My case study is on the decision by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to publish an editorial titled “Reason as Racism”. John Robinson Block is a known and avid Trump supporter. Block is also the publisher and editor-in-chief for Post-Gazette. He ordered the editorial to be drafted and published on the Toledo Blade, a sister publication of the Post-Gazette owned by the Blocks, and a subsequent decision was made to re-publish that on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The inciting incident that lead to the decision was Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s decision to publish an AP story on President Trump’s reported remarks on why the US should take more immigrants from “s–thole countries” in Africa. Shortly after that, he ordered the Post-Gazette to remove the “vulgar language” from the lede.
The diversity issue might lie within Trump’s comments from the initial glance, but I am instead focusing on the action taken by Block as an overruling power over the two publications and his multimedia company. The scope I intend to look into this subject is, of course, the inherent agreement to racism of Block’s direct orders being a negligence on diversity. However, another viewpoint would be the uselessness of having a diversified newsroom or environment ending up not mattering because of a superior decision.
The piece was to clearly support Trump and justify his comments on that, and it has an argumentative tone to it. This sparked massive outrage from the staff members of the publication and members of the journalism community. A large criticism was that the author column was “The Editorial Blog Pittsburgh Post-Gazette”, yet the idea and political view was not well-received by the majority of its staff. Michael Fuoco penned a piece on the Columbia Journalism Review on how frustrating the experience was. “By any objective measure, the editorial was intellectually dishonest and racist, twisting itself in knots in a colossally failed attempt to defend the indefensible,” Fuoco mentioned in the piece. As the president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, he led the guild to write a letter to the editor decrying an editorial. It was ultimately denied of being published on the Post-Gazette by Block, despite Fuoco wanted to grant the publication the courtesy to publish it first. It was then released to media outlets and social media and it was well received by the public and the profession.
A significant problem in this case is how the family-owned company by the Blocks could also heavily influence its publication like that by installing John R. Block as the publisher and editor-in-chief. In the Poynter Institute article about the incident by Indira Lakshmanan, it was even titled as “Abomination”. The tweet on Block requesting the Post-Gazette to pull the vulgar language comment is quoted, and it said “Our publisher is requesting us to remove @realDonaldTrump’s “vulgar language” from the lede in our @AP story about his vulgar language.” It was described as a “cry for help” as read by many journalists. Personally, I understand the premise of it, and also the need of featuring different voices in a publication. However, the problem, as mentioned in the multiple ethical decision-making discussions we have had in class, is that racism, among other things like the Nazis, is indubitably wrong and it cannot be argued otherwise. The media should not be used to spread this type of message, especially when it was described as “intellectually dishonest and racist”.
On the grounds of ethics, this piece should not even be seeing the light of day because of its support toward racism.
“One Owner, One Voice? Testing a Central Premise of Newspaper-Broadcast Cross-Ownership Policy” is a study conducted by David Pritchard, Christopher Terry & Paul R. Brewer on the premise of cross-ownership of media outlets circulating a singular message throughout the 2004 Presidential Election. The result was proved to be not valid. “Cross-owned newspapers and broadcast stations may not always provide more viewpoint diversity than do similar media without common ownership, but there is no reason to believe that they systematically provide less.” (p. 24) Block Communications Inc. is indeed a cross-ownership program with multiple media outlets. Yet I don’t think they can escape the allegation in this vastly different media culture. We are in such a crooked culture that the president took a stand against traditional media and is in the middle of splitting the narrative and further differentiating the country. It was also mentioned that “a growing body of research demonstrates that news content responds to an economic logic which incorporates audience preferences, the value of certain segments of the audience to advertisers, the costs of producing various kinds of news, and the positioning of competing media products, among other factors.” (p. 23) It is evident that the Post-Gazette certainly leans that way, yet this is about the owner overruling the editorial staff and enforcing his power onto the news staff and the newspaper itself.
This brings me to the second ethical issue in the difficulty to measure ethics in journalism in the current political climate. As mentioned, the president has seemingly taken a stand against the journalism industry by reportedly calling out media outlets, as extreme as pointing them out as the enemy of the state. On top of that, an older, less technologically-savvy demographic was behind the push for Trump’s election. In turn, they are generally more susceptible to falling for what we know as fake news. This, plus the rise in social media, has driven the news market into instability, especially with controversial and sometimes even misleading news. In Aidan White’s article “Political and economic power and media ethics”, he mentioned that “applying ethical values in this complex environment is increasingly difficult and some traditional media have allowed commercial and political bias to overwhelm their commitment to public interest journalism.” (p. 192)
In turn, in this era of journalism, both journalists and the general public have to be adaptive and somewhat malleable to the constantly-changing journalistic climate. It is extremely hard to make sound ethical decisions in such a short time (in cases of breaking news) and one standard might not work for most cases. In class, we have discussed the importance of having a protocol in place before breaking news and of course, it is generally helpful for news like shootings, which is sadly the norm now. However, when encountering acts of what some may consider domestic terrorist attacks with debatable motives and not all the details (like the recent mail bomb attempts), it is really hard to draw the line on what angle to take and how to report the news itself.
In conclusion, I feel like just as everything in this world, there always need to be some kind of check-and-balance for decisions, or at least autonomy. News media and journalism is standing on such thin ice now that mutual understanding and also what is “doing the right thing” has become so much more important. One might argue that as the owner and the person who writes the paychecks, John Block can do whatever he wants and speak his mind. I see the rationale behind that as well. However, the problem also lies in the message itself being deceiving, racism being completely wrong, and, although insignificant, the most serious offense being in addressing the author line of the blog “The Editorial Blog Pittsburgh Post-Gazette”. It is an ultimately cowardly move in my opinion by throwing the newsroom staff under the bus and associating them with a indefensible stance and message.
Works cited:
David Pritchard , Christopher Terry & Paul R. Brewer (2008) One Owner,
One Voice? Testing a Central Premise of Newspaper-Broadcast Cross-Ownership Policy,
Communication Law and Policy, 13:1, 1-27, DOI: 10.1080/10811680701754910
WHITE, A. (2017). Political and economic power and media ethics. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 13(1/2), 191–196. https://doi-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1386/macp.13.1-2.191pass:[_]7