By Chris Roberts
The Society of Professional Journalists announced the winners of its annual Ethics in Journalism awards on Sept. 22, 2022. They are:
►Hannah Dreyfus of ProPublica, whose project The Liberty Way showed how Liberty University dealt with students who reported rape.
►Josh Renaud of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose reporting revealed that a State of Missouri web site for educators exposed social security numbers of Missouri teachers.
As a member of SPJ’s Standards and Ethics Committee, I was among the judges whose recommendations went to the SPJ board for final selection. It was gratifying to see the work of the winners, and of other news organizations that 
reached the ideals of SPJ’s ethics code.
What struck me about the winners – and in some ways separated them from some of the other excellent submissions – was the public relations response of the school and the government. There’s a hint of Christian ethics in here, too, although it was not part of my judging.
On Liberty
In the Liberty case, the head of public relations for the evangelical university lost his job because he tried to respond to ProPublica’s pre-publication request for comment. As the story noted:
Liberty officials did not respond to detailed questions sent weeks ago. But one person who received them did ultimately reply: Scott Lamb, who was Liberty University’s senior vice president of communications until earlier this month. Lamb worked at Liberty until Oct. 6, when, he said, he was fired for internally blowing the whistle on the university’s repeated failures to respond to concerns about sexual assault.
“The emails from ProPublica were definitely ignored,” said Lamb. He recalled himself and one colleague trying to make a case for the school to respond. “We said, ‘Listen, the optics of this are killing us. Is there anything we can message — something? A message about empathy? Or that we’re at least working to get to the bottom of this?’ And then it dawned on us: They’re not working to get to the bottom of this.”
Lamb sued Liberty over his firing, and the university has sued him, too. (Feel free to discuss Matthew 5:40 and 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 on your own, or at least how organizations with a Biblical worldview should deal how to apply the Bible in their real world.)
On when a politician tries to publish a good deed
The Post-Dispatch story reached national attention precisely because of the PR blowback. Renaud found the problem of social security numbers showing up in HTML code, told the government agency about it, and did not publish until the problem was fixed. This is in the highest standards of “minimize harm” in the SPJ code. The agency had planned to thank Renaud for his work.
But Gov. Gov. Mike Parson’s reaction was to seek political gain by calling it “us versus the evil media” thing. He accused Renaud of being a “hacker” and claimed he committed a criminal act. Parson has government immunity to call someone a criminal before charges are filed — a First Amendment right not afforded to Renaud, journalists, or most others.
Then the grownups arrived, with a prosecuting attorney in February 2022 saying no charges will be filed.
For his part, Renaud said the governor did him wrong, telling St. Louis Public Radio:
“We cannot allow political officials to persecute journalists for doing or publishing things that they don’t like. I think that the whole issue of [Parson] using his power to investigate a journalist who exercises First Amendment rights, and did everything, above board and by the book, that in itself is a separate thing. And I feel like that’s wrong.”
Renaud noted in that interview that his Christian faith helped during the difficult time, and he quoted Matthew 5:44, which says Christians should “pray for those who … persecute you.” And he issued a challenge to the governor:
Parson “professes to be a Christian, and he’s done me wrong. I think this is a chance for him to show what it looks like when a leader is willing to admit a mistake, and is willing to make it right.”
It’s a shame that it takes PR losers to reward truth-telling winners. But such is the nature of contemporary journalism, politics and public discourse.