Monthly Archives: January 2010

Two cheers for objective journalism

Posted on January 29, 2010 | 4 Comments

[Note: This brief opinion piece was originally written for CQ Research. It was supposed to be half of a pro & con online mini-debate, but the con side never showed up and the project was abandoned. EW]  

Nowadays, the whole idea of objective reporting is so roundly discredited as the fig leaf for a dishonest, ideologically tainted paternalism, that it’s hard to believe anybody would want to put in a good word for it.

I do. Paradoxically, today’s explosion of targeted, fiercely opinionated online advocacy has created a greater need than ever for a constantly replenished reservoir of facts. Objective journalists will never get the last word, but we need their help with the first words, the ones that the analysts, commentators and bloviators can refer to as they wrangle over what we all should think and do.

By objective journalism, I mean fact-driven reportage in which publicly significant information is gathered, verified and related for the purpose of exposure and explication, not persuasion.

Accordingly:

- The reporter attaches great importance to factual accuracy.

- The reporter tries to be fair-minded, and believes that allowing personal convictions to tilt his or her work is wrong.

- The reporter’s objective is to furnish an ideologically diverse public with the factual ground from which informed discourse can proceed.

A bit of context. Objective journalism has never been more than one journalistic tradition among others, and it has never held unchallenged sway even in this country, let alone abroad.

It arose during the 19th century as metro dailies sought neutral informational forms that were broadly palatable to the mass market melting-pot that advertisers wanted aggregated. It got a boost in the 1920s as newspaper journalists began to define themselves as professionals with a public duty to report with independence and intellectual honesty.

The objective tradition has never flown solo. A rich strain of partisan journalism has thrived since colonial times, while the personal essay has an even older pedigree. Much of the 19th century popular press disdained objectivity’s bone-dry empiricism; tabloids developed story-telling as an alternative paradigm and peddled lurid tales from the teeming cities. Magazine journalism (in print or on TV) never bothered with objectivity, and is the ancestral home of narratives driven by commitment and passion.

All are valid forms, all have their place in contemporary discourse. But the enduring appeal of credible news sources (where do you turn when the storm is bearing down?), the proliferation of fact-checking operations, the rise of wiki’s as an informational form that combines factual authority with procedural humility, all suggest that the job of learning what’s important, figuring out what’s true and what isn’t , and relating those findings without fear or favor remains a noble and necessary enterprise.

-30-

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Miscellaneous columns

Tagged

The perils of a news media paid for by outsiders

Posted on January 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Week of Jan. 18, 2010

If you run a news business staying fairly clean used to be fairly easy. What you published was produced, by and large, by journalists who worked exclusively for you. You didn’t accept material from outsiders apart from freelancers you knew or bona fide news agencies. PR firms and advocacy groups routinely offered you articles, but no self-respecting news outlet would simply publish them, even if the authors wore the sackcloth of public-spirited philanthropy.

No longer. Today’s media, keen to save money, are deepening their reliance on part-time contributors, mainly because freelancers come cheap. And established media are keen to “partner” with a new breed of stand-alone journalism initiatives affiliated with high-minded foundations bankrolled by retired big-shots who want to be remembered for something other than the industries they pillaged.

So you have more and more journalism produced by people who are financially dependent on shadowy offstage entities. The 300 bucks that freelancer gets for a story that took her a week obviously doesn’t pay her bills; so who does? The nonprofit that funds those in-depth stories on health reform—its backers really have no agenda?

The result is a potent new challenge to traditional safeguards against conflict of interest, which, it’s becoming increasingly obvious, are either too weak, too harsh, or flat-out misdirected. Consider two cases in the past month.

The New York Times halted a monthly column on corporate innovation written by a Harvard Business School faculty member because her December column was based in part on a visit to a 3M Company facility that 3M paid for.

Times policy prohibits contributors from accepting anything of value from the subjects of coverage. The paper sacked two other freelancers too, one of them, curiously, for taking a corporate-paid trip to Jamaica for a project unrelated to his Times work.

On the lenient end of the spectrum, The Washington Post stirred up a flap on New Year’s Eve by publishing an article produced by something called The Fiscal Times. That’s a startup funded by Peter G. Peterson, a billionaire investment banker, former chairman of Lehman, onetime U.S. commerce secretary under President Nixon.

The article described, approvingly, efforts to create a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, a cause reputedly dear to Peterson’s heart. It didn’t mention, according to a subsequent protest letter, fierce opposition to the proposal from some 40 national organizations that fear the commission would gut Social Security and Medicare.

Now, I don’t know whether the Harvard professor was corrupted by an all-expense-paid trip to St. Paul, Minn., or whether what the Post claimed was its “complete editorial control” was enough to neutralize Fiscal Times’ policy bias, if any.

But that’s exactly the problem with conflict of interest: You never know. The best you can do is to identify offstage influences—invisible constituencies—that seem reasonably likely to have a discernible effect on the journalism that’s produced.

And then? That depends. At a minimum, the outside ties should be severed. With freelancers, the publisher must pick up the full costs of the work. That’s fundamental. If a column required an $820 trip to Minnesota, The Times pays the $820. Otherwise, strictly speaking, it isn’t the Harvard professor who’s being subsidized by 3M, it’s The New York Times. (And letting her pay with university funds is no answer either; then the Times would be beholden to Harvard—an institution it has ample occasion to cover.)

If The Times won’t pay, then it can’t play. It must accept an unpalatable conclusion: There are certain kinds of work it can no longer publish ethically. (Disclosing the outside support, as some urge, isn’t sufficient. If you read an article and at the bottom learn that its costs were borne by the company being covered, you wouldn’t feel enlightened, you’d feel hoodwinked. And you’d be right.)

The upsurge in so-called nonprofit journalism is just as problematic. Publishers simply cannot know what kind of influence the charismatic plutocrats or their purpose-built foundations exert on the operations they fund, whether Fiscal Times, Pro Publica, Politico, or Kaiser Health News.

It seems unreasonable to think that these backers—who unlike traditional advertisers are funding journalism explicitly to pursue civic, not commercial, goals—are then going to be divinely indifferent to the actual coverage that their money engenders.

Regardless, what’s undeniable is that the cumulative influence of this burgeoning source of journalism is to ensure that the topics these nonprofits favor get a first-class ride aboard the few channels capable of commanding public attention in a significant way. As the saying goes, even if they’re not telling you what to think, they’re telling you what to think about. And that’s power.

As for other coverage areas, the ones without outside sugar daddies? They take a number and wait their turn.

These are big problems. We’re looking at a slow-motion transformation of the function of the U.S. news media from chronicling and refereeing the collision of special interests to serving as their storefront. For a business that depends on public trust, it’s a deeply troubling direction.

-30-

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Newspaper columns

Tagged

Why not pay sources?

Posted on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

Week of Jan. 11, 2010

The story about the successful fight of a U.S. father to regain custody of his nine-year-old son in Brazil became a media story late last month after NBC News flew the two of them home and got exclusive interviews for its troubles. The Society of Professional Journalists, along with other independent commentators, slammed NBC for practicing “checkbook journalism”—compensating sources with cash or goodies—which is considered corrupt by mainstream U.S. media.

I was cheered by the clarity and initiative of the SPJ ethics people. Too often newsroom conduct is judged solely by the people who own and run the newsrooms, and seeing SPJ, the country’s premier journalist organization, speak up for rank and file professionalism was inspiring and commendable.

But were they right? What exactly was wrong with NBC giving David and Sean Goldman a ride on the plane it chartered for its own people? Suppose in return NBC did get exclusive interviews. So what?

Indeed, why not compensate sources?

For journalists, to be sure, paying sources would be a major headache. Reporting is hard enough and expensive enough without preceding every interview with a sales negotiation.

For the public? There, the possible impact is less clear. It’s true that as citizens, we benefit from having reporters on the job with the enterprise and the stamina to bird-dog people and cajole them into talking about things we want to know about. If reporters’ work became even tougher and costlier, the flow of publicly significant information might suffer.

Maybe. Or maybe payments would induce disclosures from people who now see no reason to come forward.

It’s also argued that payments would corrupt the information. Sources would naturally want to please their paymasters and would shape their tales accordingly. Journalists, having bought and paid for the information, would feel tender and proprietary, not tough and adversarial, toward the new asset. Instead of lubricating the system, payouts would gum up the works.

Again, maybe. Or maybe the source would be keen to deliver truthful information if money was at stake. And the reporter, having paid up, would be secure in asking the provocative questions she might hold back if the source felt free to rip off the microphone and stalk off the set.

My point is that the criticism of payments as harmful to the public—because they would yield less and worse information—is based on questionable notions of how people would actually behave. Indeed, supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer, which reputedly relies on paid sources, have been pretty accurate in recent years unearthing celebrity scandals.

So much for the ambiguous impact of payments on journalists and the public. What about on the sources themselves?

Here, I think we have a fairness problem: Certain people are already richly compensated for being sources. Some even get paychecks, such as the new caste of on-air “news consultants.” But for many, many other members of the political, managerial and professional elite whose words and deeds constitute the overwhelming bulk of what we call news, getting called and quoted and covered is a boon to their working lives and a material factor in their career success.

They are rewarded, big time, thanks to the media’s power to confer prestige, standing and importance upon them, and thanks to their own power to convert those intangible payments—since that’s what they are—into hard currency.

When people condemn the evils of paying sources, they’re really only talking about a certain class of sources—not the professional sources who routinely cash in, but the ordinary Joe who has stumbled into a moment of celebrity and is suddenly standing on a chilly stage with a klieg light in his face, blinking in disbelief. Without any idea what this exposure might do or how badly he might humiliate himself, he’s implored to submit to questions and scrutiny from glamorous strangers, who make unfathomable salaries for doing just that.

Indeed, every single entity at every single level of the media food chain will make money from his cooperation—but not him, not the source, the most vulnerable and the most indispensable player, because the people who will profit from him have determined that paying him would be wrong.

We’ve come to believe that media exposure of most any kind is a fast track to stardom, but for most civilians being a source is a dubious proposition: high risk, low reward, possible harms far outweighing likely benefits.

I’m not sure payments would matter or how they’d work. But sources are the least valued participants in the news, and in contemporary America nothing attests to value as eloquently as a price tag.

-30-

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Newspaper columns

Tagged , , , , ,