The hardest lesson the journalist must learn is the development of the impersonal viewpoint. He must learn to write what he sees and hears, clearly and accurately, with never a tinge of bias. His own views, his personal feelings and his friendships should have nothing to do with what he writes in a story.
The ideal reporter would be a man who could give the public facts about his bitterest enemy even though such facts would make the man he personally hated a hero before the public.
In journalism more than in any other profession does the advice hold good: "Beware of your friends; your enemies will take care of themselves." By this is meant: Learn well the code of ethics which governs your profession, and when any man in the guise of friendship asks you to violate that code, you may say to him, "If you were truly my friend, you would not ask me to do this any more than you would ask a physician as a matter of friendship to perform an illegal operation, or a lawyer to stoop to shyster practices."
Supplying his editors with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is the only mission of the reporter, and any man who asks the reporter to deviate from that principle asks that which is dishonest.
BE TRUE
Thomas Carlyle: To every writer we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.
. . . VOICE OF THE LOWLY AND OPPRESSED . . . ADVOCATE OF THE FRIENDLESS . . . RIGHTER OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WRONGS.