harpojaeger.com

On the differences between the NYT and partisan news outlets:

The first is that we believe in verification rather than assertion. We put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny

…

Being right is necessary but not sufficient. We also strive to be impartial. We are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into a story with a preconceived notion. We do not manipulate or hide facts to advance an agenda. We strive to preserve our independence from political and economic interests, including our own advertisers and including our own government. (NPR, whose news coverage I admire, must surely be wondering whether a federal subsidy is worth its vulnerability to the riptides of Congressional politics.)

…

But just as doctors and lawyers, teachers and military officers, judges and the police are expected to set aside their own politics in the performance of their duties, so are our employees. This does not mean — as one writer recently scoffed — that we “poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.” It does not mean according equal weight to every point of view, no matter how far-fetched. (Sorry, birthers, but President Obama is an American citizen.) Impartiality is, for us, not just a matter of pretending to be neutral; it is a healthful, intellectual discipline. Once you proclaim an opinion, you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out.

I think this last part is exactly right.  And I also like that Keller doesn’t fall into the traditional “this is all the fault of the bloggers” line of reasoning.  In fact, he even takes a shot at that precept: “…worrying that the accelerated competition of Web news has undermined our premium on accuracy.”

There’s still, and will continue to be, a place for real, verifiable, reporting.  Some if it is done in newspapers, some of it is done in blogs.  There’s also a good deal of shoddy journalism in both.  It’s heartening to see an executive at one of the finest news organizations in the country talking frankly about the structural incentives that shape the way news is produced and consumed.  That’s the first step to better aligning those incentives with the public interest.

This comment on Jewschool and the one directly following it got me thinking about the ethics of blogging.  I’m certainly not the first to ask this question, and I tend to think that although there are certainly formalized differences between bloggers and journalists (the type of information they tend to cover, etc.,) we’re both responsible for our information.  Perhaps because bloggers tend to have less editorial oversight, we feel less responsible (and are less apt to be fired or penalized if we get a fact wrong,) but in reality, there’s a certain authority that comes with just claiming to know facts.  Anyone with a website that’s at least somewhat respectable – i.e. not a conspiracy theorist – is likely to be taken at least somewhat seriously from the get-go.

So bloggers, regardless of how impartial we are, should strive for the same level of integrity as journalists do.  Similarly, we should recognize that blogging, like journalism, can serve an important public function, and we should try to live up to that.  Which is why this is particularly disgusting:

There has been widespread condemnation of the violence directed against journalists covering events in Egypt–and there should be.  But honestly,  I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for those who have been attacked.

Journalists have a job to do,  but when they take huge risks for the sake of ratings and then find themselves in trouble,  it’s hard to take seriously any “shock” that media executives express about their journalists being targeted.

Despite news organizations’ general preference for ad revenue over real journalism, the fact remains that correspondents in the field are putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of spreading important information.

Journalists should use judgment and not race into the middle of what amounts to a massive bar room brawl without expecting something bad to happen.

First of all, the situation in Egypt only “amounts to a massive bar room brawl” if half the people in said brawl were paid to be there and to instigate violence.  Second of all, I imagine those journalists did expect something to happen.  They knew very well what they were getting into, and they did it anyway.  That’s laudable.

Bottom line: bloggers and journalists have been providing us with incredibly important information on the ground in Egypt.  Show some respect, people.

I’ve been toying for a while with the idea of macroethics in journalism.  What I mean by this is not the sort of day-to-day ethics we associate with individual journalists, but the larger ethics of the journalistic industry.  In an era where information is freely dispensed over the Internet, public understanding of important realities continues to be dominated by large news organizations.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Although I have a high opinion of many Internet-only sites, and I consider them at least as authoritative as major news outlets, there is definitely still a place for organizations like the New York Times, if for no reason other than accountability.  Large editorial structures can be beneficial in holding individual journalists to high ethical standards.

Arguably, the fact that a productive political discourse existed before the Internet is pretty good evidence that however useful the internet is, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the large-organization model.  But there is an aspect of that model that I think is a problem in the age of the internet: its profitability.  News organizations have been for-profit entities for a long time, but they’re now competing with a host of other sources for airtime.  I’d argue that this is why they’ve turned to increasingly showy (and increasingly less substantive) programming (I’m focusing mainly on TV news here).

Certainly the internet is not “the problem.”  In its ideal form, it is a forum for sharing ideas democratically (Twitter probably represents this better than any other technology).  But it would be naive to assume that the whole picture is so rosy.  Media organizations who used to have a stranglehold on (and whose editorial processes at least attempted to assure the quality of) information are forced to find different ways to make money.  Showier advertisements, more appealing programming.  In short, selling out.  They have to cover what people will pay to watch, giving journalistic discretion a lower priority.

One idea I’ve tossed around as a potential solution would be requiring news agencies to be nonprofit.  Obviously nonprofits are still responsible for revenue, because they have to pay the people who work in them, but they’re not beholden to any shareholders, and no one enters them to get rich.  In an ideal world, a nonprofit functions as a way for people to do something they enjoy and be paid enough to live on while doing it.  This would appear to fit quite well with the goals of an idealized journalistic institution.  The question is how to apply it.  I’ve thought about a law mandating that news organizations be nonprofit, but this creates all sorts of new problems.  How would you define what is and is not a news organization (Fox comes to mind)?  What about bloggers?

It would be nice to just leave it up to citizens to create their own nonprofit news organization (such things exist).  Clearly, however, companies like CNN and Fox are way too big to be taken down by such an upstart.  Furthermore, it’s unlikely that citizens would have any interest in switching to a new media organization.  The idealized free-market model that predicts that the consumer will go where the best value is requires that they actually know how to judge value.

Short of such a large-scale government intervention, however, I’ve been unable to come up with any idea on how the national discourse in this country can improve as long as the media keeps on doing what it’s doing.