Ethics

Brian Cathcart’s [The Reuter Society - Brian Cathcart: My debt to Reuters] and Patrick Chalmers’ comments are welcome reminders of what we all experienced at Reuters. I got my grounding in journalism at US newspapers for 10 years before I joined Reuters, and the education I received from the Baron - courtesy of Mike Arkus and Digger Williams, in particular - was an unswerving discipline about facts and context.

Reading into the World Desk file day in and day out produced a remarkable allegiance to facts and context and working through inconsistencies of new developments as a way of deducing the truth of unfolding events.

Having returned to the US after 24 years abroad (mostly UK), I am infuriated about partisan reporting (from Fox and MSNBC) and extraordinary levels of opinionating, which either dismiss or reduce the importance of facts and context. Reuters was never perfect, in so many ways, but the state of journalism today is scarcely recogniSable to what I knew as our way of life 30 years ago. ■