Transparency and Journalism

A Critical Appraisal of a Disruptive Norm

Michael Karlsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000453096
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

This book offers a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible introduction to journalistic transparency.

Pulling from historical and theoretical perspectives, Transparency and Journalism explains the concept of transparency and its place in journalistic practice, offering a critical assessment of what transparency can and cannot offer to journalism. The author also reviews the key theoretical claims underlying transparency and how they have been researched in different parts of the world, ultimately proposing a communication model that can be used to study the concept of transparency across journalism research. Other topics discussed include the use of algorithmic forms of transparency, the limitations of the transparency myth, and suggestions for future avenues for research.

Transparency and Journalism is an important resource for students and scholars in the field of journalism and media studies, as well as for journalists and researchers interested in delving into an ever-relevant topic for the field.

1 Transparency and its connection to journalism

DOI: 10.4324/9780429340642-1

Transparency in journalism means being open about how news is made. It also involves inviting citizens to monitor and be a part of that process with the purpose of building and maintaining a strong relationship with them, especially concerning trust. The idea is that if you are more transparent over how journalism is made, then people’s misunderstandings, misconceptions, and disbelief in journalism will prove unfounded and sway sceptics towards becoming neutrals or even supporters. If you want the short version of journalism and transparency, well, there you have it. For this to happen, journalism needs to change the way it works in terms of skills, practices, and routines, aligning it with the normative idea of transparency. Should journalism follow suit, then transparency will have disrupted both journalism’s normative outlook and the way it works. Transparency, therefore, promises or threatens to change how journalism views itself, its place in the world, and how it creates knowledge about the world. There are already signs that journalism has begun to be disrupted by this norm as transparency even now occupies a central place in journalism practice and journalism studies as a topic worthy of consideration. But it is also a question of how much journalism has changed and whether transparency works as intended.

The rest of this book provides much more detail beyond the brief summary above. The book also complicates, questions, and provides some evidence that there is currently limited support for the view that transparency can fix journalism’s broken relationships with the public. Further, it also suggests that algorithmic decision-making, currently on the rise in journalism, makes transparency even more far-fetched. It even proposes the idea that transparency cannot lead to trust since the concepts conflict with each other. But let us not get too far ahead of the story and instead turn our attention to the contemporary mainstream debate on transparency.

The role of transparency in relation to journalism is usually considered an issue of journalistic self-interest, and whether this will make it more accessible and credible to the audience in order to sustain or improve the legitimacy of the journalistic institution, not forgetting support for the business of news. This is the key focus of the debate and hence also this book. But the transparency debate can also be considered from the perspective of viewing journalism as an intermediary between the government and the governed (i.e. the public). Liberal philosophers (see Fenster, 2006, p. 895ff) emphasize publicity as a prerequisite of transparency as a democratic necessity (an argument to be extended in Chapter 2). This publicity can of course be achieved by government itself, but in reality, the public has obtained its information from news media and, increasingly, from non-journalistic arbitrators. Thus, opacity in the intermediary regarding, for instance, where the information comes from can also obscure the public’s insight into the government or the government’s attempts to explain and justify its decisions (Fenster, 2006). Consequently, there is also the larger issue of democratic accountability at stake in the debate on journalism and transparency in addition to journalism and its legitimacy.

This first chapter provides background and context concerning how transparency made its way into journalism practice and studies and the purpose it is supposed to serve. It returns to some of the accounts offered by journalists and scholars in the early 2000s that focused on the declining trust in, and consumption of, journalism. There were many advocates from both the academy (including the proponent of this book¹) and the journalism industry touting transparency as a remedy for the decline (Lasorsa, 2012; Phillips, 2012), not least because the ideal of transparency fitted neatly with the affordances of burgeoning digital media (e.g. unlimited space, hyperlinks, interactivity) (Karlsson, 2011). This chapter develops by revisiting some of the key claims that also set up the path for much of the research to follow, thus explaining why much contemporary research has ended up where it is. The subsequent section argues that there is only a weak theoretical and empirical foundation that transparency will serve the purpose that protagonists suggest, prompting the need to look beyond the journalistic field and explore the roots of transparency and its proposed function in those fields. A broader review of transparency in other fields is presented in Chapter 2. This chapter’s third section offers a perspective on understanding how transparency is enacted in journalistic practice, describing different ways in which journalists can be transparent and what they do when they are conducting journalism transparently. The final section opens with a brief overview of theoretical perspectives – institutional theory and Goffman’s theory of social interaction – that inform the book. The final section also offers a summary of the structure of the book and a short note on each of the six chapters.

Transparency: Essence, purpose, and how it made its way into journalism

If there is a single word that previous research has used to explain transparency it would be “openness” (Heim & Craft, 2020; Karlsson, 2010; Plaisance, 2007; Vos & Craft, 2017). Openness here refers to generally opening up the black box (Singer, 2005) that used to be the news industry generally and the newsroom specifically. According to a range of researchers, journalism has been sealed off to the outside, including the public it is supposed to serve and be accountable to ‒ a black box fortress going by the name “newsroom”, from which news appears to spontaneously emerge at regular intervals (Deuze, 2003; Gillmor, 2004; Karlsson, 2011; Singer, 2005). According to Singer’s observation (2005, p. 179), the news media are among the opaquest industries and news people have not been particularly keen to “let the public in on how the sausage is made”. Had the posture been given a sausage-appropriate slogan it might have been “Eat it or beat it”. And beat it the public gradually did, although it remains to be seen whether this is due to the lack of exhaustive sausage-making knowledge or something else. It is my hope that this book helps inform that debate.

The decline in the relationship between journalism and the public is visible in at least three different areas: first, the diminishing news consumption affecting revenue and advertising rates (Kurpius et al., 2010; Pickard & Williams, 2014; Thurman & Myllylahti, 2009); second, the reality that trust and credibility ratings are going down among the (American) public, affecting not only news consumption but also the legitimacy of journalism as a social institution (Brenan, 2019; Pew Research Center, 2013; Newman et al., 2019); and third, the fact that the objectivity norm, a mainstay in high-modern journalism for decades, is being questioned by insiders (Vos & Craft, 2017) as a viable long-term norm and needs to be replaced or supplemented by a better option (cue transparency).

As the relationship deteriorates further, the need for solutions only becomes more urgent.

Transparency can, at least partially, be a response to these developments and its main purpose is to rehabilitate journalism’s declining relationship, especially in the US, with the public ‒ a response that has been brandished by academics, debaters, and journalists alike. From relative obscurity, transparency was picked up by journalists, debaters, and scholars in the early 2000s. In the first edition of their milestone book The Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001, p. 78) proposed that journalists should “[be as] transparent as possible about [their] methods and motives”. By the time the second edition of the book was out (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2007), they had noted that transparency had been given even more prominence in the field and this was reflected in their extended treatment of the topic as well. In 2004, J.D. Lasica suggested in the Online Journalism Review that the transparency found in blogs helped to explain the fact that they were perceived as more credible than news media, and that mainstream journalists might benefit from learning from their “cutting-edge cousins” (Lasica, 2004).

In the summer of 2004, 24 media executives, journalists, and consultants gathered at the Eighth Annual Aspen Institute Conference on Journalism and Society “to examine the policies and practices that enable ethical entanglements to occur and to explore strategies by which news organizations can strengthen the public’s confidence in the integrity of their journalism” (Ziomek, 2005, p. v). Charles Firestone, the executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, challenged the participants with the question “With the changes in communications technology, can you afford not to be transparent?” (Ziomek, 2005, p. vi). The participants at the conferences responded unanimously that transparency is key for the industry, practitioners, and the public to come together and rebuild trust in the media. The counselling to the journalistic field boiled down to: “Good journalism should be as transparent as practical” (Ziomek, 2005, p. vi).

For Plaisance (2007, p. 193), transparency could also be used as a tool for credibility in interactions with the public: “For journalists confronted by an often hostile public, transparency is more than academic; it is an essential element of credibility”. David Weinberger suggested in 2009 that transparency was the new objectivity because “…we want, need, can have and expect transparency. Transparency – the embedded ability to see through the published draft – often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did” (Weinberger, 2009). Although there is no lack of conviction in the argument, it is peculiarly vague who the “we” are.

But there have also been sceptical and critical voices regarding what transparency can bring to journalism. Allen (2008) feared that it can be used to dodge criticism and defend the institution rather than to change it. In 2006, Rachel Smolkin had already expressed her scepticism by comparing journalists’ commitment to transparency with the belief that healing crystals can solve all problems (Smolkin, 2006). In an almost identical remark in 2013, media ethicist Stephen Ward criticized the optimism over transparency that accredited it with magical powers to restore democracy (Ward, 2013). Instead, Ward put out a warning that transparency is insufficient to ensure ethical conduct and might lead to excessive caution among management. Despite these objections and, as we shall see later in Chapter 3, there being little to show in terms of substantial effects, transparency has gradually been incorporated by the news media, the journalistic profession, and academia alike.

By the mid-2010s, transparency had been institutionalized in the sense that it had become officially embraced as a way of doing journalism properly. Thus, it took roughly a decade between the point in time when the term first began to appear in serious discussion and when it had become amalgamated by journalism. Perhaps the most significant sign of transparency’s grip is its inclusion as an acknowledged professional norm (Heim & Craft, 2020; Vos & Craft, 2017). The US Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) added transparency to their Code of Ethics in the latest revision (in 2014). More specifically, a whole section, “Be accountable and transparent”, is devoted to it and here it is explained that “[e]thical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public” (Society of Professional Journalists, n.d.). The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) revised their code of ethics in 2015 to incorporate transparency (Heim & Craft, 2020). They expounded the role of transparenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. Transparency and its connection to journalism
• 2. Journalistic transparency in history and context
• 3. Can you see the sunlight? Transparency at work
• 4. Algorithmic forms of transparency and opacity
• 5. The limits of the transparency myth
• 6. Transparency after all?
• Index