Students try to make right call

Cherubs put their the pens down, their papers away and spoke their minds with instructors David Weissman and Jenny Hontz and guest instructor Bret Begun, national affairs editor at Newsweek.

As part of seminars on ethics at the National High School Institute, students like Helen Tobin, of Clive, Iowa, discussed the dilemmas and decisions that journalists have to make in their jobs.

“Even though the seminars were a little gruesome, I’m appreciative of what they wanted to teach us,” Tobin said. “I liked the format of it, too. It was nice to be able to speak our minds about topics that really matter.”

Tobin said the cherubs were forced to question their news judgment and decisions that could make or break a reputation, end a career or damage the trust of a source.

“As a journalist, you have a lot of power,” Jason Jung, of Los Angeles, said. “You have to learn to be sensitive to what other people are going through in their lives, but also keep in mind that your job is to report the news.”

Jung said he faced an ethical dilemma while writing his trend story on underage drinking. He interviewed a source who drank alcohol, but was also under the drinking age. In the end, he was forced to decide whether to print the name of the teenager in his article.

“I knew putting the name in the article would add credibility,” Jung said. “At the same time though, I didn’t want to sell her out.”

The ethics seminar focused on similar situations in the media, including photos in the news.

Weissman said talking to young journalists about ethics in the media is important because journalists must often make difficult choices.

“There are a lot of shades of gray in ethics,” Weissman said. “There’s a lot of ambiguity in determining what’s ethical and what isn’t.”

Overall, the students thought it was necessary to learn about the ethics of journalism.

“Every human being is going to be exposed to these certain situations,” Jung said. “We need to know where we stand on ethical issues.”

In the end, there never is a “right answer.”

“The thing is, it’s a reporter’s job to show readers what they need to hear,” Tobin said. “If reporters only told the public what they wanted to hear, people would be ignorant about what’s going on in the world. The ethics seminars helped emphasize that.”