by Suzanne Hanney, IWPA 1st Vice President
Loyola Offers Journalists AdviceLine
by Suzanne Hanney, IWPA
1st Vice President
The Chicago Headline Club and Loyola University Center for Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists began Jan. 22 because of the positive commitment toward professional standards in confusing times, not a negative belief in society today, said the Loyola University professor who is one of its founding team members.
Casey Bukro, as a Chicago Tribune staffer and member of the Headline Club/Society of Professional Journalists, held the conviction that there was a need for ethics advice and a quick way of getting it to people, said David Ozar, PhD, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics at Loyola University of Chicago. The Center hosts regular corporate values breakfasts and television journalist Carol Marin, a speaker at one of them, brought the two groups together.
Loyola was chosen as their partner, Ozar said, because its work in corporate and civic decision making uses ethics as part of the process rather than as a studied after effect.
Its not our job to tell people what they ought to do, but to help people come to good decisions by making sure they ask the right questions, Ozar said. Are they presenting the truth in an unbiased manner, and then they do so, are they really serving the interests of the public? A third kind of question is potential conflict of interest that could bias the story.
As an example, he cited a newspaper that planned a conference on advances in information technology. The publisher asked the technical editor to recommend panelists; the editor started receiving requests from sources that wanted to pay to be on the panel, with the prospect of free publicity.
Hotline committee members concluded that asking editorial to help the paper make money could harm its reputation for telling the truth.
The AdviceLine, (312) 409-3334, takes calls from throughout the nation on a voice mail basis with 24-hour turnaround. Four ethicists Ozar, a graduate student, and two others trained in corporate compliance handle phone calls.
The team of philosophers and business conduct professionals bring their own disciplines to the ethics hotline, augmented by several training sessions with the journalists. In addition to decision-making approaches, they discussed truth-telling, conflict of interest, weighing benefits and harm from possible courses of action. Periodically, the interdisciplinary team reviews recent hotline calls as part of its own continuing education.