The Code

Even when I attended sports camps at BYU when I was 13-years-old, I needed to sign an agreement to uphold the standards of BYU. I didn’t think about it much at that point, my mother just told me to sign and I signed. I usually would snicker a little bit at the modesty rules and then go about my 13-year-old life. Now, at BYU I still live under the BYU honor code and I plan to live by that code for the rest of my life. I plan to go into broadcast journalism and uphold a standard of excellence and honor.

This whole semester I have been learning about print journalism in this class and broadcast journalism in another class. It has been interesting to see how they overlap, because they really are the exact same thing. The delivery is what sets them apart and it is those deliveries that draw in specific students to those majors. Both print and broadcast journalism seek to find the truth and to share it.

It is important to remain honest when reporting. Only report that facts and not things that may be or are likely to be facts. This keeps journalists out of libel problems and keeps a journalist’s name clean. But obviously, fact checking and getting good sources of information is key.

Edward R. Murrow said, “to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.” As journalists, our credibility is all we have. One silly mistake and we can lose everything. One silly name inserted that didn’t really exist and no one will hire us. Our job is based upon being trusted. If we lose someone’s trust, then they probably won’t wait around for us to earn it again, they’ll just go to another source. We learned in my broadcast class that the anchors that are most watched are the ones that the audience feels like they can trust. But if the anchor reads something off the teleprompter that a journalist wrote and it turns out to be false, then he anchor is the one who takes the biggest fall.

Along with honesty is independence from the subject you are writing about. Even if a journalist thinks or knows that are independent, it still may appear to an audience that they are tied in. Just how the first guest speaker is class told us about writing about his son’s school. His son had nothing to do with the incident, but since he went to the school at all, the journalist appeared to be too closely linked to the subject on a personal level.

The topic came up in class about if we would be willing to go to jail to protect a source. I loved to avoid answering that question because I just cannot even imagine being in that situation. The interviews I plan on doing would be local, non-government, sports teams, or maybe if I am really lucky Hollywood stars. But this class has made me recognize the steps I need to take to avoid going to jail or losing my credibility. I plan to tell a source that if I end up in court, I will say their name. Though, I still do not desire to do any interviews that may lead to the courthouse.

I think a part of me loves this profession because it does seem to require perfection. There is the truth and there is everything else. You either get it right or not. It’s all a matter how much you are willing to work to find the real story. We learned about muckrakers who went undercover and risked their lives to find the truth, but what are we willing to do?

I really enjoyed in class when we talked about balance in writing. There are always two sides to every issue, but we addressed the issue of subjects having equal balance or not. Before this class, I felt like journalism was sort of without a soul. Because everything has to be given without bias, without personality, and with balance for each opposing side. But that’s not exactly correct. With certain topics, the information can lean one way and there’s nothing wrong with that. Now, we should not strive to be like the anchor we watched in class who totally lost it with the woman who rallied at a funeral, but it is okay to have human emotions. And also as we learned in class, we don’t have to totally separate ourselves from society because we are a journalist. We can have friends!

Whenever we would talk about proper proportion in class, I would immediately think about the tabloids. I will not lie, I love waiting in line at the grocery store and reading the headlines of the magazines. Do I really care if some actress got a horrible haircut or if there are rumors of him and her getting back together? No. But they still do amuse me for the 3 minutes wait and the store. The strange subconscious thing is that we expect that from magazines. When flipping through Seventeen magazine a few years ago I remember seeing an article about world hunger and thinking to myself “why is this in here?” But when I see an airy article on lipstick colors in a newspaper, I wonder the same thing. We expect newspapers to have the important information and to focus on that.

I have a lot of faith in journalists. The type of people that this profession attracts tends to be hard workers who sincerely want to do what is right. However, with the medium of print journalism changing, I fear that journalists may lose their place to electronic whiz kids who will write however they feel necessary. But that will only happen if we let it. Part of upholding a standard of excellence is doing what we can to preserve our industry. I don not mean to hold onto print, I just mean to do what we can to be at the front lines of going electronic with blogs, online sites, and new iphone apps. We cannot be left behind and to be left behind would be to let down our code of ethics.

The quote I based my bumper sticker project on was, “In America, a president reigns for four years, but journalism reigns forever” (Oscar Wilde). We need to make sure that is never doubted. Journalism is a reigning power in American and it was born that way. Printed papers is what united the citizens to fight back against the British in the early colonies.

For me, it all comes down to one thing; if a journalist writes for the right audience, then they can never stray too far from the path. Journalists are supposed to inform the public. I know that at this economic time, it can be hard because no paper want to lose advertisements and sometimes they just want to print the “popular” stories and maybe not the more “important” ones. But journalists must hold on to that standard. If the papers start telling the public only what they want to hear and not what they need to hear, then there really is no point. Facebook could probably do the same thing but much faster and for free. Excellence in journalism will come from staying true to the profession and the traditions therein. So what if there print paper dies and everything turn electronic? Journalism will still be alive as long as people are willing to find the truth and write it for the people. Even in tough times like this, keeping a perspective on what matters most is what will get us all through.

Last year I had the opportunity to go to LA with a bunch of BYU girls for a week and spend time with people from all over the country. We were with these people nearly 24 hours a day and got to know each other quite well. A particular bunch of college boys from the east coast were intrigued with our honor code. They would always run around and say “well what about THE CODE?” They would oftentimes make a joke out of it and try to make it relate to things like what pets were okay to have. But it really has made me realize that BYU is preparing us to easily live by ethical codes in the real world by having us abide by the BYU honor code now. I do not stress about upholding any journalism code of ethics because it is already a part of my life now.