Never Take the Cake
“No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.” Francis Bacon, Elizabethan philosopher
Like all students everywhere I was, as a journalism student, fascinated by some classes and turned off by others. One I adored and would race to was an ethics class. Our professor – Jeff — was tall, skinny as Ichobod Crane, and had great stories to tell us about his long career as a newspaper journalist. I loved the debates that followed, sometimes reaching crescendo level. I loved analyzing the ifs, buts, and maybes of ethics and the moral mazes they led us through.
One of his early reporter stories’ about newsroom gifts seemed like an ethical slam dunk at first. Jeff was working on the staff of a small town newspaper. He wrote a short piece about a local event. The female chair person of the group heard it was Jeff’s birthday the next day and came in that morning, carrying a huge chocolate birthday cake. She marched up to his desk and loudly gushed, “I am soooo pleased with the lovely story you wrote about my club. I made you this cake to thank you.”
Jeff said thanks, took the cake and laid it out on a nearby table. Another young reporter got a knife and some paper plates. What a neat thing, they thought, until they heard a loud bellowing, “Whaaaaat is going on here!!” It was their editor and he was not pleased. He covered the room faster than they had even seen him move. Someone started to explain. They didn’t get past, “That nice lady gave us . . . ” Their editor turned purple in the face and shouted, “Get that cake out of here. We DO NOT, repeat DO NOT accept gifts. End of Story. Get ridda’ the cake!” The chocolate sugar high disappeared in seconds. Jeff never took a gift while a reporter again.
I got it. So later, when a gal who had set me up to write a story I later realized was contrived marched into our newsroom, a gigantic cake held like an Oscar before her and thrust it my way, I blanched. Then I said, sweetly, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones. We are not permitted to accept gifts.” She argued haughtily, “How silly, Why don’t you just take it and give it to the “boys” if you don’t want it?” When I held my ground and said I was sorry but that would be the same thing, wouldn’t it, she changed her tactics. She tucked the sheet cake under her arm like an old parcel, opened her purse and pulled out a sheaf of papers. They were for me, she said. It was her draft of a story she thought I should write for the next day’s paper! I referred her to my editor.
Now, whenever I hear someone shredding ethics, I want to say to the targets of their manipulation, “Don’t take the cake.”
Meditation for the Day
“Truth may be stretched but cannot be broken. It always gets above falsehood as oil does above water.” Miguel de Cervante, author, Don Quixote
Action for the Day
Today and tomorrow, I’ll embrace integrity and say “thanks but no thanks” when someone offers me the cake.
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