Hacking scandal: Stephen Adler reminds staff about Trust Principles

The Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism alone do not offer protection against such ethical violations as occurred at the News of the World, he said in a memo to editorial staff. The memo also bore the name of Jim Gaines, Reuters’ ethics editor. Both men are relatively new to the company: Adler joined in 2010 and was appointed editor-in-chief in February 2011. Gaines joined in April from The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s digital paper for tablet computers, where he was managing editor.

“Every one of us has an obligation to push back when something seems wrong, even in the happy event that it may turn out to be right after all,” they said. “When the fairness, balance or integrity of our journalism is in question, we simply must ‘pipe up’ – to a colleague, a manager, or, if that doesn’t work, to one of us.”

Following is the full text of the memo:

The News Corp. scandal is not an occasion for self-satisfaction, at Reuters or anyplace else. That much should go without saying. Journalists everywhere have lost some of our innocence, again. However flagrant the ethical violations of News of the World, we flirt with disaster if we imagine it can’t happen here.

We are uniquely fortunate to have our Trust Principles, with their institutional protections for independence and integrity and their injunctions against bias and factional interest. We also have our Handbook, which exhorts us in specific ways to honor its “absolutes” of accuracy, transparency, rigorous sourcing and freedom from conflicts of interest. The Trust Principles and the Handbook have proven their uses in a thousand ways.

But they alone do not protect us. Every one of us has an obligation to push back when something seems wrong, even in the happy event that it may turn out to be right after all. When the fairness, balance or integrity of our journalism is in question, we simply must “pipe up” – to a colleague, a manager, or, if that doesn’t work, to one of us.

In a profession that requires us to pursue the truth wherever it leads us – whether into the teeth of controversy or cross-wise with authority and conventional wisdom – “this doesn’t seem ethical to me” may be the most important thing a journalist can say. We’re both happy to report that the evidence of our brief time here suggests this is widely understood at Reuters, but in the present circumstance it seemed to bear repeating.

Best regards,

Steve Adler and Jim Gaines

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