Journalism is a profession, where ethics matter a most, because journalists throughout history has acted as the voice of the people. The New York University Journalism Handbook for students for Ethics, Law and Good Practice, says
- Most newspaper bar reporters from reporting on their family members and friends
- In exceptional cases they are allowed to do so, but by openly telling the readers/viewers about their relationship with the interviewee
- But mostly such occurrences take place only while writing a memoir or biography
- A journalist is allowed to quote or consider an opinion from a relative/friend, only if he can honestly claim that opinion would not sway him in a particular direction on any topic
- In essence, the question in this scenario is, would the journalist‘s reporting be biased because he's a friend of the source?
Recently on the wake of the unfortunate incident of Metro North commuter train derailment, that took place in New York City, Chris Cuomo of CNN interviewed his brother Andrew Cuomo, the New York Governor. This has started a round of heated discussion about the ethics of a journalist interviewing his family member, particularly a politician. Chris defends his interview saying, it was a non-political interview and he openly admitted his relation with Andrew, during the interview. So he opines there is nothing unethical about the issue and it was a non-biased interview. But many media experts disagree saying there is nothing called a non-political interview, when the person interviewed is a politician and this incident could have been avoided.
When we compare the CNN interview with that of Msbn’s morning Joe interview we find that, Chris was slightly easier on his brother and at times had even tried to boost up his image by his comments such as, ‘you hurried to the scene’, ‘the training program initiated by you came in handy’ etc. Thus in conclusion it might be said that, Yes, the interview was handled well by both the brothers and it would not have led to any heated discussion if their surnames were different. But despite all these it might have been a whole lot better and the journalistic ethics wouldn’t have been transgressed, if the interview had been handled by Chris’ co-host Kate Bolduan.
