By Rachel Stockman

Lying, cheating and deceit usually don’t equal national recognition. But New York Times reporter Jayson Blair showed us recently that these were just the qualities to get him front-page news. Blair was caught plagiarizing articles and falsifying information. Ironically, Blair got more recognition after he cheated than during his short-lived career as a journalist. The truth in this case was not in the stories he reported but rather in the discovery of how he rose to the top by deceiving his editors and the public. And if this could happen at the highly esteemed New York Times, are we to believe that lots of people are getting away with unethical behavior, cheating their way to get to the top?

“The media has always been an intensely competitive industry,” said Tom Ricks, a military correspondent for The Washington Post and author of A Soldier’s Duty. Recalling a famous story about a reporter at the scene of the Kennedy assassination, Ricks said the reporter called in the story and then dismantled the phone he used so nobody else could get the “scoop.”

With the advent of the Internet and cable news print journalists have a tougher time reporting the “scoop” before anyone else. No longer able to report breaking news as it happens because of 24-hour cable news, newspaper journalists compete over sources to deepen the public’s understanding of the breaking news. Ricks says the function of a good newspaper reporter is to explain the headlines and bring context and history to an event. “To do my beat,” said Ricks. “I’ve read over 1000 books and that’s been welcomed by the newspapers I’ve worked for and that’s what they want nowadays much more than they used to.”

Since the face of journalism is changing with new technologies so is the way students are being taught at journalism schools. In an age where information is just a click away, all students grapple with easy access to cheating issues. For Colonel William Smullen, Director of National Security Studies at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Professor of Public Relations at the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, it is less an issue of competition to get ahead and more of an issue of setting standards. “In the world of journalism, every news organization has its own standards, its own checks and balances,” he said. “Clearly Jayson Blair was at fault for lying or deceiving the readers with the stories he was telling. He wasn’t places where he said he’d been. He wasn’t talking to people he was quoting. He wasn’t always being factual. He was lying. For those conditions not to occur, you need to establish tough standards.”

If the standards are high, then there is a greater likelihood that the degree of responsibility and ethics will also be high. In class, Smullen and his class examined what went wrong with the Blair incident. “If you offer examples to students while they are learning a trade and talk about them like I did with the Jayson Blair affair, students can dissect what went wrong and learn from it,” said Smullen.

“We all have to have our standards, personal or professional. You have to have certain standards before you come to the class; certain standards when you leave class and people need to be reminded of this throughout life. Look around, there are temptations to take shortcuts all the time.”

Certainly the competition to get ahead creates the temptation to take a shortcut to the top – even to land a job at a newspaper after graduating from journalism school. Yet the interesting thing about journalism is that often it doesn’t even matter how well schooled you are to get a job as a reporter. “Having a Ph.D. or academic knowledge of any kind is only going to be marginally helpful,” said Ricks. Editors want to know how well you can cover personality and players.

One of the best reporters Ricks has ever known is Mary Peck Flaherty who covered the Pittsburgh police. “One reason she covered the police well is because a few years earlier while working her way through college, she worked the night shift at a diner where all of the cops ate,” he said. “She knew all the stuff by having a personal relationship, being familiar on site. Being someone who you have a history with is going to help a lot more than all of the academic knowledge in the world.”

Connections, a code of ethics and skills are necessary to being a good journalist. And many different styles of reporting can emerge from such when information isn’t readily available. “It’s a little like the Baskin & Robbins story,” says Ricks. “There’s a whole bunch of flavors of reporters out there.”

While the “flavors” of reporters bring dedicated readers, journalism is still a what have you done for me lately industry and editors tend to look at reporters differently if they have a front page story. Both Smullen and Ricks argue that all can be lost if the flavor is wrong and reporter lies to get ahead all is lost. “The most important commodity [for a reporter] is their credibility,” said Smullen. “It is something you have to build over time. You have to work hard each day with every story, with every assignment to build your credibility. All you have to do is make one mistake, and your credibility will be gone.”

“The most important commodity [for reporters] is their credibility.”

Col. William Smullen