Journalism's role as a trustworthy source of verified information is under siege. With unprecedented speed, modern crises now spur a phenomenal amount of real-time media content that challenges conventional journalistic practices.

How does the rapid influx of information — and misinformation — impact communication professionals, journalists, and the public? Abbie and Adrian explore the dynamic interplay of ethics, truth-telling, and the role of technology in shaping public perception.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on our website.

Key Takeaways

1. The rapid proliferation of crises and media through advanced technology poses unique ethical challenges for journalists in reporting verified facts.
2. Ethical journalism necessitates careful gatekeeping, especially when assessing user-generated content that could alter the authenticity of news stories.
3. Adrian emphasizes that professional journalists, even when acting in good faith, face difficult editorial decisions driven by external and internal pressures.
4. Abbie advocates for recognizing the complex decisions journalists must navigate to ethically and transparently communicate important narratives.
5. We discuss historical precedents in media ethics, highlighting the importance of intention and good faith in journalism.

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Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations firm in Phoenix, AZ.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a strategic communications consultancy for PR agencies and marketing firms, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy PRGN Presents: PR News & Views from the Public Relations Global Network, featuring conversations about strategic communications, marketing, and PR from PRGN, "the world’s local public relations agency.”

It’s a new year, a new you, maybe, and a new episode of the Copper State of Mind podcast. We had a totally different idea for what we were going to talk about today, but something about the nature of reality intruding on our plans is actually the new theme of this episode, and maybe even this year. We’re entering a period of time where the speed of crises, this modern crisis cycle, if you will, is increasing at a pace that is leaving us all breathless sometimes, as if punched in the gut.

And it’s very hard to know exactly how to react where communication and communicators fit into the contemporary landscape of business and politics and life. So let’s talk about it. People are struggling with the narrative, with the pictures and videos they see. Trust is declining. We’ve talked about that before. And we need to find a way to navigate as communicators and as professionals through an increasingly chaotic landscape. Abby, what’s on your mind?

You know, when I was in journalism school, I took a class on ethical communications. And, you know, I’m all of 19, 20 years old at the time, so I’m not sure I even understood what the word ethical meant. But the teacher would show two photos and asked us which one we thought should be used with a particular story. And one would be, you know, a very hard to look at scene. It might have been a sick child or a fire or something really dramatic. And then something that was a little bit more soft, still portraying the imagery you might want with the story, but a little bit easier. And what was the ethical implications of all of those and would create lively debate. And there was never going to be a right or wrong answer. It was just how we felt. And there was a lot of emotion that came into that.

And this would have been, of course, at the time where there wasn’t even a concept of what citizen journalism was. There wasn’t access to instant video and collection of data by virtually anyone anywhere. And so making an ethical decision may have felt much simpler then. And, you know, fast forward, here we are today where, you know, anyone with a cell phone has the opportunity to capture information.

We have a situation where, you know, editors are now editors, both print and broadcast are really having to face some really serious decisions about whether or not what they’re using in terms of visual components, audio transcripts that are being provided to them by individuals that may or may not come from the journalistic side of things. And are those needed to amplify their story? Are they adding fuel to the fire, so to speak, by showing something and really what’s the ethical dilemma that they’re all facing? And so although it is going to be a constant in our society today, it’s a little top of mind right now. And I think, you know, the situation and this, this is not a political discussion. We try to stay away from politics in particular, but certainly the circumstances that transpired in Minneapolis over the last handful of days, and certainly some things over the last many months where we’ve really had a bird’s eye view to situations that under normal circumstances, the average civilian would not have had a chance to see. And I think our colleagues in the newsrooms are really being faced with some decisions about whether or not.

Whether or not they should use the information they have, not so much whether they should be covering the story, because I think we can all agree that they should. But you know, what. What are they using to gather their news and where’s the verifiable elements and such? And I don’t know that I have an answer to this one. I just. It’s been kind of circulating and conversating with my other colleagues and really, you know, putting it into the lens of, you know, ethics and trust and transparency. This is certainly, you know, coming at it from another perspective.

Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on a lot of the troubling dimensions of this. And of course, even the verifiability of pictures and videos is now called into question with highly realistic AI generated images, which can be really cool and great in a creative context and not so cool and great if you’re trying to source a factual story and get to the bottom of something. And at the same time, while we don’t want this to be a political show, politics, the way it is being practiced intrudes on the practice of truth telling.

We’re now told that war is peace and up is down and lies are real and the truth is a lie, and it’s it in a way that is the story. And to try to find a way to navigate that minefield and get to the bottom of something is increasingly difficult. There’s probably never been a period of US history, and let’s just say human history, in which all actors operated in good faith and you could take anyone at their word, but certainly the level of bad faith acting in our contemporary world, not just in the US but abroad, the level of manipulation, disinformation, the kind of reality distortion machine that the Internet has become for so many people, it makes it very hard, especially as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, where you have journalists Being told that they are not allowed to ask certain kinds of questions or report certain kinds of stories, and the only official sources, vetted and approved sources will be allowed.

And I have to say, and I’m saying this in my personal capacity, you may or may not agree with me, Abby, but we’ve also had a problem for many years that is not new, of certain journalists and certain outlets taking public statements at face value and essentially treating, you know, the police spokesperson’s commentary after an incident as if it were the facts. And, you know, we. We now have even more intentional misrepresentation to deal with.

I don’t believe, by the way, that all of that was done in bad faith in the past. That’s not what I’m trying to say. But simply being a mouthpiece for the spokesperson of an official institution is not the only function of journalism, certainly, if it is at all. So I don’t know if that’s clear, but here I am trying to muddle my way through some pretty thorny topics without putting my foot in my mouth. And maybe I should just say what I’m thinking, not use my weasel words. But anyway, here we are.

Well, and, you know, the official spokesperson for an incident. Let’s put some assumptions around that. The official spokesperson for an incident has been authorized to speak on behalf of the entity they’re representing.

Yes.

They come to the microphone with the facts as they know them at the time. They are a credible resource.

Are we talking about the assumptions or the reality?

The assumption of. The assumption of right. And again, this is. There’s some of this. And so if you are in that environment and you’ve got your news conference setting and you’ve got the, you know, the journalists in front of you, you are the person that is. That has been designated to share this information, and you provide that information. The reporters take it. They go and write their story. That’s one element that, to the extent that it is controllable, it’s controllable. I think where we’re facing the challenges now, and we lumping myself in with my journalist colleagues, is there are so many others that have stepped forward in those situations that act as a spokesperson or an eyewitness.

And to the extent that journalists want more viewpoints, they might see the person across the street who’s holding up their phone camera and is filming the situation, and they go and say, well, what did you see? And that’s live on camera. And we see John Q. Public, Jane Q. Public, saying, I saw this, I saw that. That has not been verified. That is not considered factual shouldn’t be considered factual.

Where do we draw the line between, you know, that firsthand account and actually reporting on the news? The ability of anyone to take photos and are being encouraged to submit those to legitimate news operations? Where does the photo editor step in and say, as much as this picture truly represents the story we’re trying to tell, I can’t verify its accuracy. I am going to A, not use a photo or B, use a photo that one of my employees took.

Is a photo from across the street still showing an accident scene equally demonstrative of the story versus the one that is right there focused on, you know, the individual laying on a stretcher on the ground. So it’s. To me, we can go on and on about the, you know, the credibility of the information and such. And I think there’s one step further, which is, even if it’s credible, even if that photo is verifiable, it’s factual. It’s actually what happened.

Does it need to be the photo that we use in that story? And I think that these are questions that are being wrestled with amongst journalists, editors, the, you know, the publishers that are saying, you know, these are important pieces of the story. Names, dates, previous history, any of that helps tell the story. But where does the. Where do we cross? We draw the line and say, this doesn’t help advance that particular piece of information.

And I think that’s where we’re really, you know, there’s a struggle right now in where are. Where are those decisions being made? Where did. Where should we agree or disagree to put something in or not put something in? And by the act of doing or not doing, have we altered the outcome of that particular story by showing a particular picture, by stating the name of an individual, does that change anything? Or does it just add more to the story in maybe not so positive of a way?

Again, I don’t have an answer. I’m more. I’m wrestling with it myself. I see something and say, did I really? Like, I’ve been watching videos all week because I can’t not. But did I need to? Did I have to see what I’m seeing to still believe in, you know, and understand what this story is?

You’re actually bringing up a lot of interesting and somewhat distressing memories for me because I’m thinking about other situations where these ethical dilemmas and editorial dilemmas and those aren’t always the same thing. Although we would hope that the ethics is guiding the editing were at play. So one that comes to mind more than 20 years ago, as I’ve mentioned on this show and others, my job was to be the official spokesperson for a large international humanitarian relief agency.

And the stakes were high because we were operating in a hostile environment. And the government of the country that had given our organization permission to be there could have kicked us out at any time if they didn’t like the story we were telling. Our organization, Oxfam was actually there to do life saving humanitarian relief work with people displaced by the conflict in Darfur. But our organization, Oxfam, like many others, is also a media and policy and advocacy machine that is trying to influence, influence governments to stop wars, prevent poverty, alleviate suffering, et cetera. So on the one hand, our engineers and program people are there to do direct life saving assistance, and on the other hand, people like me are there to tell a story that the host government doesn’t want told, in part because they were actively fueling these genocidal campaigns of violence in Darfur.

And we did actually get kicked out eventually. But I remember vividly one trip that I had helped to coordinate for journalists from one of the largest newspapers in the UK. Huge circulation. It was The Sun. I was thinking, do I need to say? Do I need to protect. No, they’re The Sun. They can handle it. So the sun is a tabloid journalism that refers to the shape of the paper. It’s not like the National Enquirer as opposed to a broadsheet, but they had the largest subscription in the UK.

We had a writer and a photographer from The Sun, and I hosted them for three days and took them around Darfur to various places. And I remember the photographer being frustrated because everywhere we went, the children were smiling. They were playing. And they were playing in these camps that they had walked to for days across a very dangerous desert. Some of them didn’t know where their parents were. Some of them had seen one of their parents murdered in front of them.

But as children do, they were, you know, playing soccer with a empty plastic bottle or something. And this photographer wanted to cut to get an image for the front page of the sun that would tell the story of the conflict in Darfur. But all the kids were smiling, which isn’t the story that he wanted to tell. So there’s this weird kind of engineering of, you know, he, he’s like, there’s gotta be somewhere. Can you find some sick kids? Like, I need to take a picture of somebody who’s miserable.

And I’m thinking to myself, well, now wait a minute, am I helping to manipulate things by, by essentially staging we didn’t stage anything. We went to a medical clinic where there was some malnourished kids. And in the mind of the sun writers, photographers and editors, the story of a conflict in Sudan is going to be the story of a small black child with a distended belly who’s looking emaciated and miserable. And that was the photo that they wanted to get.

The crisis in Darfur was not a famine, but that was kind of the story that they wanted to convey. And my dilemma was, well, our goal here is to raise attention about this conflict that at this particular moment in time, nobody was talking about. Like, this was still very early on and we hadn’t yet managed to break through. It became the biggest news story of that year and stayed in the news cycle for almost 12 months.

But we weren’t there yet. We were trying to get it out. So here we are, ending up with a picture on the front page. And it was a. It was a very compelling picture of a truly miserable individual struggling. A young child held by her mother struggling. You know, all the things. The pathos was real. And if that picture helped raise awareness and actually got some people to wake up and realize they need to pay attention to what’s happening in this place in Africa that’s being ignored, maybe that was the job of the photo.

But I have always kind of grappled with that. I mean, like, there was nothing fake about that picture. And it wasn’t staged either. We just had to look all over the place to find the one person that fit the idea they were looking for. You see what I mean? So there’s other examples, but I’ve already told too long of a story. But again, all of us were acting in good faith. So this is the one thing I want to end my story with every one of us. The photographer was not trying to fake a photo. He wanted a specific photo. He had a photo in mind he needed to find, and we found it.

The writer was telling that story, the story of the people who had been displaced, who had walked across the desert. So the photo needed to kind of convey the truly horrible conditions that we were witnessing and trying to prevent. And my job was to help facilitate all of that. But it’s because we were all acting in good faith and trying to get to the truth of the thing that we did, that nobody was making stuff up. All right, I’ll stop my little rant here. Go ahead.

Well, no, and I. And I think that that is exactly where I’m headed with that, is that there was, to the extent that you want to call it an ethical dilemma. But there was a, there was enough of a hesitation and a conversation around, you know, this is our vision. This is the vision of our story. This is the visual elements that we want to accompany it. Will we see that? Will we find that, you know, if not, you know, what, what, what would we do next? What if there wasn’t going to be that opportunity? What would they have shown instead?

And it’s more for me, it. To the extent that it’s the opposite of that. So the, you know, if the story in this case, if it was about, you know, children that have overcome, you know, adversity and they, you know, they learned to be adaptive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they show the unhealthy child that’s suffering, that. That’s disingenuous. It doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s. But in your example, there was discussion, there was conversation, there was your knowledge and expertise of the area that helped the journalist and their photographer understand what was happening.

And I think where, again, where we are today versus even that short period of time ago is. It isn’t just professional journalists and photographers that are capturing content. It is, there are, there are lots of ways now for the, for the media to get content or sources of content. And the. Again, a photo of the official photographer that comes out from the local newspaper and is a safe distance away and does a wide shot and shows the three cars in a car accident and first responders, you know, coming on tells the story of a terrible, fatal accident versus the story of the person that happened to be crossing the street at just the right time, took the photo of the first person coming out of the vehicle, being laid on the stretcher with the body bag, tells a very different story.

And does that photo need to be the one? And again, I don’t have. I’m not saying one or the other is right. I’m more about that we’re. That journalists are facing incredibly high scrutiny in general. And then we have an added element now of this other stuff that they have to consider where it also, I think, starts to impact some things. And, you know, this is a common discussion we have with our team on a regular basis is when these things are happening in our midst, when we hear of protests or, you know, significant anniversary milestone events that the world is thinking about on a particular day, how do we, if we, how do we put ourselves into it and do we need to.

What’s the input that we need to create as PR professionals? Should we be in this or not? Do we have to be in it? Do we have to carry on the conversation in such a way? And I’m not sure I know what the answer is to that either.

I think these conversations are never easy. I think they’re never clear cut. They never have been. I wasn’t there and I actually haven’t read anything about it. But I can imagine that there must have been a lot of discussion about the famous Zapruder film taken by a bystander of the assassination of JFK. It was a truly graphic film, but it also was the only thing that had captured one of the most momentous events in the history of this country. There have been many, but this was one of the most.

And then how do we deal with that? How do you handle that? So here we are, we have a proliferation of technology making this so much easier. Everybody’s got a HD or even 4K or 8K camera. You know, it’s one button away. The sources have multiplied the questions around veracity and all the things that you need to ask have increased exponentially. And at the same time there’s so much noise and things move so fast and everyone’s got an endless infinite screen loop on their phone. And it does create some real challenges. So at the very least I think we can say this.

Journalists who are acting in good faith and editors and trying to get to the bottom of something and publish important stories about issues that matter, at the very least deserve. Listen, we don’t have to put these people on a pedestal. Some of them are not even nice. But even some of the UN nice ones are trying to do something important that is fundamental to a democracy. It’s so important. It’s the only profession named and protected in the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States of America. So can we please, at least all of us. I’m not speaking to you now. I’m speaking to everybody. Can we please at least just take a minute to think about what we think about this? Are we okay with this knee jerk reaction that turns everything back on the questioner? This has become commonplace and I think maybe the rest of us ought to be pushing back on that. Now wait a minute. We can ask. You don’t have to answer, but we can ask. We can report this story. I don’t need your permission. This is what we do here. This is the United States of America. I think something has been lost if we don’t stand up for that.

Well, I agree and I think we’re, you know, I’ll take it one step further and, you know, recognizing that these are these individuals that are, you know, making these decisions, right or wrong, agree or disagree, these are difficult, difficult decisions to make. If they are practicing, ethically practicing their craft, they are debating and discussing and analyzing and ultimately making a decision that this is how we are going to proceed with this particular thing, that in our responsibility as a journalist to bring forth information and the truth, this helps tell that story.

And I don’t envy the discussions that are happening in regards to some of these more challenging stories. And I applaud my professional colleagues in the newsrooms that are taking the time to think about these decisions and really making a determination that in the best interest of telling the story, in the best interest of getting the truth out, this is how we’re going to proceed. And they deserve the respect that they’ve earned in order to put this out. They deserve to be questioned and made sure that that’s happening within the confines of their editorial newsrooms and such. And just understanding that there is an awful lot that’s being asked of our journalists today, and the more challenging the story is, the more challenging it will be to cover it.

And we all play a part in making sure that is ethically and as responsibly that we carry out information, whether we’re talking about it in a newsroom or we’re talking about it around a client’s conference table, we still have to be, you know, ethically responsible and transparent with our information and recognizing that there’s somebody at the other end of that that’s going to be impacted by whatever information we share out there. And when we can have that as our guidepost, I think we we come up with a better product and better news product at the end of the day.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It’s easy to do. Just click the “Share” button in the app you’re listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.FM, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona. For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.FM, I’m Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others, if you choose to do so. We hope you’ll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.