It wasn't that I didn't care, it's just that I didn't think.

The afternoon was blindingly hot, the kind that just seems overexposed. Dan Wallace and I were out on assignment in northern St. Pete Beach, walking around a small neighborhood looking for houses whose design had been affected by FEMA regulations. We had forgotten our water back in the car, and were tired, hot, and most of all, thirsty.

But we were able to push past the heat, mostly because we had stumbled onto a goldmine. We found ourselves on a street where two of the houses were rebuilt after a waterspout. Constructed under modern FEMA regulations, they were monstrous-and illustrated our point precisely. We were even luckier to have run into one of the owners as he was moving a table saw into his garage. Dan and I spoke with him, and he agreed to meet us for an interview the following day. As we were about to leave, Mrs. Galiardo emerged from the house with two plastic cups in her hand. "Would you guys like some mango soup?" she asked.

Integrity has always been exceedingly important to me - important enough, in fact, to usher me past several long-time dream colleges to apply early decision to Haverford College. Haverford - or, the 'Ford, as it is often referred to - is a tiny 1,200-person liberal arts college nestled on 200 bucolic acres just outside of Philadelphia. The college was founded in 1833 as the first officially Quaker higher education institution. Though mandatory attendance at Fifth-Day Quaker Meeting was eliminated in the 1970s, Quaker values of social conscience, tolerance and integrity still form the core tenets of the institution.

These values are most clearly manifested in Haverford's Honor Code, a self-imposed document simply asking students to demonstrate "trust, concern, and respect" for our peers, our academics and our professors at all times.

As a student, I was impressed by how thoroughly the school asked us to live the code's ideals of respect and integrity. Most exams were timed, closed-book take-homes where professors trusted us to time ourselves and follow their directions about use of course materials. There were no RAs in the dorm; instead, we were expected to demonstrate respect for our peers and resolve problems on our own. Students routinely left backpacks, laptops and even iPods on the shelves in the dining hall, where one could reasonably expect that anything left there would be waiting for its owner, even several days later.

But Haverford's leafy campus was far from my mind on that blistering Sunday afternoon. "We'd love to try it," I said as Dan and I both reached for a cup. We thanked Mrs. Galiardo and walked off toward a neighboring house. I took a bite of the mango soup, which had been frozen into more of a mango sorbet. It was delicious.

That evening, I returned home to the dorms at Eckerd and plopped down on the couch to chat with my suitemate Leann Frola. So, how was your day? she asked. Great! I said. I told her about our story and the excellent sources that we had stumbled onto. "One of my sources even gave us some mango soup," I bragged, grinning as I remembered how creamy and flavorful it was.

"Isn't that unethical?" Leann asked, only half kidding. We often joke around the suite about "unethical Ben." I strongly disagreed with a decision made earlier on one of Leann's stories. Poynter Faculty, Kelly McBride, had argued (and prevailed) that if we were going to accurately profile a massage therapist who treats AIDS patients, we would have to include his sexual orientation. Kelly argued it was a critical part of the story, because in initial interviews the therapist had described how losing several friends to AIDS made him more compassionate.

To me, it seemed only tangentially relevant. I worried that his story would go untold, simply because he refused to broadcast his orientation on the Internet. From that point on, I became Unethical Ben, because I disagreed with the head of the Poynter Institute's Ethics Department.

But somehow I knew that Leann was half serious. "Ooohm," I grimaced in my head as I, too, laughed nervously and tried to push the issue out of my mind by asking Leann about her day.

As soon as the conversation in the living room broke up, I went to my room and crashed onto my bed. I knew that I had probably done something unethical, but I wasn't sure how bad it was or how I should react. So I called my girlfriend.

Beyond our year as a couple, I've been good friends with Rachel for four years, and she probably knows me better than anyone else. She's fished me out of the water often enough to know when I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but she also knows when I've gone too far.

"Do you think I'm unethical?" I asked breathlessly when she picked up.

I explained the mango soup scenario.

"You know what I think about journalists and their ethics," she said. "I think they've kind of got a stick up their ass." But, I think they might have a point here.

She was right. I knew it. They had a point. This I could accept. Troubling, though, was that they had had points before.

Lying on my bed, I couldn't help but recall another ethics "incident" earlier in the program. Shortly into my first design project about an abstract copper artist, I decided I wanted to include a detail shot of his art on the inside page. The only problem was that the artwork was horizontal, the space remaining vertical. Since it was abstract art with no clear orientation, the solution seemed obvious to me: Without consulting anyone, I simply rotated the artwork 90 degrees and slid it into place.

As soon as the photographer, Michelle Le, saw the proof, however, she called me out on the rotation. Did you rotate this picture? she asked. I told her that I did, and explained that turning it on its side was really our best option since it wouldn't fit as a horizontal. "That's really unethical," she said, her voice concerned. "You can't mess with someone's work like that." Though this hadn't occurred to me initially, I immediately knew she was right. Michelle very graciously offered to give the artist a call to see if it was OK, but I decided that the best solution would be to rethink the layout. There's no need to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I went home that night feeling a bit uneasy about myself. As I tried to fall asleep, I felt that queasy grimace in my stomach. Did this mean that I was an unethical person, I worried? Haverford had impressed upon me the colossal importance of integrity and ethical behavior in all walks of life. For me, to fail at integrity was to fail as a person.

At Haverford, I majored in growth and structure of cities - really, urban planning. The professional ethics conversations that we had were very broad and far removed from the world of journalism. We stroked our chins, worrying about the ethics of highways, zoning and eminent domain. Our college newspaper didn't have an adviser. In the midst of laying out pages and calling wayward reporters and unjamming the printer, we didn't have much time for ethical conversations.

Before I came to Poynter, I hadn't given journalistic ethics much thought. I recognized the need for professional integrity: Don't make up stories and don't deliberately misrepresent facts. This was simply an intuitive understanding rooted in my personal sense of integrity.

What I didn't realize is the need for an obsession with truth-telling: to have journalistic integrity is not only to refrain from deliberate misrepresentations, but to check and question every step of the process to ensure that what is published is fair and accurate. Poynter has taught me that it is not enough to see this from a singular, personal perspective. You must consider how the story will be perceived and how your actions will be interpreted by all stakeholders.

But I also realized I didn't think. I acted first, before I was able to process potential consequences. I didn't exercise self-awareness or filter my actions through good judgment.

Problems of self-awareness and real-time ethical judgment have been a recurring theme in my life: For the most part, I am able to understand why my actions might be unethical after the fact, but I often struggle to identify ethical issues as they are unfolding.

I will always remember what was perhaps my first ethical "incident" back in first grade. Toward the end of lunch, one of my classmates offered me $2 for the homemade brownie that my mother had lovingly packed for me. I countered for $5, an exorbitant sum for a first-grader. To my amazement, he accepted and I pocketed the money.

Later that day, Mrs. Wells confronted me.

Do you know what you did wrong? she asked.

"No," I answered, curious as to what was wrong with making a little money off my extra food. My teacher explained that gouging fellow students was unethical, which I understood - but only after the fact.

In the end, was accepting the mango soup unethical? Debatable. Some say yes, some say no. I know that it didn't affect my reporting or the presentation of the story. I also know that even just appearances can cast serious doubt upon my credibility. Next time someone offers me something, I will probably stop and think a bit, before making another Mango soup decision.

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