Abstract
Does a new century require new principles? Not necessarily, but nor could one easily resist a revised look at ethics in the wake of this particular century’s eruptions in the economy and technology of how people make, form, and receive news. It hardly will surprise that a fourteen-essay map of journalism’s changed moral landscape produced under the acute curation of the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride and the American Press Institute’s Tom Rosenstiel offers both elegant contours and sometimes provocative route-markers.
Nor, given the still-molten geological state of post-millennial journalism so far, should it surprise that the resulting map includes a few blank spots—and, to this reader’s mind, the odd navigational error.
The most elegant thinking is offered in the opening two chapters, which jointly address a timeless yet currently compelling question facing every journalist (among others): “What is truth?” Twitterite orthodoxy has, to date, shed upon this point mostly the meme that facts are whatever the crowd eventually determines to be factual, an epistemological soup that is neither meatless nor especially nutritious. But Clay Shirky and Roy Peter Clark, variously at odds and in sync, offer far more nuanced ideas on the meaning and attainability of accuracy.
Here is how Shirky, for example, puts the post-postmodern conundrum of truth-seeking in an ubiquitous, boundary-agnostic universe of opinions as to what constitute facts: “Seeking truth and reporting it” is becoming less about finding consensus, which has become rarer, and more about publicly sorting the relevant actors from the irrelevant ones. . . . In this environment, journalists have to get more practiced at sorting . . . legitimate from illegitimate opinions. In an even more significant rupture from their past, they have to get practiced at explaining to their readers why they are making the choices they are making.
The latter point makes more compelling the editors’ most prominent—and most controversial—suggestion that transparency is no longer merely an essential strategy for attaining credibility and accountability (as is, by now, almost universally accepted). Rather, it is one of just three ethical “principles” for journalism. The other two moral pillars are, according to the editors, the more preeminent (and familiar) pursuit of truths, or rather, as is wisely argued, truths, and the highly fashionable (and, yes, unarguable) idea of engagement with communities.
This elevated position for transparency, though certainly debatable, should not be oversimplified. McBride and Rosenstiel do not present it as a cure-all, a low-bar uber-ethic: In fact, true transparency is more than disclosure. It also requires producing the news in ways that can be explained and even defended. It becomes the key to a method. Transparency requires those who produce the news to anticipate how they will explain their actions before they act.
Not merely one of ethical journalism’s three moral pillars, then, but “the key to a method.” Yet, the lack of methodological development of this vision of transparency is the book’s most striking gap. McBride and Rosenstiel rightly state that today’s public demands to know how alleged facts have been sourced, chosen, and verified; what biases have been controlled for, and how so; and how news organizations themselves are comprised, supported, and operated. The editors then assert that Most news organizations fall short every day answering these questions. We have yet to develop best practices for transparency on this level. It is far from a habit to be this open and communicative with our audiences.
Agreed. Providing news and documentary journalism with this kind of openness is hard—the evolving principle amounts to no less than a call to reinvent decades-old story forms. So, a reader reasonably carries high hopes for the five chapters devoted to transparency, and is not entirely disappointed. Craig Silverman fleshes out guidelines for prompt and comprehensive corrections; Adam Hochsberg writes insightfully on the challenges facing nonprofit centers for investigative reporting. But the chapters on managing third-party platforms, data use, and diversity of sourcing strike this reader as more technically than morally enlightening. Left unaddressed are tormentingly practical questions such as how sourcing methods or the origins of story ideas can be explained more “communicatively” within a TV news story. Or what the transparency principle means to the push–pull between narrative style and comprehensive attribution in feature articles. How to distinguish, in any journalistic form, between “enough” background and, well, TMI? How to navigate personal and professional identities in social media?
The book is also marred by a lack of rigor in defining terms and recognizing assumptions. Like many works about journalism, it fails to specify what its authors include and exclude under the heading of journalism, which in this case is compounded by a casual use of terms such as independence. The editors state that independence is of continuing value, but explicitly reject it as a defining characteristic. The term is sometimes used as almost synonymous with objectivity (resisting bias), elsewhere as if it is primarily an economic concept (not having “a dog in the race”). But if independence is not defining, then one is forced to ask whether those who work in the Coca-Cola “newsroom,” or in the White House press office, or the many who press the products of self-interested “reporting” into the social Web, might also be counted as doing journalism, and if not, why not. The book’s implied answer seems to be that it does not matter who claims to be doing journalism; it will be up to the community to decide whether it is good journalism or not, because good journalism is transparent about its methods.
About the difficulty of which, see above.
Another flawed assumption is that even in an information ecosystem that has become, for the first time, truly global, the possible existence of useful models or insights from other countries and cultures, or of widespread journalistic values or practices that might differ from U.S. custom, is not worth so much as a nod.
Despite these errors, the overall collection brings a strong diversity of voices and fields of expertise, and an always conversational style and accessible voice, to a range of important current questions that include new challenges to photojournalism, lessons from the wave of political “fact”-checking, and (in an especially compelling essay by McBride with danah boyd), “the destabilizing force of fear” as a driver of journalism.
Each essay is followed by an admirably concise and pointed case study that tests and applies the key point made in a concrete situation, building a case for consideration of the collection as a j-school text. If the book does not deliver on all that it promises, it provides a firm framework around which to add readings and provoke discussion. “The Book” on twenty-first-century journalism ethics has not yet been written, and quite likely never will be. But an excellent start has been made.