Swallowing Eggs and Ethics - a chat with Dominic Standish

As the sweet smells of cinnamon French toast, crunchy thick bacon, pan roasted potatoes and fluffy scrambled eggs settled in the cozy living room and our breakfasts in our stomachs, my traveling writing class of seven scattered around the room, laughed as Professor Standish narrated his beginnings in journalism, exclaiming in praise “Hallelujah” for the International Herald Tribune finally offering him an assignment.

Wednesday morning instead of having regular class, everyone in my travel writing class got up a little bit earlier, threw on our slickers and trekked through the rain down the empty streets of Paderno to our professor’s house. To break up the normalcy of class, we had a homemade “American” breakfast and a conversation with a British professor from CIMBA.

Dominic Standish, an expatriate, has been living in Italy for 11 years. After only four days in Italy he was married in Venice and has since started a family. When asked what his role is as an expatriate, he jokingly replied that it is less about patriotism and more defined by public responsibility.

It’s the responsibility of journalists to spur debate and to stop the erosion of public intelligence, he commented - a reoccurring theme in the overall conversation and a point that I think is worth reflection.

As a journalist it is important to realize that your work influences the public. Society depends upon journalists to be a watch dog – to provide checks and balances. While I don’t think any media can be completely impartial, journalism strives to offer the public accurate, clear, and unbiased material so they can develop their own opinions.

Standish offered the idea that as a journalist he works toward initiating a conversation with society. People 30-40 years ago, according to him, valued debate. Academics played a wider role in society and journalism worked to connect the two for the good of the public. However today there has been an erosion of public intellect. The media no longer holds the deep moral journalistic standards that propelled the industry only a few decades ago.

As we have been exploring in Standish’s Mass Media and Ethics course, ethics policies, which have increased ten fold in the past 30 years (ever sense Watergate), are becoming more and more restrictive – regulating more than just journalists' action but also how they are expecting to think ethically about situations. People in my opinion are no longer building their own morals but depending on the ethical codes of their companies to mold their beliefs, leading to the ethical decay that we have been witnessing in recent history with company scandals and downturns.

Journalists should be working on defining society’s morals by preparing news for public debate. The media should spur conversation and dredge up people’s personal opinions.

Finally, I also agree with Standish when he suggests that more academics should enter journalism because as he divulged the hardest piece to write is a story you know the least about…