Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted; The New York Times, September 12, 2025

 Katie Robertson, The New York Times; Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted

"The Atlantic quietly agreed to pay more than $1 million early this summer to settle a lawsuit by the writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, who had accused the magazine of defamation after it took the rare step of retracting an article she had written and replacing it with an editor’s note, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement.

Ms. Barrett, who wrote an article about youth sports in wealthy areas as a freelancer for The Atlantic in 2020, sued the publication and one of its editors in January 2022. She said the outlet had smeared her reputation and asked for $1 million in damages.

Both sides agreed to resolve their dispute in mediation in April and asked for the suit to be voluntarily dismissed on June 27 when they reached a settlement, according to court documents. The Atlantic made updates to the editor’s note on the online version of the article on June 26."

Thirteen Journalists on How They Are Rethinking Ethics; Columbia Journalism Review, August 21, 2025

JULIE GERSTEIN AND MARGARET SULLIVAN, Columbia Journalism Review; Thirteen Journalists on How They Are Rethinking Ethics

"Seek truth. Own up to mistakes. Consider all sides of a story. Prioritize accuracy, minimize harm, be transparent, avoid conflicts of interest. These are the core ethics many working journalists today learned in school or during their first years on the job.  

This summer, the two of us—Margaret Sullivan and Julie Gerstein, of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University—have been exploring, in a series of pieces with CJR, whether those ethics are sufficient for journalists in the modern moment. Whether, in the face of artificial intelligence, “fake news,” eroding protections for sources, and the weakening of their business model, journalists should adjust their core tenets. 

As part of our research, we asked working journalists and academic journalism ethicists to share their thoughts on themes including disinformation, objectivity, AI, nonprofit news business models, and dealing with sources. 

In some areas, we heard calls for change. “Traditional journalistic norms and conventions for covering politics and politicians were not created for a president like Donald Trump,” said Rod Hicks, executive editor of the St. Louis American and formerly the director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists. Stephen J. Adler, director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and chair of the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argued that “the media isn’t doing its job in correctly balancing the news value of a leak versus. the news value of who made the leak and why.” 

But other journalists spoke out in favor of renewed allegiance to old values. “Limiting the use of unnamed sources to matters of public interest wherever we can helps us ensure we don’t dilute the credibility that makes our coverage worth reading,” pointed out Elena Cherney, senior editor at the Wall Street Journal and leader of the newsroom’s Standards & Ethics team. And even as business models have changed, Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the nonprofit Texas Tribune, argues, “the need to protect journalism from the potential corrupting influence of money is as old as the profession itself.” 

Their comments highlight the value of open, honest conversation among thoughtful leaders in an industry seeking a path forward."

An ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.; The New York Times, November 3, 2024

Andrew Higgins, The New York Times; An ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.

"When a state-funded Polish radio station canceled a weekly show featuring interviews with theater directors and writers, the host of the program went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture.

But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a “unique interview” with an icon of Polish culture, Wislawa Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The terminated radio host, Lukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Ms. Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012.

The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones."

Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers; Futurism, November 2023

MAGGIE HARRISON, Futurism; Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

"After we reached out with questions to the magazine's publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated's site without explanation.

Initially, our questions received no response. But after we published this story, an Arena Group spokesperson provided the following statement that blamed a contractor for the content..."

Journalistic ethics with Mark Memmott on Thursday's Access Utah; Utah Public Radio (UPR), January 20, 2022

Tom Williams, Utah Public Radio (UPR); Journalistic ethics with Mark Memmott on Thursday's Access Utah

"Journalist Mark Memmott was the standards and practices editor at NPR (2014-19) and played a major part in designing NPR’s code of ethics. When reporter Jack Kelley was suspected of fabricating stories at USA Today, Memmott was secretly assigned to investigate Kelley. Memmott spoke to USU’s Mass Communications Ethics class yesterday and he’ll join us today to talk about issues of media ethics, including NPR’s recent decision to permit journalists to participate in Black Lives Matter protests.

Mark Memmott is a journalist, freelance editor, and consultant. In his 40-year career he has worked for USA TODAY, NPR and The Texas Newsroom (collaboration between NPR and stations in Texas)."

A board to oversee Georgia journalists sounds like Orwellian fiction. The proposal is all too real.; The Washington Post, April 8, 2019

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post; A board to oversee Georgia journalists sounds like Orwellian fiction. The proposal is all too real.

"Granted, journalists are far from perfect, and their practices deserve to be held to reasonable standards. But there already is pretty good agreement about journalistic ethics, available for all to see.

Respectable news organizations have codes of ethics — many of them available to the public. The Society of Professional Journalists has a well-accepted code as well."

Ethics, Quants and Cold-Calling; Bloomberg, May 25, 2017

Matt Levine, Bloomberg; 

Ethics, Quants and Cold-Calling

"Ethics.

I used to be a lawyer, and lawyers have a code of ethics. Now I am a journalist, and journalists have a code of ethics. One thing that strikes me about these codes is that they are opposites. Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a lawyer is that your obligations are to your client, and you have to act in her best interests, even if that is against the interests of accuracy; legal ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle. Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a journalist is that your obligations are to the public, and you should be accurate even if that is against the interests of the people you talk to; journalistic ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle. In both cases the exceptions are huge and important: You're not supposed to lie to the public as a lawyer, or mislead your sources as a journalist, etc; none of this is meant to be any sort of ethical advice. But if someone says to you "oh yeah I murdered someone," as a lawyer, your baseline expected response would be not to tell anyone; as a journalist, your baseline expected response would be to tell everyone.

Obviously these opposite rules make sense in their respective contexts; the role of a lawyer is different from that of a journalist, and each profession's ethics are well adapted to doing their jobs usefully. Still it is weird to think of them as "ethics." They are both functional systems adapted to the work of their professions, not absolute moral-ethical rules handed down by a higher power. Keeping a murderer's secret is not absolutely ethical for humans, and disclosing that secret is not absolutely ethical for humans; each is ethical or unethical depending on its social context."

Hulk Hogan, media ethics and the battling Internet moguls; PBS NewsHour, 5/30/16

PBS NewsHour; Hulk Hogan, media ethics and the battling Internet moguls:

"When Hulk Hogan won $140 million in court from millionaire Nick Denton’s Gawker Media after it published video of him having sex, the verdict raised serious questions about journalistic ethics. Hogan’s suit was funded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who Gawker outed as gay a decade earlier. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Wired’s Jason Tanz for more on the case and its implications."