Category: Media Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

https://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/02/media/index_np.html

Is it a coincidence that so much of the real discourse in the last election took place not in magazines, not in newspapers, but in books? Michael Moore on the Left and the Swift Boaters on the Right were the most visible, though far from the only. There were dozens of books from all over the spectrum on the charts, and they were selling.

This article gives some insight into why so many newspapers and magazines were conspicuously irrelevant. Oh, for the glory days of the 70s when newspapers actually took the idea of news seriously!

Among the most disturbing parts of the article:

[quote begins here] Suskind quotes a senior Bush advisor who dismissed reporters for living in the “the reality-based community.” The advisor said, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Separately, discussing the role of journalists, White House chief of staff Andy Card famously told the New Yorker in a Jan. 20, 2004, article, “They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.” At the time, Card’s blunt assessment was seen as a justification of the Bush administration’s policy of keeping the press at arm’s length. (Bush held the fewest first-term press conferences in modern presidential history.) It’s now clear that while most mainstream reporters were getting stiffed, members of the administration were simultaneously setting up propaganda projects by lavishing the Ketchum public relations firm with nearly $100 million in contracts to “communicate” White House initiatives — by hiring Williams, shipping out bogus video news releases, and other sleazy schemes — and waving into the White House an amateur journalist using an alias and working for a fake news outlet. (The bogus video news releases were subsequently slapped down as an illegal use of public funds by the General Accounting Office.) end of quote]

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

https://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=53&aid=79271

Fascinating–a look at what a reporter knew that her public didn’t know, and whether withholding the story was appropriate. Of course, every journalist makes choices about what to include and what to leave out in a story–legitimate journalistic choices. A major purpose of journalism is to filter a large quantity of raw information into a coherent and digestible story. When I work as a journalist, I usually have far more information than I can include in (for instance) a 500-word story. But when the choice is not to do the story in the first place, or to do it and leave key information out of the discourse, many ethics questions come into play. Especially if a government or corporate source wants the material held or permanently suppressed.

One of the things I found especially useful in this article is author Kelly McBride’s list of six criteria for when to hold and when to divulge, at the very end of the piece.

Criterion #1:
“First figure out where the information came from. Anything that can be found in a public record, anything that is voluntarily revealed by witnesses or is observed first-hand by a journalist should be considered fair game.”

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics

https://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110626272888531958,00.html?mod=todays%5Ffree%5Ffeature

Yup–blogging’s getting mainstream. This fascinating Wall Street Journal article looks at the role of blogging in getting stories on the radar, and bloggers’ shifting self-perceptions into the world of journalism. Blogging has played a role in discovering–and covering such stories as the Dan Rather Bush memo escapade, and what WSJ writer Jessica Mintz calls “widely disseminated premature exit poll results that led many to believe John Kerry was winning the presidential election for much of Election Day.”

In my own mind (and in the minds of many others), there’s a huge question about whether, in fact, Kerry actually did win key states that would have given him the election. Irregularities that went far beyond the issues in the Ukraine, where in fact the election was done over. I am convinced that Bush did not win honestly in 200, and I am not convinced either way about who won Ohio (and thus, the presidency) in 2004. I find it particularly weird that in the US, partisan Republican Bush campaign officers (Katherine Harris, Florida, 2000; Kenneth blackwell, Ohio, 2004) get to oversee the election and count the votes. If you are Secretary of State with oversight responsibility for elections, you shouldn’t be chairing the state campaign of *any* candidate, IMHO.

Meanwhile, blogs are so legit now that Harvard University’s having a conference,”Blogging, Journalism & Credibility.” Mintz mentions this in her article, and Poynter.org’s Romsensko (in whose emailed blog I found the Mintz piece) gives a URL to listen in:
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/webcred/index.php?p=12

Unlike most of the WSJ archive, this particular article is available to non-subscribers.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

In an op-ed by Andrew Rotherham called “No Pundit Left Behind,” The New York Times called it “a stunningly inefficient use of public dollars – every bit as redundant as paying football fans to watch the Super Bowl.” The nation’s newspaper of record is referring to the news that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act–and promote it he did, but without revealing it was earning him a paycheck.

And because I write about business ethics, I find this story–which combines the public and private spheres in yet another act of blatant corruption–particularly instructive. First, Williams should clearly have reveled he was a paid lobbyist. Organizations such as Public Relations Society of America are very clear that failure to disclose a financial interest is a definite no-no for PR folks. If Williams hadn’t stumbled across the PRSA Code of Ethics, surely his own common sense would tell him that when you shill for a special interest, the relationship ought to be disclosed.

Of course, those of us who have followed the various scandals and mismanagement accusations connected with the Bush administration shouldn’t be surprised. The more they play the values card in public pronouncements, the more dirt shows up with a little scraping. I can’t remember an administration as obsessed with having everyone follow the party line, regardless of the consequences, and so quick to apply double standards on matters of truth, special interest relationships, and their own accountability.

I’m not being partisan, here. The current group is amplifying a trend that can certainly be traced at least as far back as the LBJ administration–but Johnson and Nixon and Clinton were amateurs. As a populace, we need to demand accountability, and not spin–not only from any presidential administration, but from the media that supposedly have the job of keeping them honest.

This story is breaking all over the mainstream press–but so many others are either buried on page 46 or left to the likes of the highly partisan Internet news organizations of the left and the right.

personally, I think America would have just as much appetite for substantive news as it does for the latest celebrity trial or “reality” TV show (sure doesn’t look like *my* reality!)

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