A colleague belatedly emailed me an alert to a Kosmo article on the late Yasmin Ahmad. I have watched a few of her films. Sepet is my favourite.

What piqued my curiosity when I checked out the article was the exchange and name calling in no less subtle terms among bloggers - and mainstream journalists - about the justifications for running a page one story on Yasmin's sex-change - which was common knowledge among her peers.

The tit-for-tat in the journalism-blogging fraternity shows how counterfactual reactions to what's ethical or unethical journalism often leads nowhere, where every party's reasoning is logical - and irrational - at the same time, depending on the values each party brings to the exchange.

What stories there'd be if the sexual inclinations of mainstream journalists and bloggers were placed under the microscope - in the ‘public interest' just as the story about Yasmin's sex change was reasoned to be. It's the old argument about journalists' rights and responsibilities, freedom of expression, and so forth.

"Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others," as St Paul (55-57AD) taught the people at Corinth about the believers' freedom.

Paul's teachings about the believers' freedom to eat whatever food were offered may as well apply to reporters reaping the fruits of ethical journalism.

The Kosmo-Yasmin story fortuitously provided me a discussion point with a group of American journalism students I'm teaching for two weeks now at Auburn University Montgomery, Alabama.

As a short-term ‘visiting professor', my brief is to ‘expose' the students to a more ‘international perspective' of journalism practices and cultures.

The ethical issues arising from writing about the dead and ‘exposing' what they were like in life - as I explained to the students - reflect all the imperfections that make journalists perfectly human, unless journalists are able to suppress their emotions and obsession with shock and awe for the rules of logic to "bring a serenity that humans never experience", as Sarek, father of Spock, told him in Star Trek (2009).

The main gripes

For a context to suss out the ethical issues in reporting, I asked the students to cite their main gripes about the American media. Unsurprisingly, they said the US media are blatantly biased (such as Fox Television), just as we know that Malaysian mainstream media and bloggers are invariably biased although they'd like to think otherwise.

The students' other gripes were: Journalists don't follow the rules of honesty and integrity. Journalists are hypocrites. Journalists are overly negative, sensational. Journalists are obsessed with the ‘rich and famous', trivia and gossips.

For context, I alluded my American students to what the third US president, Thomas Jefferson said in 1807 about newspapers that abused its freedom to report and publish:

"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: in as much as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors."

And, this from Malcolm X when he spoke at Audobon in Harlem in December 1964, two months before he was assassinated: "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

The American students' criticisms are not much different from my Australian journalism students'. Interestingly, working journalists I teach online with the Asian Center for Journalism at Ateneo University in Manila, and media participants at the workshop I conducted at the Malaysian Press Institute this January, likewise cited similar gripes.

Indeed, knowing what's wrong with journalism does not necessarily prompt professional journalists to consciously do something to fix it.

"When you have unqualified editors running the newsroom, our hands are tied," said a senior Malaysian journalist, as I recall, from one of the mainstream papers.

"The media is controlled by the government." How often we hear these tired justifications for the ambivalence in Malaysian journalism.

Not one which panders to power

Good journalism, as I often teach my students, is more than the ability to string words into sentences and paragraphs in an inverted pyramid. A solid foundation in ethics, moral and spiritual values, fair-mindedness, a sense of right and wrong, common decency - these are attributes that students need to learn for themselves and internalize for life.

These attributes will define the journalism we need back home, one that serves the people rather than one that panders to power.

Thus, the crucial stories that bloggers and mainstream journalists should instead be investigating and debating - such as prevalent crime in KL, overbearing rude ‘foreign' vendors taking over Petaling Street, police corruption, errant judges, human trafficking, potential terrorist cells allegedly linked to illegal Indonesian immigrants at Desa Sri Hartamas.

As long as bloggers and journalists are guided by profit-making goals and self-aggrandising motives, the public discourse in style and substance will continue to be drawn to rhetoric, goss and dross, negativities, controversies and conflict.

Perhaps, we need to move from a commercial to a non-profit journalism model to raise the quality of journalism.

The need for higher standard in reporting was discussed at length by teaching panels at the AEJMC (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication) conference I recently attended in Boston from Aug 5 to 8.

Educators reinforced the need to teach students to report out of their comfort zones so that they may, when they enter the profession, be able to reclaim the journalist's primary function in engaging with their immediate communities to tell their stories.

Exercising self-control

Journalism curriculum will channel students towards developing ways to better communicate with people across lines of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, disability and age.

Journalism educators were also challenged to explore their own biases - just as students will carry their cultural baggage to class and their reporting assignments with entrenched habits of thinking and preconceptions.

How well do we recognise our biases and reflect before we react to issues and events?

Public communicators need to contextualise the imperatives of press freedom with self-control from the temptation to write platitudes and sensationalise to draw in the crowd.

As one of Asia's famous journalists, Mahatma Gandhi, said: "My newspapers became for me a training ground in self-restraint and a means for studying human nature in all its shades and variations.

"Without the newspapers a movement like Satyagraha (passive resistance) could not have been possible."