If a journalist isn’t in the “truth business” as Jerry Roberts so eloquently said, then can they really be called a journalist? I always thought journalism was telling about something that happened in the world, and if it’s not the truth, why tell it, because someone will always know.
Could this conflict with business? I suppose so. Somehow I don’t think that lying is really long term profitable for any business in anyway. Bernie Madoff got caught, why not anyone else? It seems to me that even if a lie seems successful in the beginning, things will untie around it until the liar is caught or the lie itself is out in the open. While I understand the publisher has to keep an eye on public interest, stockholders, etc, surely it’s not a good idea to blatantly lie or stop your employees from telling the truth as McCaw seems to have done. I would have liked to see the documentary from a less skewed view; it was completely obvious it was made by those against McCaw, and showed her as the villain. It almost made it seem like they were looking down on her environmental efforts as well, which is an admirable thing for someone to support.
I do agree that her kicking people off the beach under her house is silly, but if it’s her property, it’s her right. The newspaper was her property, but the employees were not, and they kept their right of free speech. I would rather have watched a documentary from an unbiased point of view so that we could see what the editors and writers were “forced” to publish. The whole thing literally seemed like one big media circus with little rhyme or reason as to why it was going on.
An interesting thing to do in class would be to find the memos the McCaw staff sent out and read some of the articles that were either suppressed or forced written so we could see what they were like.
