I Could Have Been a Journalist…
I consider it an honor to have earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Florida. UF’s College of Journalism has many damned good programs and has long been deemed one of the more rigorous colleges of journalism in the nation. Because of my public relations major and political science minor, I’ve done all sorts of PR and political work in my career. Even though my diploma says “Bachelor of Science in Journalism,” I’ve never worked for a news media company and have never had more than a passing interest in the field, mostly because of my antipathy for many of the people I knew in college who were involved with the school paper, the Independent Florida Alligator: I’ve tended to avoid building personal relationships with professional journalists ever since.
Public relations and politics often requires interaction with news writers and editors; I can handle that part because I can keep it all business. My instinct guides me to enter into each new reporter interaction with a prejudice that the person to whom I am speaking has a propensity for playing loose with the facts and will skirt ethics whenever it can make constructing a story more convenient. I’m sure that keeping my guard up has saved me countless hours of grief.
Of course, over the years I’ve learned that ethical weakness is pervasive just about everywhere a person may choose to work these days. The pervasive lack of ethics and morals in people I’ve trusted has been the biggest disappointment of my entire professional life. My disdain for the questionable ethics in those around me has surely has hurt my chances of advancement many times. I guess my ethical compass tends to be a rather noisy contraption.
…But I’d Have Had to Tell My Family I Played Piano in a Whorehouse
To this day, when the unethical behavior of reporters, editors or publishers comes to light, I feel the most vindicated in my rejecting “professional journalist” as a career choice. This is not to say that there are not reporters I trust, editors I admire or publishers I believe to have a fully functional set of ethical principles. My respect for what I perceive to be an honorable adherence to higher ethical standards determines whether or not I attempt to maintain a personal relationship with any reporter or editor; so, if you’re a journalist with whom I’ve dealt in the past and I keep in touch with you, this post is not about you. You have not set off any alarms in my gut and you have earned my respect.
This doesn’t surprise me at all
Today, there are ten unemployed journalists at the Miami Herald. It seems that not only is Miami government a banana republic, it’s media is the journalistic equivalent. Reporters who get paid to work for Radio Marti at the same time as they are molding public opinion about Cuba in a “respected” publication are no better than the corrupt sleeze in Batista’s regime that led us to 46 years of Fidel Castro.
”This is such an obvious textbook case,” said University of Florida journalism professor Jon Roosenraad. ‘This is exactly like a business reporter during the day going out and moonlighting as a PR [public relations] person for a local company at night and then going back to the paper the next day and writing about `his’ company.”
Dr. Jon Roosenraad was professor of my “Ethics in Journalism” course and one of the two or three professors at UF whom I respect the most. If every college of journalism had a Jon Roosenraad on staff and ethics were made a five-credit-hour course, then I think the next generation of reporters just might enter the profession with enough character to become part of a responsible press.
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