolevel decisions will set the tone for how ethical a news outlet is. These proposed accountability mechanisms are not without problems. Who is to conduct the ethics M&M meeting? If it is a senior manager, can the exercise ever be anything more than a reinforcement of the status quo? If ethics becomes a component of the annual evaluation, whose ethics are used? What is the scale? If ethics-related training is offered to journalists, who will provide it? And when? More important, each of the “borrowed” accountability mechanisms offered here is internal. None provides a satis- 188 Accountability in the Professions factory answer to the question “Are there better ways than now exist to institutionalize our right to distrust, our right to demand an account, our right to enforce professional accountability?” There are, however, ways that groups external to, but interested in, journalism could seek an accounting. First, citizens could create forums for discussion of journalistic behavior and use the light of publicity to force an accounting. In many U.S. cities, cable access television provides an outlet for resident-produced programming. Citizens interested in media performance could start their own programs evaluating the performance of media, perhaps with guidance from interested journalism professors. They might also post the results of their monitoring of local media performance on Web sites, creating electronic, citizen-produced versions of the paper and reporter-produced journalism reviews that proliferated in the 1970s (Bertrand, 1978). The largest stumbling block to such efforts, of course, is that they would need strong leaders who could accurately identify excellence and evil in journalism, rather than merely grind political axes. In addition, to make a lasting difference, leaders of such efforts would have to make long term commitments, something many of the journalists who published local journalism reviews in the 1970s ultimately could not. Scholars of journalism ethics might take training in ethical decision making directly to journalists. In addition, scholars of journalism ethics might take training in ethical decision-making directly to journalists, as some have in the past (Hernandez & Schmitt, 1996) and as ethics experts in other fields do (“NSF Funds Chapter-Based Ethics Workshhops,” 2001). A good model exists in the “Quick Courses” conducted in several cities yearly by the Society for News Design, an industry group for newspaper, magazine, and online designers. That group typically rounds up trainers and flies them to midsize to large cities, where they conduct six to eight hours of training during a single day, frequently in a newspaper’s meeting room or auditorium. Professionals from the host publication and others in the region pay a nominal fee to attend. Ethics decision-making training conducted on such a model would need the imprimatur of a journalism organization, like the American Press Institute, a journalism foundation, a university, or some other institution that journalists would regard as politically neutral. It could, however, feature as panelists members of organizations with a variety of reasons for demanding an account from journalists. The trick, of course, Newton, Hodges, Keith 189 would be getting news organizations to support such training and finding pedagogical strategies to make the training memorable after the workshop had ended. At the end of the day, solving the media accountability puzzle may not be so much a case of finding the perfect accountability mechanism, as one of creating a patchwork of mechanisms. 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