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February 2001

Look at it our way: practice good journalism

We here at the Playwickian bring you good journalism every month. This is something that we enjoy doing. It brings you, our reading audience, material that is entertaining and informative, and it also gives us the opportunity to express our adherence to the universal journalists code of ethics, a code that is followed, for the most part, by journalists worldwide.

Some of the provisions of this code include the reporting a news story in a timely fashion, try to be as objective as possible in writing a news story, and if the situation warrants, respect and protect the anomymity of your sources. These provisions of the code were broken by the publication of certain news articles in the daily newspaper The Trentonian.

As most of you are aware, the incident involving some underclassmen and video equipment occurred approximately two weeks before the writing of this article. The Trentonian published two news stories on Feb. 8 covering the incident as if it were a breaking news story.

While the story is one that has the volume to be covered by the daily newspapers, wouldn’t you agree that publishing articles about the incident two weeks after it occurred is a little late?

Secondly, in order for a news story to be covered with impartiality to all sides, objectivity in the story must be observed.

In order for this to happen, any bias the writer has must be put aside for the sake of delivering a fair account of the events as they happened.

In the articles The Trentonian published, there seemed to be an undertone of criticism of the Neshaminy administration in order to sensationalize the general theme.

Instead of focusing on any positive solutions or goals that have been or could be accomplished, the story only emphasizes the lewd part of it.

In one of The Trentonian articles, four teenage girls from another high school were quoted as expressing what their views were regarding not the incident itself, but about sex in general. These views may have been erroroneously attributed to Neshaminy high school students.

This article was a news article mind you. Do the views of four underage teenagers about sex have anything to do with the story itself?

We’ll leave this one up for you to decide. If this wasn’t enough, the girls were not named in the article, but descriptions of them were given, including, believe it or not, their respective hair colors, length and style. Not to mention, they couldn't even deliver a balanced story by interviewing boys as well.

Finally, the disturbing prevalent factor that cannot be ignored in these articles, and for that matter, in all the media hype surrounding this story, is that it contians the three letter word: sex. It sells, pure and simple.

Never mind the fact that there are many great things going on here at Neshaminy other than some underclassmen that made some indiscreet decisions.

But these things do not get hyped up media attention. Only the things that put our school in a negative lime light attract superfluous media attention.

While this incident may give a few giggles out at first (we laughed a little, mostly out of embarassment), the negative media attention that our school is receiving is no laughing matter.