Wednesday, January 04, 2012

The Journal's "special obligation"

If you go the Society of Professional Journalists and read their code of ethics, link, to the very last tenet, you find;

Recognize a special obligation to ensure that
the public's business is conducted in the open and
that government records are open to inspection.
Then I think about APS Supt Winston Brooks getting a contract extension in a meeting whose agenda is still secret from public knowledge, and less than two days away, link, and the Journal's failure to investigate and report upon their shenanigans.

I think about the Caswell Report on felony criminal misconduct by senior APS administrators; a "government record" by any reasonable standard, and the fact that the Journal is not only not demanding its immediate surrender, they are actually enabling it to be hidden.

As for Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz and the other editorial role models of the Journalist's Code of Ethics, they are fortunate that their code, like APS' Code of Ethical Conduct, is utterly unenforceable.

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