Ethics of Journalism

[Vendetta21]

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/11/keith-olbermann-suspension

Media outlets should give up this insane act in which they pretend that their reporters are robots without biases. Everyone knows that's not true! People have lots of biases. Look, this is incredibly simple. Reporters and journalists and media figures should be judged on one thing and one thing only: whether what they say and report turns out to be true. Why do people not get that? If we had a media culture where people were hired and fired based on their record of truth-telling (or not), the world would be a much better place.

ITT discuss journalism and bias. In my opinion I think most news should be slanted because seriously trying not to slant the news gives a really ****ty picture of reality. A moderate amount of analysis should lead normal, rational thinking people to come to similar conclusions and if it's not something that is in your niche then you shouldn't feel belabored to read a ton and you should get the gist of things fairly quickly.

For instance, the Economist is really dry and factual but has decent analysis but oftentimes the Economist makes you feel pretty neutral about things that you shouldn't feel neutral about I.E. Argentina and the ****ing Peronist resurgence. Don't make this about Argentina.

Anyways case in point where a slant is useful: the endless procession of articles on I/P that latently give the mental image of a power symmetry. Don't make this about I/P tho.

[MrGiggles]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZnMumCKXU (warning: vampire lesbian tv host rambles for a bit and is only tangentially on topic)

The thing about this that kind of bothers me is that Olbermann is quite blatantly more of an opinion show host than a news anchor. I can maybe understand blocking newscasters from making donations in the interest of appearing neutral, and MSNBC was correct in punishing Olbermann for donating (NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW etc), but I think their policy is flawed.

ps What is I/P? I can't figure it out.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

I/P is shorthand for Israel/Palestine, the debate that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends.

[MrRubix]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

I think it's important to be as neutral as possible.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

I think it's important to be as neutral as possible.

I think there's some sort of Austrian economic trade-off that exists given that finding neutral news is a laborious process and layman news has overwhelming slants (esp. in regards to Capitalism) that a slant (which you understand and serves to condense simply) is a pragmatic option esp. when considering political issues.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

It's sort of like trusting experts but in this case it's smaller than a book prob. about the size of a sentence and you read 100 of them daily. And maybe about 10 you read are 2 or more pages long.

[Relambrien]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

I agree that the news should be focused on presenting the truth, regardless of what political biases that truth might take. As trite as it is, the press originally acted as a check on the activities of government. And although it's expanded far beyond that role, that role still exists.

The unfortunate part about all this is that since people are naturally inclined to read things which support their own views, a partisan split is a natural consequence. Even assuming that the real truth lies somewhere "in the middle", people are going to choose to believe whatever repeats their own opinions the most. Liberals will look for liberal media, conservatives will look for conservative media, and centrist media will be largely ignored. Specifically, it's my understanding that MSNBC is the baby of General Electric, and quite liberal, with Fox News being News Corp's conservative pride and joy.

Granted, this is coming from an American perspective. I understand that the concepts of "left" and "right" are shifted over in Europe--those Europeans I've talked to claim that the US has no left-wing party, and that the Democrats are center-right while the Republicans have flung themselves off the right side of the political map.

Anyway, back on topic. Although this is a different kind of journalistic ethics, there was a question brought up in something I watched a while back called Under Orders, Under Fire, which examines aspects of military ethics in a Vietnam War-like setting. One problem goes as follows: Suppose that the enemy has invited an American journalist to follow one of their army units as a show of good faith so that the Americans may learn that they are not the beasts they're made out to be. Skeptical that this is just a PR ploy, but still excited at the opportunity, you, a lucky journalist, decide to accept the offer. The unit lies in wait to ambush an American platoon, and thus you have two options: 1) remain silent and allow the Americans to be ambushed, or 2), draw attention to yourself to alert them, almost certainly getting yourself killed by the enemy you are with. You are under no legal obligation to perform either action. What do you do?

The problem illustrates the question of journalistic responsibility with regards to separating work from other duties. From a purely journalistic point of view, there is no reason for the journalist to reveal the enemy's positions, but at what point does a desire to protect your country trump your journalistic responsibilities? Similarly, at what point should anyone in media disregard their responsibility to be objective (assuming of course, that they have such a responsibility), and instead present whatever biases they believe will make the world a better place? I don't think it's unreasonable to want to send a message that you think will improve the world, but balancing this with neutrality and objectivity is a tough question.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

I guess to broaden this outside of an overly American way of viewing things consider the following major sources of news:

Mother Jones
The Economist
The Wall Street Journal
Huffington Post
Drudge Report
New York Times
Foreign Policy
Al Jazeera
BBC
NPR
Reason
Wired
Newsweek
Time
The Guardian
The New Yorker
Zero Hedge

Each of these has a highly observable slant. You would be hard-pressed to find an easy, approachable well-known news source without a slant. As a person who doesn't have a domain-specific interest in news doesn't it make sense to just bother less with finding news without bias and just reading news with a knowledge of the operative biases perpetuating it?

For instance Marxist-leaning blogs tend to have a ton of information on things going on in the world that you wouldn't be aware of otherwise because they aren't covered much elsewhere, so reading these things gives you an idea of what is going on in areas not generally covered. Just like reading the Economist gives you a pretty cut-and-dry Economic analysis of the major goings-on in the world, and the BBC gives you the news from a mild socialist perspective. Bias is especially present in each of these cases based on the sorts of things they chose to report on: microcosms for the things the organization thinks their readership generally believes about the world. Understanding that there is a bias and its impact seems far more pragmatic than trying to find news without bias.

[Relambrien]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

As you say, given the available news sources, reading with knowledge of their slant in mind is most certainly the best way to go.

I guess I'm just more interested in the question of why there exist these slants in the first place. "You would be hard-pressed to find an easy, approachable well-known news sources without a slant." You're entirely right, but why is that the case? I said before that I think it's because people will prefer to expose themselves to information which fully agrees with them, but is there anything else? I don't really feel satisfied with just that. You would think centrists would be just as common as anyone else intuitively, so there should be a market for them. And yet, there isn't. I wonder why. Are centrists really just that uncommon?

Another possible explanation is that it's possible to keep a centrist readership while drawing in the more extremes by continuing to lean toward those extremes. I don't have a good enough handle on society, nor do I have enough knowledge about news media to make this judgment, so I'm just throwing ideas out.

I do think the current system is interesting, though. People are going to be reading with their choice's bias in mind, for sure. If they agree with, say, the BBC, then it's because the BBC is smart and leans the correct way. The lack of an "objective" source means people have the opportunity to compare if they want, and draw their own conclusions. Giving it some thought, this really doesn't seem unreasonable--it's merely a council of news sources debating for you, the same way a council might debate in front of a president.

And yet, American news outlets don't want to admit their bias. I'm just really puzzled why.

[Vendetta21]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

A slant serves to condense information in a way that is easy to digest, making it effective for the way people read the news.

For instance Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) which are the new wave of poverty reduction techniques don't exactly work to completely solve the problem of poverty because new problems are arising in poverty as some strategies begin to have positive effects. Nonetheless CCTs are a pretty powerful tool in helping to eliminate poverty amongst all possible tools. So CCTs should be advocated for. As an outside observer the connection to be made and remembered is CCT=Good.

If you are to read into CCTs more you realize that in some ways they are being used as a panacea to problems related to poverty and that they can't be the only way to solve it. The truth is that CCTs work in some areas and not others based on a myriad factors (rural/urban being a major one.) One problem that can arise is that as you start to raise people out of poverty new problems arise such as domestic violence and drug abuse, and both of this continue to factor into cyclical poverty.

News organizations can present all of this but it is belabored with details and dry. News organizations in condensing this information to be readable for people can say stuff like:

"CCTs work in some instances but not others."

"Poverty reduction techniques seem to create new problems because as people begin to rise out of poverty drug abuse and domestic violence begin to become issues, thus resulting in cyclical poverty despite increased cash-flow."

"CCTs are one of the best methods we have right now for reducing poverty."

The first line is not something people would not feel any need to remember. The second line paints a picture that poverty reduction feels like too big a problem and is a waste of time. And the last line paints a picture that CCTs=good.

So in serving to condense something simple (which was already condensed prob. with a bias) we give people the gist they need when they are "reading the news." Granted this approach to journalism introduces its own problems but it just seems like it's the most pragmatic way to go about things and that the discussion about journalism focuses on bias way too much when other issues are probably more important.

[Relambrien]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

All of that works for me, thanks for the insight.

[MrRubix]

Re: Ethics of Journalism

Facts by themselves are not meaningful to most people -- they're objective. Having a slant, I would think, gives the data some sort of impact or meaning as a sort of underlying "So what? Why should I care?" explanation. Depends on who is reporting the facts and who they're reporting to and why.