Law, Ethics and News Literacy

As a leader on InFocus, reinforcing the importance of recognizing and upholding strong news literacy and ethics is always a priority of mine, especially because of the copyright restrictions and fair use laws that our videos must comply with. In addition to acknowledging the responsibilities we have as journalists when it comes to copyright, it is just as important to ensure that everyone on staff is familiar with California Education Code 48907, which guarantees student journalists the right to exercise freedom of speech and protects them from school administration and other authority so long as factual information has been reported.

One of the most significant stories I’ve produced on InFocus covered my local school board election, involving a particularly controversial candidate who caught the attention of many community members due to the beliefs she chose to base her campaign on. Going into our interview with this candidate, my co-reporter and I kept in mind the importance of remaining objective, making sure we crafted unbiased questions. During our interview, in response to our questions about the place of gender identity in classrooms and how race is being taught in schools, the candidate reiterated statements she had made in the past that had received backlash.

After our interview, my co-reporter and I reached out to another school board candidate who had organized a rally in support of LGBTQ+ youth a few weeks prior. Rather than asking questions with the intent of fueling tension between the two candidates, our goal was to record the perspective of a different candidate on the same issue, and include both their views in our story. Later, while editing the interview clips and writing our script, we focused on communicating these two viewpoints in an objective manner that allowed our audience to form their own opinions.

In this package, I also talked with a Paly history teacher who responded to Campos' claims about revisionist history causing division in classrooms, as he had first-hand experience with the outcomes of facilitating difficult conversations surrounding race.

While my co-reporter and I were prepared to hear statements along the lines of what the candidate had declared in the past, we were truly taken by surprise when, during our interview, she directed a racially insensitive comment towards my co-reporter. When reviewing the footage afterwards, we debated whether this charged comment should be included at all. Ultimately, we decided against it due to the fact that our job was solely to allow the candidate to represent the tenets of her campaign, not to provide a platform for unrelated hateful or inflammatory comments.

The completed story aired on November 8th, 2022: Election Day. Immediately after, multiple students and teachers came up to me to share discussions they had with their peers about the candidate's statements. Regardless of one's personal views on an issue, the job of a journalist is to convey information straight from the source to let viewers judge for themselves. This difficult but necessary story helped reinforce this concept for me and encouraged me to have further conversations with my staff members about navigating situations where ethics and journalistic values may lead to tough decisions.