Green Light Ethics

Practice hard-hitting journalism with confidence.

The Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership takes a practical approach to the ever-changing pressures on journalism and democracy. We are an authoritative voice for journalists, citizens and everyone interested in elevating discourse and fact-based expression while battling disinformation and bias.

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Through the work of the Center, journalism can evolve its values and the public will better understand how those values impact their everyday lives, building practices of mutual trust and transparency. We:

Provide custom advice and training to professional newsrooms on stories and policies.
Advance the ethical standards that guide professional news organizations.
Work with citizens and journalists to identify issues where journalism can better serve its audience.
Host gatherings where journalists and experts can exchange ideas.
Sponsor research into building trust in news and the democratic process.

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Do you want to interview one of our experts? Please email Poynter’s director of marketing Tina Dyakon for all media requests.

Neil Brown
President
The Poynter Institute

Kelly McBride
Poynter Senior Vice President and
Chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership

Cheryl Carpenter
Leadership Faculty
The Poynter Institute

Rick Edmonds
Media Business Analyst & Leader of News Transformation
The Poynter Institute

Shannon Kellenberger
Administrative Assistant, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership

Samantha Ragland
Faculty Member
The Poynter Institute

Al Tompkins, Senior Faculty, Broadcast and Online

Al Tompkins
Senior Faculty and Group Leader for Broadcast Media
The Poynter Institute

Doris Truong
Director of Training and Diversity
The Poynter Institute

Ethics articles:

The headquarters for National Public Radio in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Should journalists be allowed to protest? A legendary news organization tries to address that issue

NPR unveiled a new ethics policy that cracks open the door to allow journalists more freedom in their civic lives away from work.

A flyer for Local Live(s) Chicago, part of a series of storytelling events produced by Back Pocket Media. The project partners with newsrooms to bring storytelling nights to communities across the United States.
(Courtesy: McArdle Hankin)

Journalists share the stories behind their stories with virtual storytelling collective Local Live(s)

‘People who didn’t care about news … were staying late after the show to buy beers for the journalists,’ Local Live(s) co-founder said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders in October of last year. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara). (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders plays politics with COVID in a guest column for The Democrat-Gazette

But maybe anything that encourages someone to get the vaccine could be viewed as positive.

A sign urging safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic is seen in Teesto, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation on Feb. 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca)

Governments created an informational black hole for Indigenous communities and COVID-19

How did the pandemic affect the 576 tribal nations across the US? Due to a lack of government transparency, we may never know.

In this Jan. 12, 2021, file photo President Donald Trump walks to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. In a fall 2019 and early spring 2020 media ethics class at Greenlee School Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, Michael Bugeja and his students studied lies, deceit and secrecy in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

You can’t be a truth-seeker if you’re also a liar

Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election is one lie in a culture of falsehood. Media ethics students learn they, too, often fail at truth-telling.

Michael Wolff. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Trump author Michael Wolff and CNN host Brian Stelter got into it over the media

The two had a back-and-forth about Fox and Rupert Murdoch and then Wolff sounded off on the media, including Stelter.

An older white male, with his hair slicked back, wearing a white shirt with a black tie under a black garment, looks off to his left. The photo is in black and white.

Defamation was considered a well-settled area of law. Then came social media.

Recent dissents by two Supreme Court justices make reconsideration of New York Times v. Sullivan look like a real possibility.

The image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. “There's a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It's rotating." The U.S. government has been taking a hard look at unidentified flying objects, under orders from Congress, and a report summarizing what officials know came out recently. (Department of Defense via AP)

UFOs, once consigned to conspiracy theories, have landed in mainstream American journalism

How do journalists balance the offbeat nature of the subject — with its decades of conspiracies and skeptics — with their credibility?

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The Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter was made possible by a generous grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies.