Online Journalism Ethics

Traditions and Transitions

Cecilia Friend, Jane Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317463603
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Online media present both old and new ethical issues for journalists who must make decisions in an interactive, instantaneous environment short on normative standards or guidelines. This user-friendly book guides prospective and professional journalists through ethical questions encountered only online. Including real-life examples and perspectives from online journalists in every chapter, the book examines the issues of gathering information, reporting, interviewing, and writing for mainstream news organizations on the Web. It considers the ethical implications of linking, interactivity, verification, transparency, and Web advertising, as well as the effects of convergence on newsrooms. It also addresses the question of who is a journalist and what is journalism in an age when anyone can be a publisher. Each chapter includes a complex case study that promotes critical thinking and classroom discussion about how to apply the ethical issues covered.

1

Traditions, Conventions, and Ethics

Cecilia Friend

Journalists and scholars largely see journalistic ethical codes and principles as transcending time and place, but newsroom ethics are closely tied to the culture in which they develop and the technology by which news is produced. For example, the emergence of objectivity as an ideal in reporting the news is derived in part from the conventions of the inverted pyramid as a storytelling device and the commercial development of the telegraph in the nineteenth century that gave rise to those conventions.

Practices that once might have been tolerated, if not officially sanctioned, such as eavesdropping at government officials’ office doors, have morphed into a pervasive wariness toward all types of surveillance as electronic looking, listening, and lurking become easier. And the range of taboo images and information—from shattered bodies to the names of rape victims—has steadily shrunk, first under the influence of televised war images from Vietnam, the Middle East, and Somalia, then in response to the ubiquity of personal data on the Web.

Journalistic ethics, then, is always in a position of delicate and uneasy equipoise with culture, technology, and history. Ethical standards must wield their influence outside the daily riptides of deadline pressure, shaky sources, and dubious methods. The standards are, by definition, abstractions—models and maps. Yet changing times do alter they way we think about or apply some traditional standards. And such changes may themselves pull in quite different directions, as with the many newspapers that have pledged to exorcise racial and ethnic bias from their pages even as they shift news-gathering resources from urban to suburban desks.

This chapter explores traditional newsroom ethics as a product of their time and place; the degree to which those ethics may be transferred to a new media environment; and, in particular, how ethical principles are transformed as they are both appropriated and contested in the digital realm.

History of Journalism Conventions and Principles

Claims of fairness, balance, and truthfulness in news are hardly a modern phenomenon. American publishers have voiced them since well before the American Revolution, according to David Mindich.¹ But throughout the era of the Revolutionary War press and the partisan press that followed it, most domestic newspapers were marked by a narrow political slant or driven by primarily mercantile interests. Before the 1830s, newspapers were “expensive, partisan and sedate.”² Journalism in the modern sense had not yet been born.

The advent of the penny press in the 1830s saw the rise of a more popular daily journalism that targeted the masses with a mix of crime and human interest stories.³ Political news was not altogether ignored, but the financial success of these cheap newspapers made them economically independent of the political parties that had previously underwritten them. The working-class audiences attracted to the egalitarian rhetoric of these mass-circulation newspapers turned them into big business and brought wealth to their owners. By the early 1900s, newspapers around the country were following the model of the successful penny city papers in Boston and New York: putting audience tastes and interests ahead of political interests and instant financial gain in a strategy of long-term financial growth.⁴

In some markets and newsrooms, of course, this financial independence was accompanied not by a larger journalistic vision, but only by a larger appetite for pandering—that timeless tradition that Jill Geisler has described as “bodybags and beauty tips, house fires and health hints.”⁵ An influential few, however, understood that financial independence was the necessary condition for ideological and intellectual independence. Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896, codified this new philosophy of disinterest in his first edition, in a pledge that would become his legacy: “To give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”⁶

As policies of editorial independence took hold, editors and writers increasingly began to regard journalism as a profession and think of themselves as its trained practitioners. With the emergence of a professional ethos, journalistic principles such as those espoused by Ochs began to be articulated, debated, and institutionalized as ethical standards grounded in broad ideals of independence and nonpartisanship.

In 1912, a group of editors formed a professional association around a code of ethics that placed independence above all other principles. The American Society of Newspaper Editors’ code said in part, “Freedom from all obligations except that of fidelity to the public interest is vital. Promotion of any private interest contrary to the general welfare, for whatever reasons, is not compatible with honest journalism Partisanship, in editorial comment which knowingly departs from the truth, does violence to the best spirit of American journalism; in the news columns it is subversive of a fundamental principle of the profession.”⁷

Nearly a century later, those ideals are echoed with remarkable fidelity in a recent well-received book about journalism principles, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. Their first principle is that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. The second is a reiteration of Ochs’s declaration: Journalism’s overriding loyalty is to the public. “Allegiance to citizens is the meaning of what we have come to call journalistic independence.”⁸

This is not to say, however, that the intervening decades have left Ochs’s notions of the truth and the public interest unchallenged. While they are the foundations on which the twentieth century’s most lasting journalistic legacies were built, both independence and its corollary, objectivity, have been the source of confusion, inquiry, and criticism. The terms have often been used as synonyms for other ideas, Kovach and Rosenstiel point out, including disengagement, disinterestedness, and detachment: “These terms are a confusion and reflect a fuzzy understanding.”⁹

Independence, the Inverted Pyramid, and Objectivity

Michael Schudson in The Power of News observes, “In historical perspective there is nothing more striking than the transformation of journalism from the nineteenth-century partisan press to the twentieth-century commercial-professional press.”¹⁰ Central to that transformation in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a new way to tell stories. The inverted pyramid, which begins with the most important information and ends with the least important, supplanted earlier chronological and expository forms over a span of several decades. With its emphasis on the “facts” of who, what, when, where, why, and how, the inverted pyramid signaled a shift not only in the way news stories were shaped but also a shift in the worldview of the society it chronicled. The inverted pyramid also brought with it a fresh ethical framework for how writers should approach their work.

While no one can say precisely where and why the idea of the inverted pyramid story format took hold, journalists were certainly influenced by the telegraphic transmission of news during and following the Civil War.¹¹ The telegraph’s compressed messages highlighting the most dramatic pieces of information may have provided a model for modern news reporting, Schudson says.¹² The telegraph was only one of many scientific innovations of the era. Journalists of the new century, already influenced by their new prestige, affluence, and independence, were undoubtedly also affected—if only by diffusion—by an emerging empirical and scientific worldview¹³ as well as the movement toward realism in literature and art.¹⁴

Schudson characterizes this newsroom paradigm of the era as a “naive empiricism”—a faith in the power of observation, evidence and “neutral” language to convey things as they really are.¹⁵ Reporter Ray Stannard Baker noted, “Facts, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude, was what the American people really wanted.”¹⁶ By the turn of the century, most writers had abandoned the older news story formats of narrative convention or emphases on points of view and embraced the inverted pyramid, with its hierarchical ordering of facts and events. “The world has grown tired of preachers and sermons,” Clarence Darrow wrote in 1893; “to-day it asks for facts.”¹⁷

Mindich summarizes the impact of this historical transition as a revolution. “The importance of the inverted pyramid, which supplanted the chronological style of antebellum news writing, is difficult to overstate,” he says. The inverted pyramid produced an ethic of “straight” news and ushered in an era of “objective” news writing.¹⁸

And Kovach and Rosenstiel point out that the transition ultimately involved not only storytelling techniques, but the semiotics of the news—the design and placement of information to construct new meanings. “In essence, the press swapped partisan loyalty for a new compact—that journalists would not harbor a hidden agenda. Editorials and political opinion, which before had mixed with and sometimes even constituted the news on the front page, were now set apart by space or label. From these simple decisions—things that seem obvious today—much of today’s standard journalistic ethics were formed.”¹⁹

But while the inverted pyramid’s focus on facticity and the growth of the ideals of objectivity and independence may have been a vast improvement over the verbal brawls of the partisan press, the new story form was not simply an objective, factual account of events—a mirror of the world as it is. Journalists writing in the inverted pyramid format were now forced to decide, however unconsciously, which parts of an event to include in the shortened story form and which story elements were more important than others. This interpretive dimension is, of course, present in any act of communication, but in the inverted pyramid it is typically hidden by a detached tone and nonnarrative sequence. “News, as we imagine it in its ideal state, is all information, no form,” Schudson says. “The [inverted pyramid] news story informs its readers … but in a specific way. Its meaning lies in the instructions it tacitly gives about what to attend to, and how to attend to it.”²⁰

While the inverted pyramid story form and journalistic objec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Exhibits
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Practice and Promise of Journalistic Ethics in a Digital World
• 1. Traditions, Conventions, and Ethics
• 2. Newsrooms Go Online
• 3. Gathering and Sharing Information
• 4. Ethics and the Law
• 5. Bloggers and Other “Participatory Journalists”
• 6. Beyond Blogs Other Interactive News Forms
• 7. Commercial Issues and Content Linking
• 8. Cross-Platform Journalism, Partnering, and Cross-Ownership
• Appendixes
• Index
• About the Authors