law and ethics
The photo above was taken at a March for Our Lives protest in San Jose in 2018. Reporting on protests like this one is one way that I exercise my First Amendment Rights as a student-journalist. Photo by Eric Fang
As journalists, we strive to serve the community, which consists not of some abstract concept but of real people with real stories that we have been entrusted to tell. Sometimes, that requires thinking through some difficult ethical considerations: how do we prioritize the victims and not the perpetrator? How do we avoid re-traumatizing the community? How do we respect a source’s desire to remain anonymous while doing our due diligence as reporters? How do we comfort our peers at a time of grief and loss?
From writing obituaries for classmates and mentors, interviewing anonymous sources fearful of retribution and editing articles on shootings and sexual assault within the community, I have had to grapple with each of these questions and constantly consider the impact of our words and actions.
KNOWING OUR RIGHTS
A tradition for all of our cubs is to memorize the 45 words of the First Amendment within the first two weeks of school. As a staff, we do not shy away from exercising our freedom of speech, and we know that the First Amendment is our greatest defense when reporting on controversial issues or covering protests.
We know that the words we write in our articles will not be censored. We also know that we have a right to take photos of individuals, even without their consent, when they are in public areas (though in certain cases I choose to respect them by asking for consent anyway).
We also learn of the long legal history that gives us the freedom of speech we have today. During the first few classes of each school year, we discuss some of the most prominent legal cases in journalistic history, like Tinker v. Des Moines and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
A pocket U.S. Constitution and pin of the First Amendment, which I carry with me in my backpack for easy reference.
DEFENDING THE FIRST AMENDMENT
When I interned for San Jose City Council Member Tam Nguyen in the summer before my junior year, I wrote a letter to U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren on behalf of the district to advocate for First Amendment rights. The letter pushed back against the Vietnamese government’s restrictions on the press and social media. The district I represented had the highest number of Vietnamese Americans of any San Jose district, and these restrictions on free speech prevented many of our constituents from contacting loved ones in Vietnam. I encouraged the U.S. representatives to host a San Jose town hall to address the concerns of their districts’ Vietnamese Americans and defend the First Amendment.
Read the letter here or by clicking on the pages on the right.
Click above to read the letter I wrote on behalf of San Jose City Council Member Tam Nguyen to U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna.
Click above to read the letter I wrote on behalf of San Jose City Council Member Tam Nguyen to U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
ETHICAL JOURNALISM CASE STUDIES
As a student-journalist, I value the ethics behind reporting as much as I do the reporting itself. Below are two opinion articles I have written that wrestle with some thorny ethical situations I observed in mainstream news media.
Julian Assange
When British authorities arrested WikiLeaks founder and Australian journalist Julian Assange, I felt compelled to reflect on the implications of his arrest on free speech and ethical journalism. In my opinion article, I argued that Assange and Wikileaks serve the public by “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” However, I argued that illegal acts committed to inform the public were still illegal and set a dangerous precedent for ethical journalistic practices.
Serena Williams
In late 2018, my junior year, reigning champion Serena Williams lost her seat to newcomer Naomi Osaka in the Women’s Grand Slam Tennis Championship. The ensuing media coverage of Williams’ reaction to her loss revealed entrenched sexism and racism within many mainstream media outlets. I hoped that by writing an opinion article on this media coverage, I could call attention to the need for greater gender and racial diversity in sports and sports reporting.
An editorial cartoon I made to represent my opinion on popular media’s treatment of Serena Williams.
AVOIDING UNPROTECTED SPEECH
As leaders in Harker Journalism, the strategic team and I expect every staff member to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism and integrity when interacting with individuals both inside and outside of staff. As a result, we avoid profanity in our professional interactions and our publications. An exception to this rule is when the profanity is crucial to the piece as a whole. For example, we sometimes make exemptions to profanity to a certain degree when our reporters cover large-scale protests, where profanity on protest signs tells a story in its own right.
As a staff we are also careful to not publish libel or misattribute quotes. We train our cubs and reporters to read back crucial quotes to our sources and to always make sure that the interviewee is quoted correctly, both in the interview transcription and in the article itself. We require all reporters to take notes during their interviews – these could be used to accurately keep record of important quotes and observations in the moment.
Further, we avoid unprotected speech with extensive fact-checking and corroboration. For example, when members of our staff heard that rumors of a shooting threat graffitied on the wall of a specific boy’s restroom, I walked to the restroom in question and found that it was closed off and locked. We waited to publish an article until we could get further corroboration from administration and fact-check details in our story, prioritizing accuracy over speed. We knew that any errors or unprotected speech in our article could result in harm to the community.
For more on checking the facts, visit News Literacy. For more on avoiding bias, visit News Literacy and Editing.
COMFORTING THE AFFLICTED
As student-journalists who cover local, national, and global issues, we often have to write articles on extremely sensitive topics. Personally for me, these included asking unsheltered men and women about their experiences with homelessness or speaking with school administrators about a recent school shooting threat. However, the example that stands out most to me is when I helped a rising sophomore reporter, Alysa, on her breaking news article on the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting that left four dead and 17 injured.
It was July 28, 2019, middle of summer. I was in a dormitory at the University of Chicago, my adviser was in Illinois and the rest of our leadership team was away on their own summer plans. At close to midnight in Chicago, my phone lit up as Alysa alerted the leadership team of a shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, just 40 miles from school. She then texted me directly, asking for help writing the article. This shooting hit home for both of us, as it did for many in our school community.
That night, I advised Alysa to keep in mind a phrase that our adviser teaches us all as first-year reporters: comfort the afflicted. We discussed how to avoid sensationalizing the story, whether through words or visuals. Instead, we talked about how much our community would appreciate an article that is future-focused, centers the victims and directs readers to helpful resources. For example, I suggested to her to begin the article with the story of a high school student who witnessed the shooting and to reassure our readers that police had the situation under control before going into details about the shooting or suspects. For visuals, we chose not to use images of the crime scene or suspects to avoid sensationalizing the event and putting focus on the alleged perpetrators. To help those affected by the shooting, our adviser reminded me to have Alysa include phone numbers for the police department’s witness hotline and family reunification hotline in the article.
SEPARATING TRUTH FROM RUMOR
When the Trump administration killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, public information was limited. As such, when two editors wrote a piece on Soleimani’s death, I made sure to emphasize the importance of separating truth from rumor by going to the most direct sources of information and fact-checking with a variety of sources. For more on the editing process for this article, see Editing.
Instead of rushing to upload an article, we felt we could better serve our community by waiting a couple days for details to become clear. Otherwise, if we were to report uncorroborated information, we would only sow heightened anxiety and confusion.
In journalism class discussions about the U.S.-Iran conflict, the strategic team and I were also careful to correct rumors when we heard them and be emotionally available to help reporters who may have been distressed by the news. After all, comforting the afflicted applies to people on our own staff as well.
PROTECTING ANONYMITY
Our Policy
Our publication’s protocol for anonymous sources states that if a source’s personal safety or general well-being would be threatened by having their name published, we will undoubtedly offer anonymity, even if a source does not ask for it. We usually assign a pseudonym, with permission from the source. The actual identity of the source is usually only known to the reporter, the article’s editor and our adviser. We never write the source’s real name on any shared documents or files, and we adopt a strict code of confidentiality.
Our Choices
In the recent past, we have given anonymity to a Harker alumnus working in Hong Kong who spoke out against the Chinese government and a Harker parent who recently traveled to Beijing during the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak. The alumnus worked for a Chinese company at the time, and both he and our editors recognized the danger his quotes may have had for his future with the company. In the second case, after my interview with the Harker parent, he became concerned that, with the rising panic about coronavirus in the community, he and his family would face ostracism and stigma if people knew that he had recently traveled from China. He requested anonymity to avoid raising further alarm. As a result of these credible apprehensions, the strategic team and I agreed to give the source anonymity.
Read stories in which we have provided anonymity here, here and here.
WRITING OBITUARIES
When Sandip Nirmel, a Harker Class of 2017 alumnus and former student body president died in May 2019, I grappled with both my own emotions and the ethics behind an obituary. In accordance with our staff manual, my co-editor in chief and I made sure to respect him and his family by leaving out details of his death and allowing friends and family time and distance to grieve. We included information on a memorial for Sandip and ways to honor his life, and we gathered commentary from those close to Sandip about his life and lasting impact. Ultimately, we hoped that our reporting could do a service for Sandip’s family and those in our community who were close to him.
HOLDING OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE
One of the less glamorous parts of being a leader is taking accountability, both for myself and for the whole publication. However, I think that one of my most important actions as editor in chief has been to address a teacher’s complaint of being misquoted in the first issue of this school year’s paper. I and my co-editor in chief immediately looked into the situation, asking the reporters who wrote the articles for their recordings and verifying that the quote had in fact been mistakenly attributed.
We then published a correction online and in print, apologized to the teacher and personally delivered a copy of the correction in the next issue to her. We then worked with the reporter and other editors to bolster our fact-checking procedures and reinforce interview training.