by Andy Rooney
The young doctor promises not to seduce any males or females and not to reveal any secrets.
If journalists had an oath of their own, it would differ from the doctor’s.
The journalist certainly wouldn’t start by swearing to Apollo and probably not even to Walter Lippmann or Ed Murrow. The oath should be simple and direct. I was thinking of some things that ought to be in it.
Here are some suggestions for “The Journalist’s Code of Ethics”:
—The word “journalist” is a little pompous and I will only use it on special occasions.
—I am a journalist because I believe that if all the world had all the facts about everything, it would be a better world.
—I understand that the facts and the truth are not always the same. It is my job to report the facts so that others can decide on the truth.
—I will try to tell people what they ought to know and avoid telling them what they want to hear, except when the two coincide, which isn’t often.
—I will not do deliberate harm to any persons, except to the extent that the facts harm them and then I will not avoid the facts.
With the 60 Minutes crew; circa 1983: left to right: Morley Safer, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather, Andy Rooney, Don Hewitt (executive producer)
—No gift, including kind words, will be accepted when it is offered for the purpose of influencing my report.
—What I wish were the facts will not influence what investigation leads me to believe them to be.
—I will be suspicious of every self-interested source of information.
—My professional character will be superior to my private character.
—I will not use my profession to help or espouse any cause, nor alter my report for the benefit of any cause, no matter how worthy that cause may appear to be.
—I will not reveal the source of information given to me in confidence.
—I will not drink at lunch.
It needs work but it’s a start on an oath for reporters and editors.
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2007 : front row, left to right: Lesley Stahl, Bob Simon, Morley Safer; back row, left to right: Andy Rooney, Scott Pelley, Katie Couric, Steve Kroft
A Report on Reporting
A few weeks after I first appeared on 60 Minutes, I got a call from a drug company selling aspirin. They asked if I would do a commercial for them because, they said, my voice sounded just right for someone with a headache.
This was the first time I ever realized I had a nasal, vaguely unpleasantsounding voice. The money they offered was interesting but I told them I was a journalist and that journalists didn’t do commercials.
Although I’d never dream of doing any commercial, I often make a sales pitch for journalism. I like the news business and intend to say good things about American journalism and the reporters and editors who work in it whether for broadcast or print. My desire to tell you how highly I regard reporters and editors is prompted by several negative stories that have appeared in recent years about dishonest reporting. The stories are dismaying to all of us who work in news. We know they reinforce the negative opinion many Americans have of us. We want to be loved and respected.
USA Today announced that, after a thorough investigation by a committee under the leadership of distinguished journalist John Siegenthaler, it had determined that one of USA Today’s star reporters, Jack Kelley, had invented many of his stories from war zones. He’d also borrowed information from other newspaper reporters and often added quotations he’d invented to make his stories livelier.
USA Today did the wrong thing when it kept Kelley on the job long after some of its own staff members suspected he was a fraud, but did the right thing when it had the matter investigated. I don’t recall offhand any other company selling a product that paid to have an investigation conducted of some aspect of its own business and then made public the details of what it did wrong. The report said Kelley’s stories had often been dishonest and that the editorial staff had been lax in not finding this out sooner. Half a dozen newspapers recently have fired reporters for dishonest or unethical reporting.
While USA Today has never been a paragon of editorial excellence, it has capably filled the gap left by good local newspapers in towns and small cities across the country that don’t pretend to cover national and international events. Many people who buy USA Today buy two newspapers.
Believe it or don’t, but I can tell you that newspaper or television reporters, working at USA Today or elsewhere, are more concerned about the ethical standards of their profession than the people in any other business. I don’t think car dealers, manufacturers or clothing store operators worry much about the impact of their life’s work on fellow Americans. Journalists think of themselves as belonging to an exclusive club and are proud of their membership.
The fact that news has become a profitable venture for large corporations has not always been good for people in the business. The disappointing fact is that a large part of the American public reads a newspaper and watches television news more for entertainment than information. This has contributed to the profit-driven companies’ tendencies to deal less seriously with the truth in favor of entertainment. The truth is often less interesting than rumor or gossip and our good newspapers are to be congratulated for their imperfect resistance to being entertainers.
I’ve met hundreds of news people during my sixty years in the business. In World War II, I lived in a press camp with twenty-five and met my first bad apple reporter. He wrote for a news magazine and was ostracized by the others because he regularly put quotes in the mouths of anonymous soldiers he had not interviewed and described events he had not seen.
There’s one in every crowd, but what I want to say in this commercial for journalism is this: Reporters are more honest and ethical than the people in any other line of work. It’s just very difficult to get the whole truth and tell it accurately.
Big Business
T here is no more interesting or important work in the world than being a reporter. That’s my opinion, of course, and being at least in part a reporter myself, it’s natural I’d think so.
The word “reporter” isn’t quite right for the job, though, because it only describes half of it—the half where you tell the reader or the listener what you’ve learned. The other half of a reporter’s work isn’t described by that word. That’s the part where he or she collects the information before telling everyone about it. That’s the hard part.
A good reporter ought to be part detective, part puzzle solver and part writer. A reporter has to find the facts, piece them together so they make sense and then put them down on paper in a manner that makes them clear to everyone else.
People often complain about inaccuracies in news stories. They talk as if reporters were deliberately inaccurate or in on some conspiracy, and this is almost never the case. No reporter sets out to write a distorted or inaccurate story. They sometimes come out that way because reporting is hard and some reporters aren’t good enough. They also come out that way because a lot of people are very secretive and tell the reporter what they’d like to have printed, not what the facts are.
This all comes to me now, because this morning I got a letter from a boyhood friend I haven’t seen in thirty-five years. I knew him as “Bud,” but now his letterhead says his first name is “Cornelius” and he’s vice-chairman of a big corporation in Oregon. He was a wonderful friend when I was young, but I don’t think I know him at all now. After some personal words, he went into a tirade against the news organizations.
Being attacked by businessmen isn’t a new experience for most reporters. I heard Lewis Lapham, then editor of Harper’s Magazine, attacked one evening by a Texan with huge coal interests in Montana.
“You people know nothing about business,” the businessman yelled at Lapham.
“You’re right,” Lapham yelled back, “and it’s probably a damn good thing for business.”
When businessmen say newspapers and television don’t cover business very well, it makes me nervous because in many cases I think it’s true. It is also true that it is business’s own fault. Information about any business in town is almost impossible to get. They say they have a right to privacy, and I agree with that, but they’re being stupid by not being more open, and I’ll bet they won’t agree with me.
It is possible now, because of the Freedom of Information Act, to get information out of government. It has been a great thing for the American public but, of course, there is nothing like that requiring business to reveal its business. Some businessmen claim they are secretive so their
Contemplating a model of New York City
competition won’t find out what they’re doing and how, but that seldom stands up to inspection. The competitor usually knows all about the business across town. As a matter of fact, the plant manager used to work for Acme and one member of the Board of Directors of Allied is a former vice president of Acme.
The average business keeps its operation a deep, dark secret mostly out of habit. If the secret is not dark, at least that’s the impression they give the American public. It is Mike Wallace standing in front of the locked gates saying, “They refused to talk to us.” It suggests there is something evil going on in there, and nine times out of ten there is not. The average businessman in America takes as much pleasure and pride from making a good product as he does from the money, but you’d never guess it from the public image he projects.
You could take the books and the production plans of any good company in America and print them on page one of the local newspaper, and it wouldn’t alter the operation one bit. That includes printing the salary of every maintenance man and executive in the place. Business is simply too secretive about everything. They don’t have anything more to hide than the rest of us.
The corporate public relations people who do the best job for their company are the ones who lay it on the line. They tell you the truth, even if it hurts a little. The ones who do their companies the most damage are those who try to hide little mistakes or keep information secret that would be better made public even when there is no law demanding it.
The American public is as suspicious of Big Business as it is of Big Government, and what I’d like to say to my old friend Bud is, business would do itself a favor and get better reporting in newspapers and on television if it opened up. If the company is making a good product for an honest profit, the truth won’t hurt it.
On Work and Money
Procrastination
I t isn’t working that’s so hard, it’s getting ready to work.
It isn’t being up we all dislike in the morning, it’s getting up. Once I get started at almost any job, I’m happy. I can plug away at
any dull job for hours and get some satisfaction from doing it. The trou
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ble is that sometimes I’ll put off doing that job for months because it’s so tough to get started.
It doesn’t seem to matter what the job is. For me it can be getting at writing, getting at mowing the lawn, getting at cleaning out the trunk of the car, making a piece of furniture or putting up a shed. It’s a good thing I wasn’t hired to build the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never have figured out where to put that first piece of steel to make it possible to get across all that water.
There is some complex thing going on in our brains that keeps us from getting started on a job. No matter how often we do something, we always forget how long it took us to do it last time and how hard it was. Even though we forget in our conscious mind, there is some subconscious part of the brain that remembers. This is what keeps us from getting at things. We may not know but our subconscious knows that the job is going to be harder than we think. It tries to keep us from rushing into it in a hurry.
There is a war going on between different elements of our brain. If I consciously remembered how difficult something was the last time I did it, I’d never do it again. The wonderful thing about memory is that it’s just great at forgetting. Every Friday afternoon in summer I drive 150 miles to our summer house in the country. I always look forward to being there and I always forget how much I hate getting there. My subconscious remembers. It keeps me fiddling around the office Friday afternoons, putting off leaving. The drive can take anywhere from three to four hours, depending on the traffic, and I hate it so much that sometimes I spend two of those four hours contemplating selling the place.
The following Friday, I can’t wait to leave the office for the country again but my subconscious puts it off. It keeps me from getting started. It remembers the drive even if I don’t.
One of the jobs my subconscious is best at putting me off getting at is painting. My subconscious is absolutely right. I probably shouldn’t start
With longtime editor Robert Forte
it even though I enjoy it once I get going. Once again, my subconscious remembers what I forget.
I look at a door or a fence or a room and I say to myself, “I ought to give that a coat of paint. It’ll take two quarts of paint. I’ll need some turpentine and a new brush. No sense fooling with those old brushes.”
My subconscious sometimes puts me off the paint job for months but eventually, against its better judgment, I buy the paint, the turpentine and the brush. I put on my old clothes, get a screwdriver to remove the top of the paint can and then I look more carefully at the room. Now I begin to see what my subconscious saw all along.
There are many things to do before I start to paint. I have to move everything out of the room, I have to replace a piece of the baseboard that is broken and I have to scrape and sand the places where the paint is peeling. And I better go back to the hardware store to get some spackle to fill the cracks in the ceiling. While I’m there, I’ll pick up some undercoater for the new piece of baseboard and the
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spackled cracks. I’ll have to let it dry overnight so I can’t start painting today.
It is quite probable that it is this wonderfully intelligent subconscious part of our brain that makes us want to stay in bed another hour every morning. We want to get up. It knows that just as soon as we get up, the trouble will start all over again.
Fired
T here’s something wrong with anyone who’s never been fired from a job. If I’m ever in a position to hire someone, I’m going to be very suspicious of anyone who comes in looking for work with a resume that doesn’t include the information that he or she got the ax a couple of times either for incompetence or insubordination.
What’s all this resignation business? Doesn’t anyone get fired anymore? You read the business pages of the paper, and presidents of corporations are always resigning. From a cushy $250,000-a-year job? Come on, fellas. We’re not business tycoons, but we’re not that dumb. You got canned.
The whole business of resignation is false, and it’s part of a new philosophy we seem to have adopted. There aren’t any losers anymore.
At children’s birthday parties, they play games in the cellar or the backyard, and the parents having the party give away prizes. It doesn’t matter how well or poorly a child plays a game, he’ll probably get a prize anyway, because the adults don’t want to damage his little psyche by making him think he might not always win in life.
Most high school teams in any sport have co-captains now. Sometimes they have more than two. No one wants to hurt the feelings of a good player by choosing someone over him for the job. Sometimes the professional football teams have six or eight men trot out on the field for the coin-tossing ceremonies.They’re all co-captains. Not a loser in the crowd. I hope we never decide not to hurt the feelings of one of the presidential candidates by electing co-Presidents. One President is plenty.
Last week I read where someone won $34,000 for finishing second in a golf tournament. Second! Imagine making $34,000 for losing a game of golf!
The President is always saying he’s “sorry” to have to acce
pt someone’s resignation. If he was really sorry he shouldn’t have accepted it. All of us are using the word “sorry” too lightly. We’re always saying we’re sorry when we aren’t really sorry at all. It’s all part of the same refusal to face things as they are.
We’re excusing everyone for everything. A boy of seventeen kills the man who runs the candy store for $1.35 and a Tootsie Roll.
The boy’s parents find a bloody hammer under his bed and they confront him with it.
“I’m sorry,” the boy says. “I killed him, but I didn’t mean to do it.”
The father looks at the mother with tears in his eyes and says, “At least he’s honest.”
The next day the neighbors are interviewed by a television reporter. They all say he was a nice quiet boy who always went to church. They don’t bother to say that he was a bully, that he’d been stealing all his life and that he was rotten through and through.
We keep letting ourselves off the hook. No one wants to judge anyone else by strict standards for fear he’ll be judged by them too. No one wants to say to someone on the job, “You just aren’t good enough. You’re fired.”
Broke
Has everyone been desperately broke?
Maybe not. I always assume that there are very few experiences or emotions that aren’t universal. I’ve been seriously broke twice in my life.
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It’s a feeling you never forget and although it’s been twenty-six years since I didn’t know which way to turn for money, I never see anyone out of a job and without a dollar in his pocket without knowing how he feels.
There are still times when I think about being broke. At night when I empty the change out of my pocket and put it on top of my dresser, I often recall, in those terrible old days, adding up my change to see if I had two dollars.
