As a budding reporter, I feel it’s important for me to keep up with happenings in the professional journalism community.

Judging by what I’ve seen in the last week alone, it seems that what’s left of the integrity of the American media is headed straight down the crapper.

Even more disturbing is that people in the journalism industry are not only allowing this to happen, they are contributing.

The first incident involves the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes.” It seems that some corporate lawyers became a little uneasy when it was learned that a former tobacco industry executive who had agreed to talk on record about how cigarette manufacturers try to keep information from becoming public had signed a contract with his former employer stating that he would never disclose that information.

So the CBS lawyers pulled the story, fearing a huge lawsuit against CBS for encouraging the executive to break a legal contract. Philip Morris recently sued ABC News for $15 billion, so a lawsuit was probably a distinct possibility.

The lawyers thought the company’s financial interests were more important than the story. It’s their job to look out for the financial interests of the company, so I have no quarrel with them. What really makes me mad is that Mike Wallace, the “60 Minutes” reporter who did the story, said he thought the lawyer’s decision was right.

T.V. news usually makes me physically ill, but I have always been a big fan of “60 Minutes,” and particularly of Mike Wallace. This is a man who has made a career out of exposing slimy, deceitful types on national television. I can’t believe he has gone soft like this.

Being able to ask people to give out information that they aren’t supposed to give out is an important part of journalism. Some of the greatest stories ever were things that someone decided the general public wasn’t supposed to know.

This decision has nothing to do with the integrity of the program. The story wasn’t pulled because the information was shaky or incomplete. It was a business decision, pure and simple.

Allowing lawsuits and lawyers dictate the editorial content of the news is an outrage. It flies in the face of everything a free press is supposed to stand for. But CBS is allowing itself to be walked on, and its complacency will only encourage other big businesses to use their lawyers to keep their dirty secrets hidden.

When Philip Morris sued ABC over a story that reported how the company puts nicotine in cigarettes, ABC News officials not only took it, they apologized. APOLOGIZED!

ABC not only showed an appalling lack of self respect, it set a precedent. Now tobacco companies are breathing easier because they have discovered that the threat of a lawsuit is enough to thwart the media.

Then there is the issue of the Department of Energy using the taxpayer’s money to rate how favorable reporters are to the department. There was some outcry at first, but the person responsible, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, still has a job.

The Clinton administration has said they are concerned about it, but nothing has been done. This isn’t surprising, considering that the Clinton administration handles every issue this way. Journalists every where should be demanding O’Leary’s head on a platter, but they aren’t.

ABC News was back in the news last week. Only this time, it wasn’t letting some corporation make it look bad. It was doing it all by itself.

A producer for the ABC news magazine “20/20” was suspended without pay for agreeing to pay $3,000 for access to chimpanzees for a story on the scientific use of animals. Any first-year journalism student knows that paying money for a source is unethical. Paying $3,000 to videotape chimpanzees is just plain stupid.

All of this points to a very disturbing trend in professional journalism. Decisions about content are being made on the basis of profits, not integrity.

Big businesses are bullying news organizations who threaten to reveal the truth about them. News organizations and individual journalists are allowing it all to happen, and making it worse by ignoring even the most obvious and important ethical rules.

Profits are necessary to keep news organizations in business, but money should not dictate what is reported. Maybe I’m just naive, but I still believe that the bottom line in journalism should be informing the public, not profits.

Unfortunately, journalists who think that way are becoming scarce.

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Steven Martens is a junior in journalism mass communication from Cedar Rapids.