Once again, an MSM writer has decided that bloggers need a code of ethics. Christine Hurt blogs about Adam Cohen's "fairly strident op-ed today in the NYT that bloggers need to have a code of ethics, like journalists do." Christine hits the nail on the head, though: to be meaningful, a code of ethics has to be enforceable.
Journalism is a job, not a profession. I hold a diploma from an accredited journalism school, and I can tell you that there is no particular skill to it that is particularly difficult or unobtainable by average people. There is no "accountability" of journalists in any meaningful sense. There is no equivalent of a bar exam for journalists. There is no licensing procedure for journalists. There is no minimum education level required, nor any particular special kind of training at all. Fill out an employment application, get hired at minimum wage or better, and presto, you're a journalist. Or just take a pad and pencil, call some folks on the phone and do some interviews, and you're a journalist, too.
There is a Code of Ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists that offers some admirable ideals. Here is 100 percent of what it says the accountability of journalists is (check for your self):
Be Accountable Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other. Journalists should:
--Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct. -- Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media. -- Admit mistakes and correct them promptly. -- Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media. Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
That's all. What the code means is that accountability is nothing but an agreement by journalists to follow these rules. There is no sanction for not doing so. I presume that the SPJ could revoke your membership in it for failing to follow the code, but you can still be a journalist if you want. Lawyers can be debarred, physicians can be de-licensed, and then neither can practice, but no such sanctions of any kind exist for journalists.
There is only one real standard of journalistic accountability, and it is the same as for blogs: the marketplace of ideas. People read or view or listen to sources that they deem reliable and credible (or entertaining, but we were talking about news and commentary). Glenn Reynolds gets 145,000 page views per day because people trust his record. So far my blog's has garnered more than 3.1 million views for the same reason, I presume. Lord knows, I don't try to be entertaining.
The whole idea of a code of ethics rests on the presumption that blogging (or journalism) is bound somehow by a public trust. That lawyering and medicine clearly hold a public trust is easy to see. But the notion that news media do is, IMO, a bit of a stretch. The idea that papers (and later broadcast media) are "objective" (or in FoxNews-speak, "fair and balanced") is only about a hundred years old. It was promulgated by William Randolph Hearst, who was one of the yellowist of yellow journalists in the closing years of the 19th century.
Hearst, owner of the New York Morning Journal, was feverishly competing with Joseph Pulitzer who published the New York World. To gain readers, both new and their competition's, Hearst and Pulitzer published articles about the Cuban Insurrection. These stories have been known for decades to have been frequently, greatly exaggerated to exacerbate Spain, which then ruled Cuba. Hearst openly wanted America to make war against Spain.
When his artist correspondent, Frederick Remington,arrived in Cuba to cover the anticipated Spanish-American war only to find therewere no visible signs of war and cabled Hearst for permission to come home, Hearst reportedly cabled back, ''You provide the pictures, and I'll provide the war.'' This strategy worked, as the Journal sold more than a million copies during theheight of the crisis.
Hearst came under fire at the time for dishonestly stoking the martial fires. His tactic was to insist his paper was reporting only facts and that the reportage was objective. If journalists as a group hold objectivity as an ideal, then fine - although I still maintain there is no such thing as a God's-eye view of events (unlkess you're God, of course) and that the entire idea that any journalism can be unbiased is inherently flawed. Reporters, like bloggers, can only select which biases they will follow.
At last weekend's BlogNashville conference, I confessed to a couple of other bloggers that I was not comfortable with the idea that I have some special obligation as a blogger either to write about certain topics or in certain ways, or to write about certain subjects. This blog is a hobby for me, not a vocation and certainly not a living. But I pose this question: In order for a person or occupation to hold a public trust, they have to affect a sector of the public large enough to harm the body politic as a whole if that trust is betrayed.
But as Christine Hurt points out, who enforces? For doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers and many other professions, the regulation of the public trust is enforced by law or semi-legal regulations. Is there a working journalist out there who is willing to be subjected to those kinds of permanent, career-ending sanctions? I didn't think so.
If someone wants to formulate a blogger code of ethics and offer it as a voluntary agreement that bloggers may sign onto, or refuse as they see fit, go for it. But I don't see the point: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The burr that's really under Adam Cohen's saddle is that he has swallowed whole the fiction that he, a journalist, is accountable and that bloggers are not. I leave the rebuttal to Bill Hobbs, who worked as a reporter for 15 years in the MSM. Said he:
No media tool allows for more accountability and more-rapid correcting of error than weblogs. None. And blog articles - which, incidentally, tend to be commentary rather than straight news - are often better referenced than anything you'll read in your local daily. Bloggers won't just tell you what they think about something - they'll provide you links to the relevant source materials, and even links to other blogs that take a different point of view. Rev. Sensing quotes the SPJ "Code of Ethics" in its entirety - and links to it. What are the chances he would deliberately misquote it? Zero. He linked to it - you can read it for yourself. The Internet makes it easy to fact-check bloggers - which creates more pressure on bloggers to get their facts right.
Like the NYT, bloggers can be sued for libel - in fact, this was a specific topic of discussion for awhile in one seminar I attended at BlogNashville. See also Ann Althouse and Jeff Jarvis and Larry Ribstein.
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