Drama Camp is officially over. We had our last production yesterday and the response from the audiences was great. We had over 80 in attendance Saturday night and about 70 on Sunday. It is quite a challenge to put a show together in just two weeks, but it always seems to work. The kids did a terrific job and garnered lots of laughs and applause throughout.
Now I have my routine back and when I came into my office this morning I saw a very large spider. Maybe it wasn’t as big as my fear made it, but thank goodness for my cat, John. He must have thought the spider was a small rodent because he pounced on it and killed it.
In last Thursday’s Dallas Morning News I read a column written by Leonard Pitts in which he took journalists to task over the lack of integrity in the profession. The article was in response to the recent debacle at News of the World. According to a Gallup poll quoted by Pitts, the general public ranks journalists between auto mechanics and lawyers in terms of ethics.
It is apparent that that code has been severely diluted in recent history. It used to be that the tabloids were the newpapaers known for sleazy journalism and reporters who crossed every line to get a good story. More recently we have heard of reporters from major publications fabricating stories or plagiarizing in attempts to further their careers.
The code that I learned early in my career, and that Pitts reminds us in his article is that “One avoids conflicts of interest. One does not plagiarize. One does not buy information. And one does not hack the voice mail of a missing child.”
Okay, that last one was not specifically in the code that I learned, but I was taught to respect the dignity of the people in the stories I was pursuing. In that way I protected my integrity, as well as the integrity of the publication for which I was working.
I’ve found a lot of the lack of respect for journalists is due to fear. A portion of the public doesn’t want to hear the truth because it’s a scary world out there, especially in small community newspapers. They don’t want to believe their towns are being infiltrated by gangs, drugs, violence, crooked politicians, etc., etc. So rather than accept it so they can try to stop it, they bury their heads in the sand. Thus, when a reporter writes about these things, they are chastised. How dare they report such scandal as if they are no better than the rag sheets. This is a trend I’ve been observing for the past 20 years and it isn’t getting any better.
That’s an interesting point, LuAnn. I haven’t heard a lot of people complain about reporters reporting the truth. What I have heard is complaints that some of them have crossed lines that never used to be crossed before in efforts to get stories.