Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Newsroom codes of ethics: Let’s pretend our reporters don’t think at all!

by

What are we to make of the absurdity emerging from the Miami Herald, where an editor has apparently told his staff that they’d better not purchase tickets to political benefit concerts, because such activities will taint the sanctity of their news-gathering enterprise?

I’ve never understood the sort of journalistic code of ethics — now prevalent in many American newsrooms, particularly those owned by big corporate chains — that requires newspeople to pretend that they are not human beings with brains and beliefs and emotions and lives. The logic of these rules — that, for instance, forbid reporters from participating in political rallies or contributing to campaigns or otherwise behaving like normal, politically engaged citizens — seems to stem from fear. The editors and publishers who promulgate them are worried that, if critics of their institutions get hold of factual evidence that reporters actually hold their own opinions and beliefs, those critics will be able to argue that their news reports are biased. This is the sort of fear that drives executives insane, since — despite decades of effort — no American corporation has yet figured out how to find that ideal Employee With No Mind of His Own, and a newsroom is the last place you’d want to hire him, anyway.

This issue, of course, leads one deep into the swamp of the hoary debate over “journalistic objectivity.” Me, I can’t imagine how any thinking journalist or reader in 2004 can imagine that it’s possible for a reporter to so thoroughly suppress his individuality and experiences that he can provide an account of events that’s unshaped by who he is — or that, were it possible, such an account would be desirable. But others disagree, and in fact I hear the “lack of objectivity” charge today less often from journalists than from consumers of journalism, who have — sadly but understandably — taken the profession’s traditional avowal of objectivity at face value, and then become outraged at its failure to achieve that pristine state.

For clarity here, let’s distinguish between the unattainable standard of objectivity — a scientific absolute poised as subjectivity’s opposite — and the entirely attainable, and laudable, standards of fairness and accuracy and honesty and transparency that any journalist of good mind and heart will subscribe to. Fairness: If you’re presenting one side of a story, you owe it to your readers, your subjects and yourself to weigh the other side’s case. Accuracy: Observation should always trump preconception, and you just don’t publish something that you know is untrue, even if it helps make an argument you cherish. Honesty: You do your best to present the truth as you have witnessed it and understand it, knowing that your witness and understanding are shaped by who you are, yet also knowing that honesty will sometimes require you to report things that make you uncomfortable or call your own beliefs into question. Transparency: You do your best to avoid financial conflicts of interest, and where you have an unavoidable interest in a story you’re covering, you reveal it up front.

These principles seem so simple and obvious to me after a quarter century of writing and editing that when I read something like these words from the Miami Herald memo, my eyes roll: “As you know and understand, it is improper for independent journalists — which we are — to engage in partisan politics or to advocate for political causes. In this case, buying a ticket to any of these events is tantamount to making a political contribution, which is prohibited by the newsroom’s Guidelines on Ethics.”

Where to begin here? Note how the newspaper has revised the concept of conflict of interest — which should apply to situations where an individual can improperly gain material benefit in the course of pursuing her professional responsibilities — and turned it into a stricture demanding that all reporters neuter their civic selves.

Sure, any “Guideline on Ethics” ought to forbid journalists accepting contributions (i.e., bribes) from politicians — that’s a conflict of interest! But if you accept the logic that a reporter contributing to a political campaign constitutes a conflict of interest, you really can’t avoid insisting that the reporter, um, not vote, either.

If you believe that a reporter who contributes to a political campaign can’t write about politics, you’ve set an all-consuming trap for the entire journalistic enterprise. Your rule will keep widening its net: If buying a ticket to a political benefit is verboten, since the money from the benefit will end up in a campaign’s coffers, then the reporter should carefully refrain as well from buying a movie ticket from any studio that has used its profits to make any sort of political contribution. For that matter, better stay away from buying any product from any corporation that has chosen to give dough to any candidate. If you pay taxes, you’d better think twice about writing about any arm of the government to which you’ve contributed. And so on.

It’s hopeless; the Herald’s staff might as well take vows of poverty, chastity and silence — and leave their paper’s columns blank. (Meanwhile, of course, these corporate codes of ethics never seem to apply any strictures to the folks who own the papers — and who have far more substantial interests that tend to be far more conflicted.)

Alternately, American journalism’s managerial class could accept that reporters are people with lives — and that their best bet at salvaging their profession is to start from that point, rather than desperately run from it. The vitality of the blogosphere offers one hopeful sign: here’s a model of journalism that rests on a foundation of openness, individuality and participation. But the Miami Herald’s code of ethics probably bans blogging, too.

COPA coverage

by

Here’s the AP on the COPA ruling. Says it was a 5-4. Court upheld the original injunction against putting the law into effect. Could conceivably go back to lower court for full trial if the Ashcroft Justice Department chooses to — then we’ll be fighting this poorly conceived and written law for another five years. Another area where a change in administration might be salutary — though Clinton signed the original COPA, it’s not at all clear whether a less porn-obsessed Justice Department would have pursued the case as avidly as Ashcroft has.

More on COPA

by

MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.

Supremes’ COPA decision

by

I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.

The Times sets its WMD record straight

by

Stay up late on the West Coast and you get tomorrow’s New York Times today. Tonight brings a long “From the Editors” note that reconsiders the WMD hysteria that marked some of its prewar coverage and marred its reputation:

“It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.”

“We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”

For the Times, this transparency thing is still very new. And admitting that major stories that helped launch an ill-conceived war were at best careless and at worst fraudulent is a painful thing for any journalistic enterprise. But admitting mistakes is the first step toward preventing their recurrence.

Now if we can only get our president to understand that principle. Instead, here he is solemnly announcing, in his speech last night, that “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror.” Sure it is. How did it get that way? It wasn’t such a front before we invaded. Our mistakes — Bush’s mistakes — opened another front for bin Ladenism to exploit.

Will Saletan in Slate has a smart deconstruction of the strange rhetoric in Bush’s speech that omits any acknowledgment of missteps and all reference to his own agency in the unfolding Iraq disaster. Bush hasn’t done anything; instead, “history is moving.” It would be funny if there weren’t so many lives already lost, and more on the line.

PATRIOT Act: The last refuge of scoundrels

by

One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.

This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!

(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.

What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.

The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.

(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)

Beyond the Green Zone

by

Jeff Jarvis echoes Howard Kurtz’s observation that most U.S. reporters in Iraq aren’t daring to venture outside the Green Zone. Given the chaos there and the danger of being taken hostage or worse, it’s hard to second-guess the decisions these journalists are making. But there’s no question we won’t get the full picture from Iraq this way.

Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That’s certainly good advice.

But it’s also worth pointing out that Salon’s coverage from Iraq was not “embedded” during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Phillip Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering eyewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that’s not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.

Free Press milestone memories

by

The Wall Street Journal Online published a good piece earlier this week by Carl Bialik capturing a small but significant (and, to me, personally important) moment of Net history. Ten years ago this coming November, I had my first real experience of Web publishing as part of the team that created the San Francisco Free Press, a short-lived by valuable experiment in publishing an online newspaper during a strike against the S.F. Chronicle and the Examiner (where I then worked). Carl quotes me a couple of times, noting that, for me, the choice between (a) marching a picket line in circles while chanting slogans and (b) working on editing and posting files to the Web was a no-brainer. Like just about everyone else quoted in the Journal article, I told Bialik that the Free Press experience changed my life. Afterwards, the return to the Examiner newsroom — the strike only lasted two weeks — was an immense anti-climax, and there was no question in my mind that I’d be moving my career on to the Web as fast as I could manage.

Times Magazine failure of intelligence?

by

The New York Times Magazine had to have closed out its cover story for yesterday well before the stories about torture in Abu Ghraib prison broke. So chalk one up to its editors’ prescience for running Michael Ignatieff’s “Lesser Evils,” which all but predicts the scandal:

  Torture, our founding fathers said, was the vice of tyrannies and its absolute exclusion the mark of free government. At the same time, keeping torture, or at least what used to be called “the third degree,” from creeping back into our police squad rooms at home has required constant vigilance by D.A.’s and honest cops. Now it may be creeping into our war on terror. There is some evidence that the United States has handed key suspects over to Middle Eastern governments for torture. In the metal containers stacked up behind rings of razor wire on Bagram air base in Afghanistan, beatings are reportedly routine, and at least two suspects have died during secret interrogations. It is possible that similar physical methods have been used against detainees from the Hussein regime at Baghdad airport.

It’s a smart piece, overall, but I do have one bone to pick: In his discussion of intelligence, Ignatieff writes, “The United States appears, for example, to have had almost no one on the ground in Iraq after 1998, hence the catastrophic misjudgment by U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, he’s obviously right that U.S. intelligence could have used some agents “on the ground” in Iraq after 1998. But surely everything we’ve learned about the interplay between the Bush administration and its intelligence operation in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq — from the creation of the Wolfowitz/Perle skunkworks to the stovepiping of unvetted reports — has demonstrated that the U.S. intelligence rank-and-file basically got it right before the war: They told the Bush administration that there really was no conclusive evidence supporting either the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the much-hunted link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The problem wasn’t with the intelligence. The problem was with the Bush administration. It didn’t like the intelligence it got. (Maybe it didn’t believe the intelligence it got, since it was listening to “friends” like Ahmed Chalabi.) So it ordered up some new intelligence.

Let’s not allow the Bush administration’s rewriting of this important bit of history to stand. The fiasco of the missing WMDs was not primarily a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of presidential management and leadership. Such failures are all too common in an administration that stubbornly — even “catastrophically” — refuses to recalibrate its preconceptions when they get bruised by reality.