One way ethics has impacted my job as a journalist has been conflict of interest. My first encounter with this problem was between publications. I started working at the Maneater my freshmen year, but in 2005, The Missourian hired me for the summer to do the sports scores page. At the time, I was aware of this as a conflict of interest and informed my employers. The sports editor said it would be fine to return to The Maneater in the fall as long as I didn’t have any affiliation with the Maneater over the summer.
My second encounter with the “act independently” part of the Code of Ethics had to do with sports itself. It has always been a rule at the sports desk that no one is to wear any sort of Mizzou apparel. (I have gotten around this by wearing a scarf over my fleece with a tiger logo on it.) While I agree with this rule, it is the unspoken rule that my sports editor enforces which is: No sports logos of any kind should be worn on the sports desk. He says that this is not a hard and fast rule, but we are all striving to be professional, and you can’t be professional if you are a fan.
Now, in no way am I a fan of any sort for any sport. Let me put it this way, I have to ask others the names of sports teams and what cities they are from. In other words, I have very little knowledge of sports, let alone have any sort of admiration for any particular team. However, there are others on the desk who do have their favorite teams.
I have several opinions on this subject. On one side, I think my editor is right about not showing any bias toward a team. When a reporter is covering a team, he should not be wearing a Texas Longhorns hat to report on the Tigers. My editor provided some words of wisdom. He said it’s one thing to have a passion for something at heart, it’s another thing to broadcast it. In other words, you can like the Dallas Cowboys, but in the newsroom and on the field, you should appear to be an objective journalist.
On the other side, I think that as a designer, if I want to wear my Mizzou polo to work, I should be allowed to. Here are my reasons: 1) By wearing the shirt, I am showing support for the school of which I attend, not the sports teams. 2) I am never courtside covering a team for the Missourian. My job involves coming into the newsroom and putting words and photos on to the pages. But in the name of objectivity, I have refrained from wearing any visible Mizzou apparel.
So whether it is deciding how to play a story on 1A or setting aside my Mizzou jacket, journalism ethics do play a role in my work as a designer. I am the last person to make decisions about my pages before they are sent to the press, I am have to be completely accountable for everything I do. Even though my job doesn’t really entail a lot of content related issues, my job does have impact on what readers focus on and how they are drawn into the story, so I feel like I am contributing to the greater good. The integrity of the publication and my role as a journalist is important.
