COMM 317: Term paper due April 1

Communications 317: Media Law
Benedictine University at Springfield
Spring Semester 2008

"So as grave and learned men may doubt, without any imputation to them; for the most learned doubteth most, and the more ignorant for the most part are the more bold and peremptory." Section 338a. -- Sir Edward Coke, Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628) Sect 338a.

Term paper – Spring 2008

On Tuesday, March 11, we will watch “Buying the War,” a Bill Moyers’ Journal program available at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html (and linked to our blog, The Mackerel Wrapper). In the words of its creators, “The program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press, which was then seized upon and amplified by an army of pundits. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation … went virtually unchallenged by the media.” Your assignment: Write a 2,500-word (10-page) paper exploring the legal and ethical implications of the mainstream media’s coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. If you use academic documentation, you may choose either MLA or APA style; you may also write journalistically, following standard rules of attribution in the “AP Stylebook.” While you should consider both questions below (one on law and one on ethics), you should formulate one overall thesis and support it with evidence from the video, our textbook(s) and your own reading. Be specific! Show me how much you read. Due in class Tuesday, April 1 (no foolin’).

Law. In “Make No Law,” Anthony Lewis suggests the media have a duty to report all the facts because “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” (quoting from Justice William Brennan’s opinion in Times v. Sullivan). How well, in your opinion, did the elite media, i.e. the New York Times, the Washington Post and television networks, live up to that responsibility during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003? How well did reporters for the former Knight-Ridder group (now part of McClatchy Co.) live up to it? Would reporting all the facts have presented a danger or served the cause of democracy under Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissent in Abrams v. United States? Or under Justice Louis Brandeis’ concurrence in Whitney v. California?

Ethics. While individual media outlets typically are not specifically bound by the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, it is generally regarded as stating the aspirations of the profession. How well did the national, or “mainstream,” media live up to those canons? If Aristotle had come back to life in the spring of 2003, what advice might he have been able to give to reporters covering the White House, the Pentagon, Congress and/or peace demonstrations during the run-up to the war? Would his doctrine of the “golden mean” have offered guidance to reporters who didn’t know which version(s) of the truth to believe and to report?

Please note: President Bush and other architects of the 2003 invasion claim they acted in good faith but on faulty intelligence. If you share that belief, I will not penalize you for expressing it in your paper. However, you still need to address the question of how well the media balanced competing versions of the truth regarding the reasons for invading Iraq.