I wrote my capstone essay on an ethical dilemma I encountered during my work at the Columbia Missourian city newspaper. In this work, I discuss ethics as they pertain to concepts like independence from faction and media framing.
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Capstone Essay – Navigating the Ethics in Front Page Story Coverage
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My fellow journalism students and I had many opportunities to reflect on media ethics during our fall 2015 semester, when racial protests took center stage on Mizzou’s campus. However, the most challenging ethical situation I’ve faced as a journalist came from a ripple effect of these protests the following February.
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At this time, I was working as a front page designer at the Columbia Missourian city newspaper, where MU students work part-time to earn upper-level class credit. UM system president Tim Wolfe had stepped down the previous November after black students accused him of failing to address racist incidents on campus, and one went on a hunger strike. Still, the protests remained a key topic of discussion on campus the following spring, and at the center of this was communications professor Melissa Click. Click had demanded “some muscle” to remove independent journalist Mark Schierbecker from a public quad, where he was covering the rally that followed Wolfe’s resignation. When the public backlash against her continued into 2016 — the Missouri General Assembly even threatened to revoke Mizzou’s funding while she remained employed — Click sought to improve her public image. She hired Status Labs, a "digital reputation management" firm that planned to "create a new media cycle" and favorably influence Google's algorithm with media content: new interviews, black-and-white studio photos of Click and positive social media posts about her.
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The Missourian had published each of these types of content online in a centerpiece story profiling Click. The story was nearly 3,000 words long and only briefly mentioned Status Labs’ media strategy toward its end. When I walked into the newsroom to create the next day’s print front page, I expected to have the same creative leeway I enjoyed in creating previous layouts. This time, though, the design editor gave me specific instructions as to what the senior editors collectively wanted on the front page: the Click story, her black-and-white photos as dominant page elements and the headline suggestion “Rebuilding Her Image.” In an instant, it hit me that I was about to become a pawn, designing a front page that could forgo the Missourian’s independent voice and instead enable Status Labs’ agenda. I voiced my concerns with the senior editors and photographers present, hoping to brainstorm alternative layout options. In the moment, I made my case that the Missourian ought to value its independent voice and consider its story framing carefully.
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I think most journalists would like to believe they follow the concept of "independence from faction," as presented by Kovach and Rosenstiel in "The Elements of Journalism” (Kovach & Rosenstiel 118), and that their own judgment influences their journalism more heavily than any external entity or opinion group. When Melissa Click’s story had such close ties to many student journalists, however, independence from faction became easier said than done. Some journalists’ ties to Click gave them sympathetic attitudes toward her. They had taken her classes or sympathized with the black students Click argued she was defending by preventing a journalist from talking with them. On the other hand, other students’ perceptions of Click skewed negative because she had accosted a fellow student journalist. At the Missourian, I found myself wondering if the students covering Click might fall short of journalism that “[informed] rather than [manipulated]” and was not "held hostage to [personal experience]" as Kovach and Rosenstiel emphasized. This question became even more pronounced for me when I arrived in the newsroom and overheard a student editor, who was mocking Schierbecker while her peers volunteered how they thought the whole Click situation was blown out of proportion and should just fade away.
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In hindsight, however, I wonder if I would've even raised this question if I didn’t belong to an opinion faction myself — one sympathetic to Schierbecker and in favor of Click being fired for negligence. In the moment, I aimed to strike a balance; I wouldn’t sugarcoat Click's call for “muscle,” but I also wouldn’t use my design position to heap punishment onto her. Part of this was that I knew the tendencies of others who belonged to my opinion faction. Many would verbally harass Click online anytime a story was published about her role in the protests, even if it wasn’t critical. If I framed a Click story in a critical way — using the infamous photo of Click grabbing at Schierbecker’s camera, for example — I could attract a rabid mob of readers to the Missourian's comments section and social media channels. Then, I could very well be responsible for additional hate mail being sent Click’s way, a phenomenon that had occurred over 1,100 horrifying pages pages of what? Social media? already (Chronicle of Higher Education).
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Pictured: Prof. Click’s infamous protest photo (left) and her PR photo (right)
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While discussing my ethical dilemma with the newsroom's editors and photographers, I raised the topic of stakeholders. The public had a vested interest in the Click saga, I argued, and we owed it to our readers to present the story in a way that would better allow them to draw their own conclusions. In my mind, there was a key opportunity to do so here: In the story, Click had framed her actions as a one-off mistake, but just that day, the Missourian had released new footage from a police body camera. The footage depicted Click at a second, earlier protest, telling an officer to "get your f--king hands off me." I thought it would be a disservice both to the public and our publication to bury this detail in the print version, especially when this would mean a reversal from the Missourian's online version, where the video was depicted prominently at the top of the web page.
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Of course, I also had to consider the potential cost in this shift of focus. Placing focus on the video would guarantee a great deal of negative attention in Click’s direction. This could have veered too far in the direction of “heaping punishment," so once I finished my group discussion with the senior editors, I approached the design editor for assistance. I asked for his help in designing a final layout that responsibly showcased Click’s altercation with the police. Click had a clear stake in any story about her, I reasoned, so I didn’t want any such story in my control to dip too far into sensationalism or recklessness. Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, wrote about stakeholders for the Poynter Institute's website in 2001, asking journalists to consider 10 questions about stakeholders in ethically challenging situations. He asks journalists "how [they would] feel if [they] were in the shoes of one of the stakeholders?" and also "What are [the stakeholders'] motivations? Which motivations are legitimate?" (Poynter). Though I stand by my process that night in the newsroom, I would’ve definitely taken pause had I been presented with those questions. Without a doubt, it would have felt lousy to be in Click's position, and from that context, her motivation in trying to boost her public perception through the media was perfectly legitimate. Ethically, however, I was not content to use Missourian layouts to, in essence, cover up Click's mistakes. In particular, I thought Missouri taxpayers ought to know the new information on Click if they were potentially going to continue paying her salary.
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Ultimately, a slightly modified version of the original layout ended up being published: One black-and-white photo of Click was placed on the front page rather than all three. My design editor and I also designed a different centerpiece for the jump page, featuring stills of Click from the police camera footage. The headline for the complete package ended up being "Image-Building," and the caption under Click's black-and-white photo clarified that they were, indeed, a PR firm product. With regard to the Missourian’s voice, I felt this was an acceptable compromise: The editors' preferred centerpiece was kept, but thanks to my feedback, it had better disclosure as to the content’s public relations origin. What's more, the giant story essentially took on two focuses, rather than one, reflecting its dual nature more accurately: that Click was on an image rehab tour, but that additional evidence was just found, detailing that her actions on the Quad were not one-off mistakes. All in all, I think from an ethical standpoint, the situation was resolved as seamlessly as was possible for a story that came together from the start as a result of a great mixture of viewpoints.
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Pictured: the final versions of my front page design (left) and jump page design (right)
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In the aftermath of this experience, my focus on the ethical implications of story framing and voice in the media at large has definitely been enhanced. As a current Missouri state government reporter and aspiring political correspondent, there's never a story I read or report in this genre where I'm not constantly analyzing how the focal events can and should be told, as well as who's directly or indirectly benefiting from those choices. This is especially important to me, because I know I'm not the only one analyzing the possibilities in my field. At a recent Missouri General Assembly session I attended, politicians on the floor openly bemoaned that "the media is going to portray the negative aspects of [a bill]," a statement with an ultimatum embedded in its subtext: "Media, depending on how you cover the bill we support, you're either lending your voice to a partisan cause or you're lending it to ours - and we're on the right side here." And to be fair, intentionally or not, the politicians raised a salient point I've also considered at length: What happens when, later in my career, maintaining independence from faction for my outlet means providing coverage that's critical or even flat-out detrimental for someone or something I like? In any case, thanks to my experience handling the Melissa Click cover story, I find myself more prepared to grapple with such challenges, mentally and ethically, as I prepare to enter the world of journalism outside of the Missourian.
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