What I Am Going to Do Over Vacation

Oh many things, including growing my goatee back, and this is why.

Since most of the kids in my Journalism Ethics class are seniors, it being a "capstone" course, I always take a field trip on the last day to the legendary Pig and Whistle on Masonic near the U. It serves food, so the under-21 are welcome.

This year the guys in class showed up late -- all two of them -- so at first I was seated at a long table with ten young woman. The happy acccident of my sitting at a table with ten such females -- damned handsome, as the Brits would say; just lovely -- was much admired by the guys at the bar. There were approving looks, and banter.

You know I was vaguely embarrassed, though I'm not sure why.

Matter and antimatter. Tiger and anti-Tiger?

The young ladies were very proper. Two or three had a single beer, several had soft drinks and two or three had nothing at all, having been warned more than once against roofies, I guess. I had a couple Guinness (a very nourishing and wholesome beverage, a fine lunch substitute), and the total bill was still only 33 bucks and change.

"You didn't put on much of a show," Chris the bartender said.

Anyway, the guys from class finally showed up and had a beverage, and one of them said how disappointed he and a couple other guys who had me for journalism classes were that I had shaved off my goatee.

"It makes you look like your evil twin," he said. "We really liked it."

What an irresistible idea, looking like Bad Spock in the episode set in the antimatter -- or, at least bizarro, universe -- where good Kirk suddenly discovers what fun it is to be a bad boy for a while. (If you have a taste for chewing scenery, evil is always the more savory .)

So I'm growing back my chin rag, my face fungus, my stud stubble.

Does he or doesn't he? Is he or isn't he?

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"Objectivity"

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Which I swaddle in quotations marks because it's a term I dislike, at least applied to journalism. I dislike the connotation, which is that a journalist is doing something that approaches the status of a scientific inquiry, and that journalists can do their job in a spirit of detachment and neutrality.

We were talking about this in Journalism Ethics today, though I confess it was one of my high RPM days, and I did not do a good job of promoting discussion, and the class was left hanging because after much prodding of them, and some confusing of them, I chose not to sum up, thinking it vain to hog all the brilliance.

If I had summed up, I would have insisted that we should put the O-word beside the N-word and leave it right out of civilized discourse. As that fulmination turns to ash, I concede that I am inclined to pursue some of (expletive deleted's) constituent elements as one might the Pole Star. Though Fox has certainly wiped its ass on the slogan "fair and balanced," I am not uncomfortable saying that a journalist should aspire to such.

Fairness is a kind of schoolyard virtue, the implication being it is a quality driven by fundamental character, not deracinated brainpower, an act both simple and elusive.

As for "balanced," once you get past the idea that everything in your story must contradicted, like matter and antimatter in one of a hundred Star Trek episodes -- sometimes it shouldn't be; sometimes there's one true thing so leave it alone, uncontradicted -- and once you accept there are times where a statement *should* be balanced but that balancing may be a *mosaic* of alternatives and not just the old two-ended seesaw, well, with all that stipulated I really do like the notion of pursuing balance.

As long as you accept the responsibility of refusing to juggle every ball thrown your way in the name of a "balanced story." If you're asked to juggle a rotten egg, throw it back. What I'm saying with that little comparison is simple: We have a responsibility to be accurate. You may call it facticity or naive empiricism, but it's where we start. Even 10 years ago that seemed less urgent. It seemed the greater problem was the unwillingness to sift the facts and arrive at an opinion. But in this age of Fox's Ministry of Truth and bloggers who certainly *can* function as reporters, and deserve the title, but just don't bother, given the fact that facts muddy their opinions, I have a renewed respect for simple facts. (Facts are such a speedbump, aren't they?)

I understand selective presentation of accurate information can be deeply dishonest, but that pales besides all those voices -- the lazy, the incompetent, the shameless liars -- that are out there right now just making shit up.

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Dishonest Smiles, Duplicitous Nods, Iniquitous Twinkles

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The topic of the first essay in my journalistic ethics class is the "ethics of interviewing," which I put in quotes not simply because it's a title but also because one sometimes uses quote marks to indicate that which is quoted is not to be considered in the common way, that it may be ironic or equivocal.

What is equivocal about interviewing is its hiddenness. What happens in interviewing stays in interviewing, even when interviews are videotaped since questions are often edited out. But for print reporters for whom jotted notes are the only record of what went on -- why borrow trouble by even suggesting you have questions about how you question?

I like to say that the reporter's task is to pump the interviewee dry -- the implication being that broad ethical latitude should be given as to methods --but that the real ethical heavy lifting comes when you decide what to do with what you've pumped out. I suppose my operative principle is that you, as interviewer, need to know everything but that your reader -- and indeed your editor, that cold-hearted bastard -- need not know what you know. Some things are meant to stay in your notebook.

You might say this is more of a feature writer's approach and that a news reporter would, of course, empty the notebook onto the page without compunction. I think not. I think every good reporter gets information about which he/she does not feel the benefit of publication outweighs potential damage to the source of the information, even if the only damage comes from identifying the source.

But returning to the techniques of interviewing, one profits (I think) from questioning how you question. Naturally, as a teacher of ethics, I would feel that way. That's the point of the course. Prethink. Rethink. And *then* having said *that*, I warn against analysis paralysis. If the only lesson the kids take is to be timid deferential interviewers, didn't we spend the Bush years relearning how ill democracy is served by timid deferential *ethically fastidious* interviewing?

La ronde, or do I mean thesis/antithesis/synthesis? Mulling is such a good word. In ethics class we spend a good deal of time mulling.

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I Need to Determine the Order in Which Students Will Post on My Journalism Ethics Blog

The students learn I am not only fair but gadget-obssessed. Oh. Each line in my grade book is numbered.

http://www.random.org/sequences/?min=1&max=13&col=1&format=html&rnd=new

Students: I figured there would be a random number generator on the web, and there was. So *without human intervention* here’s the lineup for posting dilemmas on our blog.

Brause (next Monday)

Hechema

Raab

Baron

Na

White

O’Brien

Laxamana

Haughey

Williams

Ryan

Pagdanganan

Schildhause