Journalists live on a slippery slope when it come to ethics.
I’ve never met a colleague who was an absolutist, saying they’d do what they know is right or good regardless of the consequences.
And I’ve never met a colleague whose situational ethics were so sloppy that their response to likely consequences was “whatever.”
Explicitly or implicitly, those tensions often are active in news judgments in print, broadcast and cable newsrooms.
Sometimes, we kill an otherwise newsworthy story because the most likely harms would overwhelm any benefits, and that imbalance could not be justified to any reasonable person.
Other times, we use a story that will benefit the communities we serve although an individual will be harmed.
In our search for accuracy, traditional journalism ethics expect us to use of the best available source. We look for knowledgeable sources, and when they have an axe to grind, we tell you.
Drawing on all of this, most reporters share an antipathy to paying sources. I’m not talking about a drink or lunch. I’ve done that. Rather, I’m talking about “checkbook journalism” that offers cash or valuable gifts.
Brits do it all of the time without shame. We don’t.
Often, payments include exclusivity. I ran into that working for UPI in London. We were looking for a West African father who took his kids “home” from England against the wishes of their mother and British courts.
We tracked him down, but when I reached him by phone, it was a reporter from a British tabloid who answered the phone. The dad was theirs, exclusively.
Our aversion to paying sources goes beyond that. It’s simple. Payment encourages invention or embellishment. Whatever might be the facts, the more dramatic the story and the greater the likelihood of payment. It’s that simple.
So I was stunned by ethicist Kelly McBride’s op-ed piece in the New York Times where she appears to accept online crowdfunding to pay people to steal information so long as the reporters and editors tell you what we’ve done.
It’s a classic case of situational ethics: Payment is wrong except when it’s the least awful alternative. Then it’s right.
McBride probably is American journalism’s go-to ethicist, but her argument goes beyond payment; it smells of actively encouraging theft.
She’s wrong on paying a source and she’s wrong on encouraging theft for some greater journalistic good.
Here’s the situation as outlined by McBride: “WikiLeaks disturbed many journalists with an initiative to crowd-source a $100,000 ‘bounty’ on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The website … has been pressing hard for sources to steal the trade documents; it has already published three leaked chapters — a reported 26 remain secret.”
Rather than defend the traditional refusal to pay sources for information and its rationale, McBride justifies her flying leap down that ethical slippery slope by saying:
• “Media disrupters” like WikiLeaks leave American editors “no choice but to reconsider this prohibition (on paying sources). If journalism organizations refuse to do so, they relegate themselves either to secondhand reporting on documents obtained by those outside journalism or to being left behind.”
• “Trade deals, which are usually about tariffs and the price of goods, are traditionally negotiated in secret. But the Trans Pacific Partnership exceeds agreements like North American Fair Trade Agreement in scope and scale and involves far-reaching foreign policy decisions. Its measures will touch the lives of every citizen in the 12 countries expected to sign the pact. Chapters already leaked suggest that the deal restricts fair use of copyrighted material, expands medical patents and weakens public policies that govern net neutrality.”
• “The job of journalism in a democracy is to exercise scrutiny to hold power accountable. Given the TPP’s secrecy, WikiLeaks’ crowd-sourced leak-funding campaign … can be seen as a logical response to a process designed to thwart public debate, an investment in democracy even.”
• “Crowdfunding for leaks may mitigate a traditional objection to paying sources by introducing transparency into dealings that are usually opaque.”
Clearly, she says the consequences of not paying someone to steal the TPP and give them to WikiLeaks are worse than violating the traditional refusal to pay sources in this situation.
That’s how traditional ethics work. She rejects any idea of an absolute ban and finds the balance of right/wrong and good/bad favoring paying sources to steal, if necessary, the TPP and give it to WikiLeaks or the news media.
If WikiLeaks succeeds and puts the documents online, traditional news media will tut-tut and use every word. We’ll follow my “virgin” rule: Don’t go first, just report what someone else has reported.
And it’s no secret that we often use documents that sources obtained without permission; the most recent, obvious example is Edward Snowden’s revelations about domestic government spying.
In the WikiLeaks/TPP case, McBride acknowledges the question of authenticity of any documents brought to it. That’s always a question when someone shows up with documents to which they have no right.
How WikiLeaks will authenticate anything it is provided is unclear, given the secrecy about the TPP documents. How news media will authenticate what TPP puts online is less of a problem. I agree with McBride when she says “WikiLeaks has arrived at a flawed solution to a very real problem” and “we have reached a point in the evolution of global democracy at which secrecy and transparency are grotesquely imbalanced.”
But she’s wrong when she uses that to justify her ethical response: “Right now, the bounty may be the best shot we have at transforming the TPP process from a back-room deal to an open debate.”
Yes, “we need a better system to discourage unjustified secrecy, to protect sources and to encourage public-interest whistle-blowing,” but encouraging thieves with promises of cash is no answer.
Worse, it undermines any remaining claims that traditional newsrooms ethics can be superior to the governments we cover.
McBride concludes with the pious hope that “modern news media organizations must develop new codes of ethics that embrace the best of the Internet’s potential for citizen journalism and information sharing. They should not rule out paying sources, but it should happen rarely and be transparent when it does. The guiding idea is not just what’s in the public interest, but what serves democracy.
“WikiLeaks is a great disrupter, breaking the old conventions. But rather than rejecting its example — or opportunistically adopting it — we must rewrite the conventions.”
No. We’d all be better served by rejecting McBride’s reasoning and holding the new online/social media to traditional standards. To paraphrase a more durable text, journalists won’t enhance our ethical claims by whoring after false gods.
Curmudgeon Notes:
• I hope The Cincinnati Enquirer doesn’t change its mind and apologize for the vivid photo of a dead or dying shooting victim on the cover of Tuesday’s “More Local” section. It’s an honest-to-God news photo, a long way from more common arranged or file photos on the paper’s cover pages.
Sure, it was good luck that the paper was covering the nearby anti-violence march and its photographer responded with alacrity. The result was a memorable record of inner-city violence, all the stronger as an image for the two passersby calling for help.
I only wish the photo was on Page 1, but this is Cincinnati, and evidence that Pete Rose bet on the Reds as a player is bigger news than another dead black man.
• Months of upbeat coverage of the proposed Clifton Market was so blind to problems that it went beyond the local news media’s historic and current passion for urban development. It didn’t pass the smell test.
Then something changed. The Enquirer quoted a consultant’s serious doubts and questions about the project and some key backers. The paper’s editorial board urged city council to reject a $400,000 grant.
Page 1 enterprise reporting described business troubles of a central figure in the market project. The $400,000 grant went down the drain.
Clifton Market advocates aren’t going to go away, and I’m still waiting for reporters to dig into questions about the optimistic business plan, vehicle access, parking and projections of customer traffic on constricted Clifton streets.
• Initial coverage of the Charleston, S.C., church killings got some important things right: emphasis on the nine victims, not the shooter, and increasingly, attention to native white supremacists. Church videotapes showed a young white man as the likely killer. Those images and the quick arrest robbed the news media of time to speculate whether Islamists were responsible.
• The initial online image of accused Charleston killer Dylann Roof showed his choice of insignia: historic flags of apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia. When I saw his first image online and recognized the flags, I knew they were perfect for a young white supremacist who reportedly said he fears that blacks are taking over our country … as they did in South Africa and Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe.
• The latest pratfall on the Frontiers of Free Enterprise was the ad for Ladies Night at a local gunshop stuck atop the Charleston Post and Courier Page 1 headline: “Church attack kills 9.” Paper apologized. Gunshop said the ad was arranged weeks ago.
• The post-mortem on the British news media’s botched coverage in the recent national election campaign holds a lesson for American reporters and editors: Beware of polls aspiring to become news and editors who believe them.
BBC news chief James Harding said coverage was “infected” by opinion polls that wildly miscast the likely outcome. Polls said the election was too close to call: Labour might unseat the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition.
Boy, were they all wrong. Conservatives returned to power with the first clear majority in years. Labour was hammered and LibDems almost vanished as the Scottish National Party demonstrated its power to command votes.
Polling and credulous echoes were Britain’s version of the American polling/reporting debacle in 1936. Then, the Literary Digest poll said Republican Alf Landon would wallop incumbent Democrat FDR. Roosevelt went on to an easy win and two more national election victories.
The fiasco changed polling, if not editors’ love of ready-made information that poses as news.
Modern American horse-race election coverage — who’s “ahead” and who’s “behind” based on polls — is no better. Like news media dwelling on personalities and gotcha stories, polls infect what we’re told.
Still, BBC’s Harding said it’s impossible to ignore poll results because they are central to politicians’ campaigns.
• SNAFUs are never absent in journalism.
This from the American edition of the weekly Economist before recent Turkish parliamentary elections:
“Foreign policy is a hubristic disaster and the economy is on the slide but that won’t stop the ruling AK party founded by Recep Tayyip Erdogan from winning.” (Emphasis added). AK lost.
The rest of these pratfalls were collected on jimromenesko.com and the spreading demise of copy editors is showing:
The East Oregonian wrote about an ambidextrous pitcher — he threw with his right arm and his left arm in the same game — under the headline: “Amphibious pitcher make debut”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commemorated the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, by printing the famous photo of dying RFK sprawled on a hotel hall floor. The caption? “Blasts from the past.”
Racine, Wisconsin’s Journal Times carried the headline, “SC Johnson named one of America’s reputable countries in study.” Should have read “companies.”
Not to be outdone, the Louisville Courier-Journal, where a lot of Enquirer editing is done, carried a Metro section cover, saying in 72-point type, “ONMI TO INCLUDE 30-STORY TOWER.”
A CNN map showing “massive manhunt for prison break escapees” identified Pennsylvania as New York.
• Gems from the first two of Michael Massing’s three-part series on digital journalism in the New York Review (of Books):
Most digital journalism repeats easily available online information rather than unearthing anything new.
Major daily newspapers still muster the staff, talent and resources to do significant investigative journalism; no digital site can match that … yet.
We learned Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA domestic and foreign spying from print, mainly London’s Pulitzer-winning Guardian.
The Internet’s focus on national and international news has all but eclipsed local reporting except on local dailies and the occasional, serious TV website.
• CNN provides the latest What Were They Thinking?
Saturday presenter Fredricka Whitfield described a distraught Texan as “courageous and brave” while he was attacking Dallas police.
Her delayed crawl-back didn’t help. It took two days before she said, “I misused those words terribly.
And I sincerely apologize for making this statement, and I understand now how offensive it was, and I want to reiterate that in no way do I believe the gunman was courageous or brave. I sincerely apologize.”
That’s another non-apology apology. If she believed it, why is she lying? If she didn’t believe it, why did she say it, even if some other idiot wrote the script for her?
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2015.
