Group 4

I loved the idea of the wall. But it seems to me that it is just that- an idea. And contrary to the popular belief created by inception, an idea is no the most powerful thing on the planet. No, an actual wall would be much more efficient. In previous years of journalism it seems like they kinda had the concept down. I especially appreciated the example of the Chicago Tribune building where they had separate elevators for the journalists and the business man. I think that shows real integrity on the part of McCormick, the kind of integrity that is scarcely found in big business today. I was researching "the wall" and I came across a book excerpt by Davis Merrit. He was talking about the wall and how the idea is to keep things separate and then made a very clever analogy,

"The great majority of American newspapers today try to walk a slack wire across the abyss -- tricky stuff akin to trying to be a little bit pregnant. It is not certain how long and in what fashion that balancing act can be sustained, if indeed it can be sustained."

Here is a link to the whole excerpt http://www.criticism.com/md/knightfall.html

Merrit makes a very good point, you cannot be a little pit pregnant. You either are, or your not. The same things goes for newspapers. Either their business and journalism is separate, or they are not. And once you start mingling to two, the baby is only going to grow. The really difficult thing is that it is impracticle to tell each individual journalist that they have the responsibility to uphold this wall. Because in truth, these journalists have families, they have bills to pay and the editor is the one who signs the check. If the editor tells a journalist to budge a little on his or her article, no one can say that is wrong, the journalist is just trying to sustain a job in this time of economic hardship. So it is the entire establishment that must build this wall, in order for it to maintain stability, not just the individual journalist.

One thing that didn't strike me quite right was the idea that the first allegiance of a journalist is to the citizen, not the truth. How is it that this could be right? Does that mean that a journalist tells the citizens what they want to hear, or does the journalist write what he or she thinks the citizens need to hear? No, I would dare say that the only way to be loyal to the citizen is to be loyal to the truth first. The Society of Professional Journalists have put together a Code of Ethics that is posted on their website. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp I think that this really sums everything up well, it only has five major points but it talks about acting independently which represents "the wall" and its very first point it "Find the truth and report it" Nowhere does it talk about "be loyal to the citizen"