About Ethics in Journalism

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, February 04, 2022

 

Recent public-opinion surveys show that perhaps only one-third of Americans trust the news media. Only 15 percent of Americans think the news media care about them. And only 13 percent think the news media are moral.

 

There are a lot of reasons for this, but maybe, I suggest, it’s because journalists are always trying to get people fired for thinking or saying the wrong thing. For thinking or saying things that are commonly thought and said.

 

An astonishing amount of journalism at prestige media outlets is dedicated to the task of removing people from their jobs. Sometimes it is in other forms of media. Is Dave Chappelle saying the wrong thing about transgenderism? Well, please alert the shareholders of Netflix. Does the former comedian turned talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg have confused thoughts about the way “race” was understood in the Third Reich, perhaps conflating it with an American understanding of ethnicity? Should she be suspended? Does Joe Rogan fail to challenge the dissenting and crackpot doctors on his show as much as he challenges other guests? People with the wrong political views can’t be on a prestigious Disney show.

 

Sometimes it is in the tech industry. James Damore foolishly shared his actual views on diversity with his bosses at Google. The people at Google who share the progressive politics of the national media leaked his memo, and he was made into a figure of sport. His views were distorted, and his fate was lustily celebrated by the media figures who effected it. Or there’s legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, whose mangled tweet was easily misconstrued and used to threaten his career going forward.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re in the club in media, it doesn’t matter if you are caught masturbating on a conference call with colleagues, as Jeffrey Toobin was. You’ll be restored. CNN’s Jeff Zucker carried on an affair with a colleague whom he constantly promoted over others for years, and colluded with one of the primary subjects his news network covered, Governor Andrew Cuomo. Media personalities on CNN the day after he resigned spent much of their airtime praising him as a great boss, a visionary leader, a friend, and so on. That his actions brought their institution into disrepute didn’t bother them a whit.

 

Digital technology has made journalism more powerful — Google is a permanent record that’s easier to access than microfiche at a faraway library. At the same time, it’s made news operations more irresponsible. They move faster, make more mistakes. They edit their work on the fly, or “stealth edit” — removing what used to be the permanent, humbling record of corrections and emendations.

 

Meanwhile, if you start making money on YouTube, but you wrote something on a message board 14 years ago that’s become unfashionable to say, a Washington Post reporter will start calling up your corporate sponsors for on-the-record comment.

 

Social media put almost every employer at least a little into the media business. And the power players in traditional media have responded like mafia figures, stringing people up as a form of intimidation and a reminder of who’s boss here. Traditional media are seeking to captain corporate power to create a monopoly control over every published word, every brain fart spoken in a podcast studio, or every dumb thing you post on Facebook.

 

Conor Fitzgerald, a man who is, as far as I can tell, the last standing independent thinker in his nation, wrote about the fundamental problem at work.

 

Because it happens on proprietary platforms frequented by media people, much public conversation is treated as though it is appearing in the legacy media; that is, it is fact-checked, edited, policed and critiqued against the standards of journalism — though of course only where it offends the values of journalists.

 

Digital media present new business threats to journalists. They have encouraged traditional outlets such as the Times to more zealously serve a partisan audience. They have encouraged beat reporters to express their opinions more frequently in their stories, and as Twitter personalities. And they have been a disaster for journalism and its reputation.

 

Journalists could regain some of the public trust and stature for their profession if they recovered journalistic ethics, applied their skepticism to the powerful, and stopped trying to superintend or censor every other public conversation that might distract others from journalism. There was a time when people, perhaps naively, considered newspapers a cut above chat-show tattle, more reliable, more likely to get at something beyond mere opinion.

 

Haha, who am I kidding? Silicon Valley has destroyed this possibility. Journalists, by and large, would prefer to host the chat shows. They are hoping that if they can’t become stars in the old media, they can at least be professionals creating well-done distractions for the new platforms. Or, at the very least — they could be glorified political censors, a kind of cleanup crew that sits between the hoi polloi putting their private parts on Zoom and the respectable progressives who put their capital behind the enterprise.