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April 2001
Journalism How-To
Guiding the unprincipled journalist.
By Kimberly Conniff
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What standards, ethics, and limits do journalists have to guide them? Unfortunately, little more than vague principles, which are too often improvised and makeshift. Two accomplished journalists sought to change that. But instead of actually creating standards, Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard (and this magazine's former ombudsman), and Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, talked to newspeople about what guidelines they already use. After 21 public forums, two surveys, and interviews with more than 100 journalists, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (Crown Publishers) emerged. A straightforward guide that should be of interest to the informed news consumer, the book is a collection of core principles. The authors' assessment is bleak; they contend, for example, that objectivity in the news is often sacrificed for entertainment. Rather than merely indict the trade, however, Kovach and Rosenstiel suggest that it's not too late for the profession to embrace the things that are done right. Some are common sense: Journalists' first loyalty should be to citizens, for example, and not to the corporations that pay them. But the authors also remark on how often such fundamentals are ignored. "[These elements] hold the only protection against the force that threatens to destroy journalism and thus weaken democratic society," write Kovach and Rosenstiel. "This is the threat that the press will be subsumed inside the world of commercialized speech." 
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