The Public's Right to Know?

Gene Roberts, executive editor of the Philadel­phia Inquirer, was covering a murder once when he learned that police had shot the suspect and were interrogating him in a hospital emergency room that was off-limits to reporters.

Roberts scouted around and found a stethos­cope near a soft drink machine. He put it around his neck, strolled into the emergency room, listened to the suspect's confession, and wrote his story.

"I never said I was a doctor, but the stethos­cope would certainly have given that impres­sion," Roberts concedes.

Would he have put on a doctor's white coat, too, if it had been available?

"It's quite possible."

But the confession of a murder suspect is hardly a story of transcendent social value. Doesn't that misrepresentation bother him now?

"No. If in all circumstances, you're going to require reporters to just walk up to people and state their name, rank, and serial number and say, “Tell me the truth,” you're flat not going to get the truth. The public will be ill-served."

Some reporters have made a virtual career out of masquerading as others in the pursuit of stories.

Mike Goodman of the Los Angeles Tunes, for example, has posed as an animal keeper in a zoo, an employee in a juvenile detention facility, an oil pipeline worker in Alaska, a hippie in Holly­wood, and, like Roberts, he once carried a stethoscope into a hospital emergency room to get a story.

"I'm a great believer in the reporter as ob­server," Goodman says, "firsthand observation is the ultimate documentation."

From ‘Press Watch - A Provocative Look at How Newspapers Report the News’ by David Shaw. New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 146.

Task 6. Answer the questions:

1. What did Gene Roberts once do in order to get a story?

2. How does he try to justify his methods of collecting information?

3. What stories might journalists like Mike Goodman have been covering when posing as an animal keeper or an oil pipeline worker, etc.?

Task 7. Discuss the following questions with your group:

1. Reread the journalistic code of ethics. Which principles are in conflict here?

2. How do you personally feel about this "masquerading technique" of gathering news?

 WRITING

Task 8. Write a "Letter to the Editor" on this topic (see Appendix 1).

 LISTENING

1.12. Interview with nigel dempster

You are going to listen to an interview with Nigel Dempster, Britain’s best-known and most widely read gossip columnist working for the Daily Mail.

Task 1. Before you listen, match the expressions with their periphrases.

financial misdemeanour homogeneous to live cheek by jowl with smb to equate a preponderance of smth to live a gilded life to reimburse one’s expenses outrageous to abdicate to banish

very shocking and extremely unfair or offensive; to be equal to something; to give up the position of being king or queen; a situation when there are more people or things of a particular type in a group than of any other type; to exist very close to someone else; to be rolling in money; not a very serious crime related to the management of money; to send someone away permanently from their country or the area where they live, especially as an official punishment (=to exile); consisting of people or things that are all of the same type; to pay money back to someone when their money has been spent or lost.

Task 2. Listen to the interview twice and answer the questions:

1. What kind of news is included in the gossip column of the Daily Mail?

2. How do gossip columns of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express differ?

3. What makes gossip columns popular among the British?

4. How does Nigel Dempster feel about stories about the Royals published both, in British newspapers and in foreign ones?

Task 3. Discuss the following question with your group:

• What points of the journalistic code can be violated in gossip columns of newspapers and magazines? Support your point of view with examples from the interview.

  READING&SPEAKING