Journalistic Ethics Too Often Lacking
* I appreciate Bill Overend’s Letter From the Editor titled “A Question of Journalistic Ethics” (Sept. 7).
I feel that journalism, especially the electronic media, has slipped pretty far down the slope toward the sewer level of human behavior. We seem to be more concerned with the mechanics of the trade and less with right, wrong, good, evil and being civil and humane. I see “news readers/celebrities, news writers/hacks and opinion makers/writers” but few if any real journalists.
I just finished reading James Tobin’s “Ernie Pyle’s War,” where journalism, ethics, the story and human feelings all seemed to count in getting that story into print. Ernie also came across as a real human being with feelings, standards, morality and ethics in his profession.
Recently The Times ran a four-part feature on assault guns. Granted that I am a gun owner, active in pro-firearms groups (I am president of the California Rifle and Pistol Assn. and belong to the National Rifle Assn. Members Council of Ventura County, East), this was still one of the worst pieces of journalism, I hate to even use the word here, I have seen in recent years. There was no attempt at balanced, objective reporting. The article was full of distortions, technical and legal inaccuracies and at least in one case a lie. That report came back from the interviewee. I doubt whether this article would have passed the journalistic standards of the Star, Globe or National Enquirer.
In the last several years I have been impressed, and have commented on to other pro-firearms sources, the impartial standards and journalistic ethics that your Ventura County section has applied to firearms issues here. I can only wish that you had been the editor for your colleagues in L.A.’s “hit piece.” I think I would have been even offended if this had appeared in the Opinion section, even there, there are allegedly standards of objectivity and honesty.
We in the pro-firearms fraternity see the issue as a human rights one. Human beings have certain rights, some of which are brilliantly stated in our Bill of Rights. To us the issue is not sport, not target shooting, not hunting. To us it is about “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and our rights as human beings.
Please keep up your journalistic standards here in Ventura. I have no hope for that place down the road.
MARTIN J. MILLER JR.
Thousand Oaks
* You want “to refine the debate a bit more in terms of press ethics in Ventura County.”
I’d like to help but I believe we have to reach an agreement as to the definition of these words. And if we are actually to apply this to a discussion of reporters and/or paparazzi, we would be required to define not only the words “journalism” and “ethics” but we should also include “boundaries.” The meanings of these three words place a wide, wide separation between articles written and pictures taken by a reporter and a paparazzi.
How many times has your profession put a microphone or camera beyond the limits or boundaries of decency when a person has just suffered a devastating blow? And usually accompanied with the words “How are you feeling about [the tragedy], Mrs. Brown?”
In an interview immediately following Princess Diana’s funeral, Barbara Walters would not take “no” for an answer when Dodi Fayed’s spokesman kept saying he didn’t want to talk about dying Diana’s verbal request from inside the crumpled car. Walters kept on and on, as did Peter Jennings, asking what was Diana’s request and who was it to go to. Hers was an intrusion of paparazzi nature, and yet both she and Jennings are considered reporters.
The major networks, the Los Angeles Times and many, many TV and radio stations showed pictures of or gave the name of the only possible witness to Bill Cosby’s son’s slaying when she requested otherwise because of fear for her life.
Cameras rolled and flashbulbs popped when stores and homes were illegally entered and looted during the Rodney King riots, and then the favorite “1st Amendment right” was exercised by some media when the police wanted copies of the film to help catch these criminals.
These same cameras rolled outside O.J. Simpson’s estate following the killings and during the trial in a way that can only be referred to as “paparazzi frenzy” and yet were being done under the auspices of the title “reporter.” And the examples go on and on.
As I have been absent from Ventura County for seven years, I don’t have any local examples of the above fuzzy differentiation of “reporter” and “paparazzi.”
Yes, Mr. Overend, let’s make the distinction between those two. I agree with you and your Larry Bessel on this. But I request of you, your editors, your publishers and your reporters to make the separation yourselves by your actions. Out here the line seems to be very fuzzy.
JUDITH “JUDY” DWYER
Simi Valley
* On the distinction between the mainstream press and the paparazzi, Bill Overend states, “It’s convenient for some people who would like to blame the press for every imaginable evil to blur the differences.”
I hope that you realize how great a temptation it will be among those who prefer secrecy to exploit that.
The paparazzi, and those who buy their work, are using freedom of the press as a shield to allow them to do terrible things to other people’s rights: the right to privacy, the right to personal dignity, even the right to personal safety.
If this continues, the decision will eventually be made that that is too high a price to pay, and restrictions will be put on press freedom. These restrictions then will become a weapon against members of the mainstream press who are researching legitimate issues such as corruption and abuse of power.
As difficult as it may be, the only course that will forestall such restrictions is self-enforcement of reasonable standards of conduct. Put another way, ultimately the only way to prevent legal limitations from being placed on your craft is to place them there yourselves, and enforce them.
I desperately hope you will do that. A free press is precious. I hope that this country doesn’t lose it because its practitioners could not handle the responsibility.
BOB HILL
Simi Valley