The third paragraph in Doing Ethics in Media: Theories and Practical Applications explains why the book runs 442 pages:
If ethical decision making were simply a matter of choosing between right or wrong, good or bad, this would be a very short book. However, such choices are not always black or white; they’re much more likely to be arrayed in a rainbow of gray.
Two things that crossed the desk this week make those three sentences so important:
* The Oct. 3, 2014, news that former News of the World editor Ian Edmondson changed his plea to guilty in the News Corp.’s continuing fallout over the paper’s hacking into phone messages of the rich, powerful and newsworthy.
* An offer to buy A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at The New York Times, a documentary with mixed reviews that tells the story of the young man who lied and faked his way to and at The Times. Doing Ethics mentions him four times: how The Times created a more specific ethics code/employment contract in his wake (p. 42), in a mention of diversity issues (p. 158), in an “accountability” section that noted how his 2004 biography fell short of real accountability for his actions (p. 396), and in the section describing blatant lies (p. 219).
Friend and colleague David Cuillier, just-past president of the Society of Professional Journalists and director of the University of Arizona’s school of journalism, is quoted on the sales postcard that the documentary “should be required viewing for all journalism students.”
Maybe — but he’s not worth 75 minutes of a media ethics class.
As noted in Doing Ethics, stories of blatant sinners committing obvious sins provide moral lessons but are not philosophically interesting. In the book, I recount what University of Maryland professor Carl Sessions Stepp, a South Carolina native, told a journalism class I taught at the University of South Carolina a few years after Blair’s fall. Stepp said Blair spent lots of time in his office, but Stepp never thought to remind Blair that it’s wrong to make up stuff and to lie. That was Sessions’ closing comment to those students: “If no one has never told you, let me be the one: Don’t make up stuff. And don’t lie.”
So while the big sins are interesting, they may not be so useful to students once reminded that plagiarism, lying, criminal invasion of privacy and other big-ticket no-nos are just that. You might even argue that they are as outrageous as they are rare.
Instead, spend more time focusing on how to do ethics in the rainbow of gray.