A Golden Rule Book for Journalists
In 1977 the Sun-Times opened a corner bar insouciantly called the Mirage and let the good times and hidden cameras roll. When the Mirage closed, the paper published a monthlong saga that chronicled in almost celebratory language a timeless local cost of doing business–paying off the inspectors. Locally, this peephole look at two-bit corruption was cheered as an ingenious new chapter in the annals of undercover journalism. But a couple of influential Pulitzer Prize Board judges from other cities were not amused. They argued persuasively that the Sun-Times had been underhanded in its methods, and the Pulitzer went elsewhere.
Fuller has just published a book, News Values: Ideas for an Information Age, that meets the complications head on. Fuller remembers himself as a City News Bureau cub reporter shameless as any other, and elaborates the guiding principles that time and experience have since fashioned. He invokes the Golden Rule. “The Golden Rule has endured through the centuries as an ethical proposition of enormous force because it offers a subjective method for determining the moral direction one’s behavior should take. It asks that an individual treat others the way he would like to be treated, to turn the tables, to empathize. This is a useful way to look at the requirement of intellectual honesty.”
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The reporter who swears he’ll never flout the Golden Rule again now runs into “the constraints of time, space, and reader attention span.” Nevertheless, says Fuller, the reporter’s reputation “should turn in large part upon the quality of his judgment in wisely sorting through these difficult issues so as to produce work of genuine intellectual integrity.”
The context of this problematic formulation is Fuller’s libertarian plea for government to withdraw and let private enterprise sort out who runs the “information superhighway” and how. Although I don’t doubt Fuller’s convictions, here he seems to be carrying water for his employers. To get government to give up its authority to hamstring expansionist corporations such as the Tribune Company, Fuller seems to propose that the media renounce powers they don’t possess. How can the Tribune compel government to reveal information except by shaming it or by filing a Freedom of Information request?
More often than it challenges, a successful paper binds the wounds. It draws people together even when it seems to be doing the opposite. Fuller notices that despite what people say, there is a clear public preference for bad news over good. “Disaster always becomes the talk of a community in a way that good fortune less commonly does. Trouble touches some people’s empathy and others’ sense of doom.” Fuller doesn’t wonder why, but perhaps the reason is that good news is bad news; it spreads envy and division through the community. Bad news is communal. It unites the tribe. If there were no bad news there might be no future for newspapers in an age whose “social dynamic,” Fuller observes, “seems to favor fragmentation.”
Those reporters were later described by Byrne as “Durbin’s media toadies” and as “liberal media acolytes.”
