When Reporters Break the Rules

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When the Gallup organization polled the public in May 1991, less than a third of Americans described journalists as having high ethical standards. If the same poll were conducted now, the results would probably be worse. Ever since NBC last month admitted to significant distortions in a report about safety problems in some General Motors trucks, the media have been awash in shame and penitence.

USA Today disciplined its Western editor and apologized in print last week for a "misleading" picture that showed armed Los Angeles youth-gang members ready to retaliate if police officers were again acquitted of beating Rodney King. A former TV reporter and camera operator in Alexandria, Minnesota, admitted to furnishing alcohol to a minor to illustrate a story on teen drinking. NBC itself went back on air with another admission of error, this time for using footage of fish supposedly killed during clear-cutting of timber on government land. In reality, one shot depicted a different forest while another showed fish that were not dead, only stunned by researchers for testing. In the most dramatic act of contrition, NBC News president Michael Gartner acknowledged that the GM controversy would not die and abruptly resigned last week, saying he hoped to "take the spotlight off of all of us."

To reporters, this spate of confessions is proof that the system of self- regulation works -- proof that a combination of conscience and competition keeps the press honest. Gartner's acting successor, Don Browne, even argues that NBC's pain is resulting in moral renewal in newsrooms around the country. Says Browne: "Journalism will not be diminished but strengthened. Because we made one mistake on Dateline NBC, hundreds of mistakes will not be made elsewhere." News consumers may be somewhat more skeptical and wonder if journalism has any rules at all. The honest answer: not really.

Individual journalists may have highly developed ethical sensibilities. But journalism as a whole, unlike law or medicine, has no licensing procedure, no disciplinary panels, no agreed-upon code of behavior. Practices that are perfectly acceptable to some major news-gathering institutions -- such as going undercover to expose wrongdoing -- are forbidden at others. At most places, no sin is automatically a firing offense. Editors insist on treating each case individually, which usually translates into permissively. Says USA Today editor Peter Prichard: "It depends on the circumstances, the individual case, the history, all sorts of things."

Even at news outlets with an internal code of conduct -- such as NBC, where the document runs to 50 pages, or ABC, where it is about 75 -- the rules are commonly described by managers as mere guidelines. Says Richard Wald, who has held senior news posts at both networks: "That's why we don't have a list of firing offenses. Ethics is not laid down in tablets -- it is judgments made over years, and some points are susceptible to change."

Falsifying the facts is the most absolute taboo. But journalists are deeply divided about what qualifies. Many reporters believe it is legitimate to tighten a quote from an interview subject, on the theory that the speaker is appearing in print and would have been more concise if he had written his remarks. Others see that as fabrication. Everyone opposes plagiarism, but opinions differ as to whether that only means borrowing passages wholesale or also includes picking up facts and quotes without attribution after other reporters have put them in the public domain.

All the recent lapses involved pictures, and while today's journalists generally consider it wrong to stage news photographs, past generations were more lenient. As Don Hewitt, creator of CBS's 60 Minutes, points out, many supposedly legitimate pictures are less than spontaneous. Says he: "What about a photo in the newspaper described as a meeting at the U.N.? No matter what the caption says, you know damned well it was a photo session before the meeting."

The most conspicuous clash is over the technique of impersonation -- failing to reveal that one is a reporter, or outright pretending to be something else, to expose wrongdoing. Network TV regards impersonation as a vital tool. ABC's PrimeTime Live, for example, won only praise from its peers for setting up a bogus medical clinic to lure brokers "selling" patients. But many print-news organizations view impersonation as lying.

The absence of settled answers does not mean journalists are uninterested in ) ethical questions. "The problem," says Los Angeles Times managing editor George Cotliar, "is that people look at what NBC and USA Today have done and assume that's the norm." As the humiliation at both places showed, it's not. Journalists may not always be sure what is right. They can usually see what is clearly wrong.

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York