Main Content
Lesson 3: Journalism's Obligations to the Public it Serves
Stakeholders
In Lesson 1, we mentioned the importance of identifying all of the stakeholders in an ethical dilemma. We said it was necessary to look beyond the obvious stakeholders who would be affected by the journalist’s decision and assign respective weights to all of them. Often, trying to resolve an ethical dilemma by simply making a decision that will please one stakeholder could end up harming other stakeholders.
Take a look at the following “Police Log” entry that was published in 1993 by the Penn State student-run publication The Daily Collegian. Here is the actual story, with one minor alteration:
Police Log
Couple cited for sex in stuck elevator: A man and a woman were charged with disorderly conduct Saturday night after police found them having sex in an elevator.
The State College Police Department was called to Park Hill Apartments, 478 E. Beaver Ave., because an elevator was stuck between floors.
When the doors were opened, a gust of hot wind was emitted and two people … (NAMES REMOVED BY THE COURSE AUTHOR) were found partially dressed having sexual intercourse. The officer reported the couple was practicing safe sex by using a condom.
The “sex in the elevator” item eventually became the focus of a chapter in a journalism ethics text by Steven Knowlton. The controversy arose over the Collegian’s decision to include the names of the two individuals cited; the woman mentioned in the story withdrew from the university before the end of the term and Knowlton’s text suggests the embarrassment following the publication of the story was responsible.
Suppose we decide to minimize harm for the woman and her partner and omit their names from the story, publishing all other details. Will that decision affect any other stakeholders?
- If we don’t name the couple, we now place every resident of Park Hill Apartments under the cloud of being the infamous “Sex in the Elevator Couple.” If you live in the building, how would you feel if your parents saw the story? Professors?
- If we don’t print their names, how do we respond to other individuals who were named elsewhere in that police log? And yes, the blotter did name two other individuals who were cited that weekend for disorderly conduct, including one individual cited nine times in five different places because of alcohol-related disturbances. Isn’t it “embarrassing” to those individuals who were also cited? Is it fair their names were published but not the couple?
As an aside: The full version of the police log containing the names of the sex in the elevator couple is no longer readily available online, raising the whole issue of “unpublishing” information documenting youthful indiscretions now that Internet searches are so easy. As an experiment, I typed the woman’s name into Google and got 8,000,000 hits; the Collegian story was not among the first five pages. I then typed her name and “Collegian” into Google and got 7,210 hits; the story was not among the first three pages. I didn’t keep searching beyond those initial eight Google pages!