By Michael Miner
The AdviceLine was heavily promoted beforehand on the Internet, and the handful of calls that have arrived give us an idea of what it might be good for. One was from an editor of a southern paper who’d been asked to give a speech on ethics and needed help. The other five all involved quandaries. As the Tribune’s Casey Bukro, another founder of the service, puts it, “We’re getting real professionals calling with real problems.”
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Next Ozar heard from a political reporter who’d been looking into an incumbent’s conflicts of interest. If he wrote the story his subject was likely to be voted out of office, but the opponent looked even worse. What to do?
The murder of two Dartmouth professors had reminded a local reporter of a similar double murder a decade earlier. A surviving family member feared for his life if that old case was resurrected. Should the reporter, who assumed the New York Times eventually would draw the parallel even if she didn’t, honor the survivor’s request for privacy?
So the line is tended by Ozar; by Loyola communications professor Gilda Parrella; by James Burke, a senior lecturer in strategic management at Loyola who chairs the Center for Ethics’ Corporate Values Outreach Advisory Board; and by board members David Enright and John Conmy. Burke, Enright, and Conmy all have spent years working at large corporations and focusing on ethics.
These periodic after-action meetings bring the ethicists together with Bukro and other Headline Club leaders to hash over the advice that’s been given out. Ozar compares them to the periodic meetings of ethics committees in hospitals–a milieu he knows a lot more about than newsrooms. The AdviceLine’s first after-action meeting was Tuesday of last week, and Bukro told me there was some disagreement over how the publisher should deal with her race-relations columnist.
“The good ones go after the tough stories–like Bartlett and Steel,” Bukro says. But, he allows, “there aren’t many Bartlett and Steels. Publishers just don’t give you that kind of time.”
