USA Today Coverage of Athlete’s Tweets Is Vigilantism, Not Journalism

This week, I did something that USA Today’s executive leadership apparently hadn’t done lately: I read the newspaper’s “principles of ethical conduct for newsrooms.”

It’s pretty highfalutin. The media manifesto of virtue, posted online, applies to all employees “working with any news platform, including newspapers, websites, mobile devices, video, social media channels, and live story events.”

Whether writing online or covering breaking developments, USA Today’s journalists are supposedly committed to:

Seeking and reporting the truth in a truthful way.
Serving the public interest.
Exercising fair play.
Acting with integrity.

Now, let’s compare the lofty rhetoric with low-blow reality.

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