Ethics in Journalism
When I was writing for my high school newspaper, I honestly did kind of struggle with the ethics aspect of journalism. It wasn’t something that necessarily worried me because it wasn’t a national paper that everyone would read; in fact, most of the students in my high school didn’t read it. So I started off by just quoting my friends. And then I started gearing my questions towards what kind of quote I wanted. Then I just started making quotes up for them and attaching their name to it. I knew they wouldn’t mind, but I also knew that as a journalist what I was doing was wrong. I wasn’t following the rules but most importantly I wasn’t being objective. I was skewing my stories to get the quotes that I wanted.
The New York Times has this list of ethics (http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html) that clearly states against those things. Thankfully I wasn’t writing for The NYT. If I was I obviously would have gotten better quotes. However it’s not unheard of. In fact, Stephen Glass did a lot worse. He made up story after story and source after source for The New Republic. Eventually he was found out and they actually made a movie about it, Shattered Glass, a preview for which can be seen here: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA4N9ex56jA).
