Yes, Virginia, Some People Still Care About Ethics
So she quit. “I understand that these are tough times for newspapers,” she said in her letter of resignation. “But economic concerns are not sufficient to make me sacrifice the integrity of a section I have worked for, cared about and worried over for two decades.”
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This week Gerst went west to lecture to journalism classes at the University of Oregon and receive the university’s Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. The judges declared that Gerst had “set an example for journalists everywhere to not compromise their ideals, whether in life or in print.” Gerst was nominated for the Payne Award by Lynne Stiefel, chair of the Pioneer Press unit of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. According to Gerst, Stiefel told her, “I had to search to find that. There aren’t many organizations that give awards for ethics. I wish I could have done something better for you.”
“It was the sweetest thing,” says Gerst, who knew Stiefel only casually at Pioneer. “The authorities were always grousing about her, but she was always mad for just the right reasons.”
The other day President Bush spoke in Washington at a joint meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America. Last week Wycliff called the speech “one of the most confusing, inarticulate public addresses since… well, some people would say since his press conference a week earlier.”
How should the papers have handled Bush’s speech? I asked Wycliff.
