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Introduction: The News Media: Rights, Responsibilities, and Remedies
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13956 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1988 |
544 Words |
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The increasingly influential role of the news media in American society and its effects on the political process in this country are coming under renewed scrutiny. In this special report, THE WORLD & I examines the responsibilities of the news media and how well they are fulfilling them.
John Silber, president of Boston University, notes that "the media have now become the chief educators of the American people; they must therefore assume the duties and responsibilities of educators as well as those of journalists and entertainers." As educators, they play a critical role in shaping the reasoning ability and opinions of the people, which in turn affects our survival as a free people.
Elizabeth R. Rindskopf, general counsel of the National Security Agency, assesses the media's role in protecting national security, particularly with regard to leaks that may unintentionally reveal intelligence information. She suggests ways in which the media can "participate in full and open debate of policy issues without harming our nation's vital--yet fragile--foreign intelligence assets." One of her proposals is that the media develop a code of conduct to address their responsibilities in handling classified information and the problems it poses.
Ernest L. Lefever, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Ethics and United States Foreign Policy, notes: "Through our history, there has been an inevitable, and to some extent desirable, tension between the need for secrecy by the government and the demands for disclosure by the press." A recent study he did, however, showed that media coverage of the CIA is highly one-sided, stressing negative over positive stories. "This distorted picture of U.S. intelligence operations... seriously impaired the capacity of the United States to respond to the challenges of our dangerous world," Lefever says.
Brent Bozell III and Marc S. Ryan, chairman and deputy director, respectively, of the Media Research Center, examine in detail the news media's coverage of U.S.-Soviet relations and conclude, as did Lefever, that one-sidedness is all too frequent and that distortion too often favors the enemies of democracy. "In fact," they write, "moral distinctions should be made in reporting. Communism is evil; democracy has defects, but carries within itself the remedy for these shortcomings."
Investigative reporter Joseph C. Spear, who writes a syndicated column with Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, urges greater openness on the part of government. He takes a look at some recent incidents of media coverage of public figures' personal lives and concludes that, in general, "serious character flaws and behavioral indiscretions merit publication, especially if they affect the public figure's performance of duties." Such scrutiny of public figures, he says, "is a correct and necessary part of the democratic process and anyone who enters the political arena must expect it."
In the opinion of John C. Merill, a longtime journalism professor, American journalists "have been pushing ethics out of the picture and enthroning expediency and self-interest." However, the tide is turning, he says. "There are indications that ethical consciousness is rising in the press and considerable soul-searching about the right thing to do is now mingling with concern about such traditional shibboleths as the
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