The Ethical Optimist

I read a great story that appeared in Editor & Publisher titled, “Ethical Warning Issued on Healthcare Coverage.”

What struck me most was the following quote:

“The ethics codes of the Association of Health Care Journalists [AHCJ] and the Society of Professional Journalists [SPJ] call for fair and accurate reporting and editorial independence. But editorial cutbacks, along with pressure on hospitals to market profitable services, may be eroding these standards.”

As many of you know, I’ve blogged on the ethical dilemmas created by shrinking newsrooms many times. As newsrooms continue to cut staff, someone will still need to provide content, and that someone is most likely a PR person or department. Newspapers are doing what many other companies are doing: outsourcing.

The problem, according to the AHCJ is that,

“In several recently reported cases, local hospitals have exerted editorial control by supplying pre-packaged stories and other content to news organizations. In some but not all cases, hospitals paid for this special influence.

“Earlier this year, a Maryland newspaper sold its weekly health page to a local hospital and put the hospital in charge of providing content,” the notice said, but did not name the newspaper. “The arrangement was halted amid community protest after just one published issue. Broadcast examples include airing of hospital-produced segments with hazy branding or no branding at all, leading viewers to believe the local station reported the story. In some cases, the hospital-created material is even transmitted to a station through an affiliated news network.”

What they don’t tell us is whether or not the health page was marked as “advertorial”. I tend to think it might have been, or why would readers complain? They’d have no way of knowing the content wasn’t generated by the paper.

On another note, the AHCJ and SPJ cited a list of news guidelines, one of which was:

News organizations should not run prepackaged stories produced by hospitals unless they are clearly and continuously labeled as advertisements.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I’ll tell you why. I do agree that the source of the content must be disclosed, but if the information is informative in nature, for example a doctor writing a piece on the early warning signs of heart disease, it shouldn’t be considered advertising. If, however, the article is about a new piece of equipment that only that hospital has, it would be a different scenario.

There is no reason why newspapers can’t outsource content to local experts, as long as they clearly disclose it. More importantly, the editors must ensure that the content is helpful to the reader and similar to what a beat reporter might cover.

This goes back to a point I’ve made many times in the past. As news organizations continue to downsize, hospitals and other organizations are going to become their own newsrooms, supplying needed content to those news outlets. Subsequently, as the gatekeepers of this information, PR professionals need to hold their organizations to the highest ethical standards to ensure that the information they provide is both newsworthy and accurate.