morality and ethics

In light of Mr. Watson’s lecture, I thought of one journalist whose conduct during a pivotal Civil Rights story in 1957 raises the question, if you must choose between ethical and moral, which do you choose?

Elizabeth Eckford didn’t get the message that the students would gather at a meeting point and face the hordes together. So on the first day of school at Central High in Little Rock, the 15-year-old Black student took the bus and walked alone to the school entrance.

The National Guard turned her away while crowds of white people shouted “Nigger go home,” and “Go back where you came from.” She twice sought entrance and was refused. So she walked over to the bus stop and sat down – alone. People shouted racial slurs and waved their arms as they gathered around her. A CBS cameraman shoved a microphone in her face and asked persistent questions that came across as a “cruel inquisition of an innocent victim,” authors wrote in The Race Beat.

Eckford kept her head down, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. New York Times reporter Benjamin Fine saw tears streaming down the girl’s cheeks, and thought of his own 15-year-old daughter. He sat down beside her, put an arm around her, lifted her chin, and said, “Don’t let them see you cry.”

Authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, who won a Pulitzer for The Race Beat, followed the ethical discussion fueled by Fine’s action. “Fine’s act in giving Eckford comfort that day was seen by many around him as humane but completely inappropriate and probably provocative,” they wrote. “Fine … had inserted himself into a live story – only to remove himself from it when he wrote about the day’s events a few hours later for the Times.”
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