Last week saw the aftermath of two destructive hurricanes, controversy over DACA’s legal status, and threats of nuclear war. Somehow, amid these monumental events, the issue which has the internet buzzing has nothing to do with life-altering instances and everything to do with Sen. Ted Cruz’s Twitter account.
In the waning hours of Monday, Sept. 11, the internet was alight as news that Cruz’s official Twitter account “liked” a pornographic site went viral. Within hours, Cruz’s senior communications adviser Catherine Frazier tweeted that the post was deleted and reported to Twitter, but by then Cruz had once again become the object of both jeers.
“It was a staffing issue,” Cruz told reporters the following day. “And it was inadvertent, it was a mistake. It was not a deliberate act.”
That’s where this story should have ended.
Instead of reporting Cruz’s statement and refocusing Americans on more pressing matters facing the nation, news sources from The Washington Post to CNN to Politico continued to dig into this story, using the word “blame” in their headlines to describe Cruz’s statement. These journalists knew articles with scandalous headlines including “senator,” “blame” and “porn” would keep the clicks coming.
Cruz’s Twitter slip-up and the media’s response bring to the forefront an age-old ethical question: how do we as journalists decide whether a story should be pursued?
Whether spoken or internalized, everyone lives by codes which guide their decisions. Along with personal convictions, journalists are fortunate to have a written code of ethics to help them decided what to write and how to write it.
According to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, journalists have an obligation to minimize harm when possible. Given Cruz’s public status and negative legislative stance on sexual self-pleasure, the fact that his Twitter account “liked” and thus spread throughout Twitter this pornographic post was significant. Journalist needed to report this news.
However, once it was made clear that this “like” was not of Cruz’s personal doing and that the matter was being handled internally, media outlets should have reported these new facts and allowed the issue to settle.
Dr. Will Nevin, an entertainment journalist for al.com, explained his motivations when deciding whether to dig deeper into an issue.
“I ask myself if there’s some angle that I think is unexplored,” Nevin said. “Is there some prospective or point of view that is unexplored. Let’s paint a picture of reality and not of some explosive unreality.”
By keeping this story alive with new content delving into Cruz’s past, journalists do more harm to Cruz than good for his constituents. These reporters are not revealing some new, hypocritical aspect of Cruz or exploring a new aspect of the issue. They are exploiting the facts that Cruz has become Jimmy Kimmel’s latest punchline and that sex always sells.
What a journalist writes is what her audience thinks about. Readers are harmed when news outlets choose to steer their attention away from important matters and toward stories that entertain but hold no real substance.
“With everything going on today, I almost feel disrespected by how big this Cruz porn thing got,” University of Alabama senior Mary Muffly said. “It shows that news outlets don’t care as much about telling us what we need to know as they do about how many people are reading their stuff.”
The decision to pursue a story further should be based in ethics and a desire to inform the reader. As evident this week, that decision is too often guided by a desire for clicks instead.