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Falsifying the facts is the most absolute taboo. But journalists are deeply divided about what qualifies. Many reporters believe it is legitimate to tighten a quote from an interview subject, on the theory that the speaker is appearing in print and would have been more concise if he had written his remarks. Others see that as fabrication. Everyone opposes plagiarism, but opinions differ as to whether that only means borrowing passages wholesale or also includes picking up facts and quotes without attribution after other reporters have put them in the public domain.
All the recent lapses involved pictures, and while today's journalists generally consider it wrong to stage news photographs, past generations were more lenient. As Don Hewitt, creator of CBS's 60 Minutes, points out, many supposedly legitimate pictures are less than spontaneous. Says he: "What about a photo in the newspaper described as a meeting at the U.N.? No matter what the caption says, you know damned well it was a photo session before the meeting."
The most conspicuous clash is over the technique of impersonation -- failing to reveal that one is a reporter, or outright pretending to be something else, to expose wrongdoing. Network TV regards impersonation as a vital tool. ABC's PrimeTime Live, for example, won only praise from its peers for setting up a bogus medical clinic to lure brokers "selling" patients. But many print-news organizations view impersonation as lying.
The absence of settled answers does not mean journalists are uninterested in ) ethical questions. "The problem," says Los Angeles Times managing editor George Cotliar, "is that people look at what NBC and USA Today have done and assume that's the norm." As the humiliation at both places showed, it's not. Journalists may not always be sure what is right. They can usually see what is clearly wrong.