Sleepless Nights

I could barely sleep the nights my high school paper went to the printer. A million little doubts floated in the darkness and I stayed awake to listen to them all. Did I check my sources? Was I fair to my interviewees? Should I have put that quote in? On and on it went until the million little doubts fed my sleepless dreams. Lurking in the darkness was the knowledge that soon my high school newspaper, Neirad, was going to be in the hands of my classmates.

In our assigned reading from The Mind of a Journalist, Jim Willis says, “Reporters spend many sleepless nights worrying over whether they treated sources and the subjects of their stories fairly or whether any innocents were harmed by the published or aired stories” (49).

Maybe that is the reason why I keep telling the doctor I need sleeping pills. I hope being a part insomniac will make me a better reporter.

I believe the only way a reporter can sleep at night is by abiding by their conscience. Yes, stress will keep every reporter up at night but following one’s conscience will eventually lull a reporter to sleep. When I was on my high school paper, I made it a habit to question myself (I already told you, didn’t I, that I am a natural stress case?). For every article I wrote, I worried about getting the quotes right, getting the multiple sides of the story, and thinking beyond the immediate consequences.

I realize now how beneficial it was to worry. By worrying, I asked myself the right questions to ensure the truth. As Professor Campbell said, “You can ruin a reputation in a day.” The power of the press simply cannot be trifled with. In high school, I especially did not want to wrongly ruin the reputation of people I see on a daily basis. But I was reassured by the simple fact that I knew, in every step of the researching and writing process, for every article, I had taken the time to listen to my conscience.

In class, we used the Poynter Institute “Checklist of Questions to Make Good Ethical Decisions.” One of the questions led us to consider sources’ family members. Indeed, a reporter must think of the many people an article can affect. When my group was discussing whether or not it was moral for newspapers to print the BTK letters, our conversation led to multiple considerations. We had to think about how the letters would affect the newspaper, the community, the victims, and the victims’ families.

The title of the chapter assigned for reading from The Elements of Journalism is “Journalists Have a Responsibility to Conscience.” My conscience is a little like that stress bird I told you about a few blog assignments ago. Except my conscience bird is somewhere humming around in my head. It flaps its wings whenever anything of moral consequence is considered in my mind. While this conscience bird can give me quite a headache, I know I must listen to it. By listening to my conscience, I can write articles that readers can trust.

In the chapter from The Elements of Journalism, the authors discuss the “pressures against individual conscience.” One pressure is time. In a fast-pace newsroom, checking facts can be time consuming. They argue, “In this atmosphere it is easy to conclude that a good story is any story that is finished” (241).

On politicsdaily.com, Walter Shapiro argues for a “slow-news movement” to end the “P.T. Barnum media age when being first trumps being accurate.” He says, "It is as if the motto of today's journalism has become: 'He who dies with the most clicks wins.'"

What will a reporter do for a story? Some will do almost anything. But reporters must not disavow media ethics for a story. The media ethics I will always tuck into my reporter's notebook will be to take the time, even if I have to do it on the way to the printer, to double check the facts. While getting the most clicks would be nice, getting the truth right is the only way I can sleep at night.