LOCAL MAN

The Media, Chauncey Mabe and Me

ROCHESTER, MN -- The response to my recent Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics at Marquette University has ranged from a few high-fiving e-mails to milder ''liked your lecture'' notes from friends who are still puzzled by my obsession with Buddhism and journalism.

The lecture elicited one outright pan -- a Wile E. Coyote-style application of a verbal frying pan to my brain pan, from a journalist named Chauncey Mabe of the Florida Sun-Sentinel. The piece raised so many good points that I commend it to you: Preacher McGill, The New York Times, and Language Abuse.

I wrote the author in reply:

Dear Chauncey,

Your grouchy hatchet-job on my lecture raises so many of the points that concern me about journalism today, that I thought I'd hazard a response.

It was ripping good fun to read your piece, Chauncey. What a delight to see a stuffy pedant get his due! Thank goodness for writers like you, who don't give an inch to puffed-up preachers and clueless ivory-tower blowhards.

But wait, that was ME you were writing about!

~ Sigh. ~

Well, I suppose it could all be true, and I'd be the last one to know about it.

But if it turns out the picture is cockeyed, Chauncey, then the difference between what's real, and what journalism presents as real, comes into sharp relief.

Most people I've met in thirty years as a journalist, especially those who are written about often, think the job's done well about half the time, and botched the other half.

A lot of people think journalism misses the mark a lot more often. 

As a journalist, I try to take these complaints seriously, to ask where the problem lies. Is there something inherent in writing, that it can't describe reality accurately? Plato thought so.

Or is there something in the journalistic attitude that also gets in the way?

One of my persistent questions is why so many journalists choose to work with a wrecking ball, while having easy access to far finer and more exacting language tools.

Where's the lasting joy, or the useful civic sharing, in building ''Preacher Pete [fill in the name]" pinatas and then bashing them to bits? Haven't we -- hasn't journalism -- moved beyond banking on the thrill of blood-battles and public hangings to build reader interest?

I know it's an old story -- another problem you had with my lecture.

But if the same moral puzzles keep arising in journalism, shouldn't we keep trying to puzzle them out?

When you argue that I didn't provide enough good examples, I agree. My lecture covered a lot of ground -- perhaps too much. Plus, presenting compelling examples is a major challenge for anyone dipping their toes into post-Orwell propaganda analysis.

Leaders in this field, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, base their theories on neurological laboratory studies showing how the brain responds unconsciously to individual words and phrases. Describing compelling examples in a way that non-scientists can understand is a major challenge. I hope to make some progress there.

In response to your other points:

1. McGill is holding journalistic accountability to an unreasonable standard: perfection. Not really. The ABC News poll linked above found that only 14% of the public trusts the news media ''a great deal.'' There's a lot of room for improvement between that and ''perfection.''

2. What if a writer is anti-establishmentarian? Then he could not be unconsciously supporting the status quo through the deeper structural parts of his writing. Actually, by definition, he could unconsciously be supporting anything, without being conscious of it.

3. McGill doesn't make any corrective suggestions. In fact, the entire Burleigh lecture is explicitly organized around two interrelated suggestions, that A) citizens increase their awareness of how the mass media affects their minds and bodies, and that B) journalists more carefully check their ethical intentions before expressing their inner thoughts as public speech.

One last point, Chauncey, if I may. When I say that you present me to your readers as a ''pinata,'' I'm basing that on the various epithets you used to describe me -- ''lackey,'' ''preacher,'' ''Billy Sunday,'' ''St. Augustine,'' etc. You even slammed me for reading Plato, Orwell, Barth and Steven Pinker.

Gosh, what's next? Are you going to pelt me with food during recess?

Why is an intellectual like you bashing people for reading books?

Actually, my friend (and I am not using that word rhetorically), I respect your playful and affecting way with words. And I admire your belief in the good that journalism can do in society -- not as a perfect instrument of communication, but as one that keeps failing but keeps trying.

So, I hope we keep talking.

All the best, as always,

Doug

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/pinata.htm

Sometimes, Journalism Stops Free Speech

The Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics, Marquette University, Part 4

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- The central theme of this talk has been how journalism's weak ethics tradition hampers its ability to adapt and evolve in today's globally interdependent world. 

Journalists define ethics almost exclusively in First Amendment terms, and self-defensively shut down conversations that range any further, especially into public speech ethics and morals.

That rigid ''First Amendment-only'' response is deeply problematic in a society where millions of ordinary citizens are exploring how to become journalists on the Internet, and in a larger world where billions of people have different values and ideas about free speech.

Free speech is a transcendent principle. But if like any moral principle it's accorded monopoly status, how can constructive conversation occur?

There are also ancient teachings about moral or ''right speech,'' and new scientific insights into how language works in the brain to shape belief and action, that only a relaxed, humble, and non-defensive journalism can absorb with benefit.

Global Trends

Moreover, and most practically, journalism's ethical dilemma has down-to-earth implications for the survival of journalism in purely economic terms.

I'd like to end my talk today with a few observations about the interrelation of ethics and economics in the global media, through a brief look at U.S. newspapers.

From their crumbling cost structures, shifting readerships and demographics to the changing news-reading habits of their customers, American newspapers increasingly are at the mercy of global trends.

Yet virtually none of the obituaries-cum-analyses of the ailing U.S. newspaper industry today account for the global components of the U.S. newspaper industry's problems.

Survival Plans

To take one example, competition for today's major metropolitan daily newspapers comes not just from the other newspapers in a given market, from TV shows or from video games that young people play instead of reading the news. 

Today, major U.S. newspapers also compete with the daily newspapers of foreign countries, which are read on the Internet every morning by the immigrant populations living in American cities.

So why aren't more major daily newspapers courting immigrants as a major plank of their survival plans?

Over the past several years, I've asked many newspaper editors and publishers, including the then-publisher of the embattled Chicago Sun-Times, just this question.

Their answers always boil down to this: ''Immigrants don't want us and they don't need us. They don't share our readers' interests, they don't live in the same neighborhoods, and they don't even speak the same language as our readers.''

Instead of answering a global phenomenon with a global solution, or even a globally-themed discussion, this defensive, head-in-the-sand posture is struck.

Reality Check

The critical question to ask here is an ethical one: ''If the journalism of a major metropolitan daily newspaper isn't for all the citizens who live in that city, who is its journalism for? More to the point, who is journalism for?''

But journalism has a hard time discussing, much less answering that question.

More precisely, journalists typically answer the question too quickly, without checking the answer against reality, before defensively ending the conversation.

The quick answer, of course, is ''journalism is for all citizens.''

That's the automatic response provided by First Amendment-only journalism ethics, which defines the purpose of journalism as providing the citizens of democracy with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

Favored Demographics

But the actual reality is, for the past half century journalism has not been for everyone in society but rather for people who can afford it -- for the people who live in the prime zip codes, who can buy the stuff in the ads, who make up the ''favorable demographics,'' and who speak fluent English.

That last one might sound like a stretch. Obviously, English-language papers are for people who read English, right? But in fact, publishers like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst once built fortunes selling newspapers to immigrants who spoke little or no English, but wanted desperately to learn.

Immigrants once bought daily newspapers for their English language columns, their advice for assimilating immigrants, and for immigrant and mainstream news.

By contrast, in recent decades journalism has sliced up our communities into favored and disfavored demographics, catering to the former and shunning the latter.

Information Redlining

In journalism, we've rationalized this shift away from the notion that journalism is for all citizens with a raft of euphemisms. We've called it ''smart marketing,'' ''writing for our demographics,'' and most of all, ''knowing our audience.''

When in fact, we've practiced the journalistic equivalent of bank red-lining. We've funneled the precious information lifeblood of democracy to certain favored groups and neighborhoods, just as redlining banks do with loans. 

A recent study by media researchers in the U.S., England, Denmark and Finland shows how the news in America has become a commodity of the upper-class.

Using a standard news-knowledge test given in all four countries, the study showed an enormous difference separating well-to-do, educated Americans versus  lesser-educated citizens, as compared to the three European countries.

Seeing Whole

In the U.S., the difference between the two groups was 40 percentage points compared to 14, 13, and zero points difference in Britain, Finland and Denmark, respectively.

How can journalism describe the world accurately, as an interrelated whole, if we define our own communities as demographic slivers? By describing them as slivered, we help make them so.

Of all our national institutions, journalism is surely among the best suited -- by virtue of its proud history, its skills of realistic social observation and description, by its favored place in the U.S. constitution, and by its key role in democracy -- to begin to see the world clearly and whole again, by seeing and serving all citizens.

By describing our communities as interrelated wholes, we would help keep its parts working together, as opposed to flying apart.

We need a full, relaxed and open ethical discussion to reach agreement on this or any other goal.

Will journalists -- citizens and professionals -- lead this global ethical conversation?

When will we do this, and how?

Thank you.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

Part One of this talk: The True Promise of Citizen Journalism
Part Two: My Language Crimes at The New York Times
Part Three: The Buddha, the Dharma and the Media

The Buddha, The Dharma and the Media

The Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics, Marquette University, Part 3

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- There is an old interviewing trick journalists use to  get people to say things far more intimate than they planned to reveal.   

The trick works when the journalist, instead of asking a follow-up question during the silence that follows an answer, instead stays silent. The compulsion to fill conversational vacuums is so powerful that people often blab intimacies they didn't mean to share.

That interviewing ploy is one of many ethical shortcuts I used as a reporter and editor in the mainstream press for more than twenty years, first as a reporter for The New York Times, and then later as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.

As the years passed, I cut more and more ethical corners as a journalist to get exclusive stories, to elicit juicy anecdotes and quotes, and to get my stories the best possible play on the newswire or in the newspaper -- preferably on page one.

Verbal Steroids

I became a serial exaggerator of social trends. Increasingly, I started defining every trend as ''new and important,'' ''widespread,'' or ''emblematic.''

My writing vocabulary was getting showy and meretricious (and a Happy New Year!), and I began avoiding humble but specific, useful words. 

I got hooked on such verbal journalistic steroids as ''unprecedented,''  ''in a dramatic new development,'' ''revolutionary,'' and ''raises new and troubling questions.'' I felt sheepish, hangdog and worse. But I kept using.

Sometime I'd get to the part of the story where I needed to type in these phrases, and I'd literally feel sick.

Was I really going to do this again, I'd ask myself?

Usually, I would. Because when I injected these particular words my stories and -- most important -- my byline shot straight onto the front page.

And that felt oh, so good. But where was the end to these addictions?

Extreme Reality

Of course, deeper ethical issues face the modern global journalist, language-wise.

The world is filled with violent words and actions that journalists must sometimes, of necessity, report. Sugar-coating reality would be an ethical lapse equal or even greater than occasionally exaggerating social trends.

The world is filled with realities so extreme they are literally beyond the reach of language, used at its most extreme, to accurately describe. But even straight and well-intentioned reporting of such violence, incendiary language, and extreme reality can kick the cycle of violence to even more violent rounds.

What morals should guide a journalist's professional purpose, reporting methods, and use of language in such a world?

In recent years, Buddhism's doctrines on life's purpose, human suffering, and ethical speech  have seemed to me to suggest -- as no other moral system I have yet found -- practical answers to such questions facing a global media.

Practical Morals

There is a spiritual side to Buddhism, it's true. But its most appealing trait to me from the beginning has been its straightforward and empirically-based morals. It asks not a speck of faith from anyone. Yet it offers a comprehensive and practical human morals of which speech is an integral part.

In this way, Buddhism seems tailor-made for journalism's ethical, and increasingly global and multicultural, needs.

Indeed, in its relentless quest to observe without filter or distortion the nature of daily human existence -- the fact and flavor of the simple ordinary present, the living now -- Buddhism seems, in a certain way, quintessentially journalistic. 

In my early years as a journalist, I was happy to discover the world through journalism. My youthful curiosity and optimism carried me through those years.

My drive to explore the world more widely (if not more deeply) trumped the ethical questions that always tagged behind.

Ethics Codes

It's only natural, I suppose, that with age the question of one's purpose looms larger. You've only got so many days in life, and so many chances to direct one's attention with positive intention and purpose. 

For a few years, I searched for an ethical system within the profession, or even from another profession, that addressed these concerns. Basically, I got nowhere. I found out that journalists don't like to talk about the moral basis of what they do, which is to use language. They are practically allergic to such a thing. That's got to change if journalism is going to evolve ethically and globally.

Journalism's moral obtuseness is enshrined in its ethics codes.

The specific injunctions of these guides to newsroom practice -- not to plagiarize, not to lie get a story, not to cause anyone harm, etc. -- are nowhere connected to any fundamental vision of human existence or morals.

That may sound like too grand a hope for journalism, but medical and legal ethics are grounded in this way. Why not journalism and the media?

Kant and Mill

By now, surely, the enormous impact of the media on global affairs is obvious enough to warrant thinking more seriously about media morals, beginning with the morals of journalism, which is the public service branch of the media.

Journalists wishing to go deeper ethically than their profession allows, as I did on my quest, traditionally look to Enlightenment philosophers for enlightenment.

In particular, ethics courses at communication schools teach the ''utilitarian'' ethics of John Stuart Mill, and the ''duty-based'' ethics of Immanuel Kant. 

Mill's utilitarian ethic calls for examining each case to determine if the greatest good is achieved for the greatest number. The Kantian ethic, by contrast, asks people to question if a given action would help or harm society if it was repeated by everyone. Could it be ''universalized'' to society's benefit?

These approaches have great appeal because they define communication ethics as a matter of general human morals, and not of daily expedience.

Buddhist Media

And yet, how impractical Mill and Kant are!

Enlightenment philosophers, I discovered, ascribe superhuman powers to ordinary people. Can any single person reasonably guess, with any degree of accuracy, whether a given act of speech will result in ''the greatest good for the greatest number''? Or whether it could be ''universalized without harm?''

Since when could any being but a God do such a thing? Neither the morals of Mill nor of Kant are easily translated, in practical terms, to individuals facing daily life situations, much less to hyperactive, competitive newsrooms. 

It was in Buddhism that I finally found an explicit and practical morals of human communication. Since I discovered its doctrines a few years ago, my ethics thinking has centered around the question whether it might be possible to develop a new journalism based on such universal yet practical principles.

A journalism grounded in Buddhist morals would display two salient traits derived from its moral purpose and methods. Such a journalism would be:

1. A journalism of healing. Buddhism is often not classified as a religion because it teaches no theology, declares no divinity, and requires no faith. Instead, its doctrines revolve entirely around the achievement of a practical goal: ''the end of suffering.'' Nor is the definition of suffering complex or esoteric. It is ordinary everyday suffering, aches and pains, mental moods and afflictions, sickness and death. On a social level, suffering in Buddhism is defined as any harshness, violence, and division of the community.  A Buddhist journalism would therefore be aimed at helping individuals overcome their personal sufferings, and helping society heal the wounds caused by injustice, hatred, ostracism, and physical violence. Such a defined professional purpose would give the Buddhist journalist a measuring stick for each word and story produced: does it help overcome individual and social suffering?

2. A journalism of timely, truthful, helpful speech. A Buddhist journalism would need tools and materials adequate to its healing purpose. The Buddhist ''Right Speech'' doctrine provides many of them. Right Speech sits midway along the ''Noble Eightfold Path,'' the Buddha's prescribed method to reach the end of suffering. The midway place of Right Speech along the Noble Eightfold Path is interesting, because speech is the first action to follow the gaining of wisdom and positive intention, as developed in meditation. By this view, speech is a person's very first chance to act morally in the world. It is followed then in the Noble Eightfold Path by ''Right Action'' and ''Right Livelihood.''  Also, very helpfully for journalists, the identifying traits of Right Speech are specifically defined as ''timely, truthful, helpful, and spoken with a mind of good will.'' Likewise, the five main types of speech to avoid are lies, divisive speech, harsh and abusive speech, and idle and distracting speech.

Can a new global journalism of healing be practiced that embraces timely, truthful and helpful speech, and avoids the five destructive modes?

It would be important and interesting to find out.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

For Part 1 of the Burleigh Lecture, click here.
For Part 2, click here.

My Language Crimes at The New York Times

The Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics, Marquette University, Part 2

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- Journalism has much to be humble about, but one special area where journalists need to tread with special diffidence and without mindless stomping is language.

Generally, journalists believe themselves to be experts at language. So did I, at one point. But now I believe that I was wearing enormous blinders during the ten years I worked as a staff reporter at The New York Times, and then later worked as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and Hong Kong.

Today, I think that I was basically sleepwalking, language-wise, during those years as a mainstream news reporter and editor. 

On a daily basis, I believe that I unconsciously but serially committed two capital language crimes as a journalist (two at least).

My first language crime was that by the rules of objectivity, I believed that my language was basically neutral. I believed that I was passing along to readers the key facts of any given story, while leaving it to the readers to sort and prioritize those facts to use as they wished.

Nuts and Bolts

I believed likewise that my own beliefs and prejudices were, thanks to objectivity, mostly absent from my stories, and that the prerogatives of assessment, judgment and opinion lay almost entirely with readers.

Then, in recent years, I read Plato's Phaedrus, and Aristotle's Rhetoric, and Roland Barthes, who wrote the deathless line that ''language is never innocent.'' I took a new look at newspapers to verify that line for myself and became convinced along with Plato, Aristotle and Barthes that all language is fundamentally persuasive.

Every writer is basically trying to persuade the reader of certain things, especially of the writer's own authority and worldview.

The means of persuasion are standard usage, narrative structures, vocabulary (especially metaphor), syntax and grammar -- the given, assumed, overlooked nuts and bolts of language.

While visibly holding language together at its joints and seams, these mechanical devices also are carrying out a covert operation on the meaning of language, which in its influence outweighs by far what is actually said.

This stealth-layer of language endorses the writer's worldview via an encoded set of ideals, values, and ironclad social ranking and status norms. Readers unconsciously decode these meanings as effortlessly as the writer encodes them, so quickly and easily that the process goes unnoticed.

To write unconsciously of this whole process is therefore to unconsciously endorse the status quo. By brute repetition and other means, ordinary language thus congeals the harmful views, hurtful categories and gross injustices of rank and process that are embedded in daily life.

Human Boundaries

My second language crime was to fetishize a plain-English writing style as a cure-all against government propaganda, corporate corruption, and all other forms of evil in the world.

In my college and early professional years, I read my copy of George Orwell's essay, ''Politics and the English Language,'' to little bits. Absorbing Orwell completely, I believed with passion that bold clear sentences map a simple reality that can be shared across all human boundaries.

But then in recent years I read George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and their book Metaphors We Live By. And I discovered the work of many other scientists, linguists, and political scientists who are making important  empirical discoveries today in the field of language and morals, such as Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Pinker, and Drew Westen.

As Plato and Aristotle did with rhetoric, showing how persuasive intent underlies all language, so these scholars have now done with metaphor, laying bare its fundamental role in language and morals. But they've exceeded the ancients by using science to demonstrate how language works at the level of brain structures and body chemistry, to underlie virtually all human action and language -- including the kind we inordinately prize as ''rational.''

These scientists have peeled back the surface of language to show the hidden engines underneath. They've linked brain structure to morality and language.

''Girly Man''

Specifically, their research has shown that powerful brain structures -- the specific neuronal linkages responsible for creating metaphors -- drive our reasoning process at an emotional level far beneath conscious reasoning.

The metaphors or ''frames'' generated by these neuronal linkages activate huge webs of meaning across the physical brain, which instantly align a human being with an entire worldview including passionate likes and dislikes, altruism and prejudice, blithe airs of apathy and do-or-die zeals.

To connect this to the newsroom, a reporter might, for example, insert the phrase ''girly man'' into a story, repeating what he heard a politician say in a big speech at a convention.

As he does so the journalist might say to himself, ''Say what you will but Arnold Schwarzenegger sure makes a great story. I've got a spot of color now in my piece, and they'll be talking tomorrow at the water cooler!''

And yet, with that one not-innocent sprinkling of pixels into his story, the reporter surrenders his moral autonomy to political speechwriters who know that just the right metaphor, uttered at just the right time, sways millions of voters in their direction. A strong metaphor -- miracle of miracles! -- even makes people vote against their own personal interests, time after time.

New Knowledge

If journalists aren't humbled by the knowledge that despite their best intentions they are used like this by their sources and spinners 24/7/365, I don't know if they ever could be humbled, or whether they even care.

The world today is bursting with new knowledge -- much of it the result of hard scientific research -- about the moral basis and uses of language.

When is journalism going to sit down and absorb this new knowledge and integrate it into the ethics and practices of the craft?

Copyright @ 2008 Doug McGill

Last Wednesday, I had planned to give the annual Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Instead, on the day of the lecture, Milwaukee got 20 inches of snow, the university shut down and I spent the day in my hotel coffee shop.

With the blessings of my hosts, I am publishing my talk here serially, in four short sections over the next two weeks. If you'd like to receive these in a newsletter format when they are published, click here.

And feel free to respond in the comment section below.

Peace,

Doug

THE TRUE PROMISE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM

The Burleigh Lecture on Media Ethics, Marquette University, Part 1

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin -- It was never easy being a journalist, but it's especially tough these days.

A journalist today not only must get the color of the man's hat right, then make an editor happy enough to publish a story, and then not get sued once it is.

Now a journalist must worry whether she will have a job next week, because the newspaper or magazine that employs her may be sold.

If you are a journalist in television news, chances are your company long ago was sold to a giant corporation that wants you to stop doing immigration pieces and do more instead about Britney's tragic breakdown, steamy trysts on luxury cruises, and exposes about ballerinas-turned-hookers.

It's a scary scenario, in journalism I mean.

At newspapers, especially, dramatically declining advertising and circulation revenues have caused the combined market value of U.S. newspapers to drop 42 percent since 2005. To prop up profit margins, newspaper owners across the country have laid off thousands of veteran reporters and editors.

It's time to renegotiate the journalist-citizen relationship.

But something interesting and hopeful is happening as mainstream journalists find themselves suddenly outside of newsrooms. Along with millions of other ordinary citizens, they find themselves reading and writing blogs, making podcasts, and experimenting in video and other online media.

These newly-solo journalists, of whom I'm one, are for the first time meeting lots of fellow citizens who are doing journalism on the Internet.

Also for the first time, lots of journalists are relating to people not as sources for their stories, but as fellow citizens with whom they can create journalism together. It's a time to renegotiate the relationship between journalist and citizen, and for both sides to learn a lot from each other.

Citizen journalism workshops so far have stressed the skills that journalists can teach ordinary citizens, such as reporting and writing techniques.

But citizens have much to teach professional journalists too, especially about ethics. Citizens are surprised at this, in my experience, but they shouldn't be.

Citizens can teach journalists about ethics.

Journalism in recent decades has suffered a severe crisis of professional ethics, that citizens can help to heal. In the big picture, in fact, the guidance that citizens can offer to journalism in this way far exceeds in importance all the skills and techniques that journalists could offer to citizens.

That's because journalistic skills amount to methods of verifying facts, plus a certain facility at writing in plain vernacular English. Neither of these skills lies far beyond the reach of anyone with a good high school education.

Whereas ethics is about the moral sense -- knowing right from wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, what's vital from what's distracting, and the ability to listen and to care about people different from ourselves.

For nearly a century, thanks to the ideal of ''objectivity,'' journalists have steadfastly refused to talk about ethics -- these real ethics -- in newsrooms.

Of course, journalism has ethics codes aplenty. But they nearly always cover merely procedural, ethically superficial topics like conflicts of interest, plagiarism, handling complaints, and who picks up the check at lunch.

Ethical schizophrenia gives journalists soul-sickness.

The ban on authentic moral talk in newsrooms has created a difficult, even painfully schizophrenic situation in newsrooms.

Because on the one hand, journalists are among the most civic-minded, and in that sense ethical, people one could imagine. Why else would someone choose a profession with such long hours and poor pay, if not for the chance to improve the world a little bit?

Yet thanks to ''objectivity,'' those same journalists are unable to openly discuss morals in the workplace. They are forced to conduct themselves at work in a manner similar to, say, environmentalists who work for lumber companies.

I have witnessed the destructive impact of this throughout my working life at The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and in other newsrooms. Over a period of decades, I have personally witnessed young journalists start their careers filled with idealism and within years hurt so badly in their souls that they suffer anxiety, depression, nausea and panic attacks every day at work.

If you don't think straight about morals, how can you
act in a morally positive and consistent manner?

They usually blame the hours, the pressure, and the competition.

I believe the suffering is caused mainly by the virus of objectivity, which instructs journalists to create positive moral outcomes by acting in a morally neutral manner. It's crazy, the conscience knows it and rebels.

My colleagues at The New York Times, Bloomberg and other newsrooms and I were liberals and conservatives, straight and gay, Catholics and Mormons and Buddhists and Unitarians. But the moment we entered the newsrooms, a curtain of neutrality descended around each of us. With the force of a strict gag order, we were never able to speak with each other about the moral and civic passions that truly inspired and guided our lives.

We could never bring moral thinking directly to bear on our stories.

The ethical scandals that have plagued journalism in recent decades is traceable to this schizophrenic situation. How could it be otherwise? If you can't speak at all about authentic morals -- much less speak straight about them -- how could you possibly act in a morally consistent manner?

Objectivity has caused even deeper long-term harm to the profession by attracting people motivated not by a civic sense but rather by commercial and personal ambition, mini-Murdochs and mini-Machiavellis of the news.

Citizens can help journalism restore an explicit,
realistic, and positive ethic of public service.

Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the idealistic wellsprings of the craft.

Because when we work simply as citizens, doing journalism as we would vote, or serve on a jury, power games diminish and the will to serve others arises.

That's why I'm excited about citizen journalism. The energy of wholesome moral intention has been lost for years in journalism. Citizens who never bought into ''objectivity'' in the first place can help us all to restore it.

My enthusiasm for citizen journalism sometimes earns me the contempt of fellow journalists. At one journalism conference recently, for example, I sat on the dais next to the managing editor of a major metropolitan newspaper.

After listening to me describe teaching journalism to ordinary citizens in Minneapolis, she opened her own remarks by icily saying: ''I represent the institutions of journalism that Doug McGill is trying to destroy.''

That remark encapsulates the conversation-stopping defensiveness, the out-of-touchness, and the morally superior attitude that infects much of today's journalism and is in large part responsible for its present woes.

Citizen journalists have ethical pitfalls to avoid, too.

Since when was journalism anything more than an act of citizenship?

Since when did individual journalists exercise skills more advanced than the use of native language, plus a basic moral sense, to share stories of the public world?

How could ordinary citizens who are trying to learn journalism's practices and ethics, in order to consume journalism more profitably and to use new communication technologies more responsibly, possibly represent an invading horde of destroyers?

If this is how institutional journalism thinks of its readers and viewers, no wonder it is losing its customers by the millions.

Not that citizen journalism is a panacea, far from it. Already, some worrying trends are obvious. The biggest one perhaps is the tendency to gloss over ethical discussions, just as mainstream journalism traditionally has done.

Seduced by the newest technological sublime, citizen journalists just like professional journalists often forego ethical talk. Classes in blogging, online editing, online marketing, reporting and writing are offered, but no one sets aside time to wrestle with the underlying problems and theory of the craft.

The very understandable urge to quickly prove oneself, plus of course to solve the world's problems as soon as possible, trumps ethics talk.

Are citizen journalists just learning how to be better special interest advocates?

There is a very real danger that if citizen journalists start their careers without sorting out the problem of objectivity, citizen journalism will end up precisely where mainstream journalism has done, in a deep ethics hole.

In addition, citizen journalism is showing a tendency to become a journalism of special interests, instead of a journalism of a raucous but peacefully conversing unified society. Most of the students in my student journalism classes in Minneapolis come to learn journalistic skills that will make them more effective advocates of a special interest, not more rounded as citizens.

Their causes are worthy -- protecting the rights of children, immigrants, the handicapped, and the elderly; AIDS awareness; global warming; election finance reform; peace and justice; and so on. But if they leave my classes only to write better press releases for their special interests, seeing their new skills as weapons rather than as conversation tools, little progress will be made.

Still, I'm hopeful. When I read web sites like The Twin Cities Daily Planet, The UpTake, Freshare, Global Voices, Ovi Magazine, and growing numbers of similar projects every month, I see plenty of citizens who aren't in the least confused by objectivity's contradictory dictates and claims.

Citizens can help revive the voice of the human conscience in journalism.

These citizen journalists are Somali teenagers describing their journeys to America; and elderly people devoting their retirements to caring for the environment; and Burmese monks resisting violent government oppression.

At their best, these citizens write an ideal journalism, one that is rational yet moral, fair yet crusading.

They revive the public voice of the human conscience, which the gag order of objectivity long ago tried to still.

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report

Lady Justice, Wickedness, and Hillary's Tears

ROCHESTER, MN -- As the New Year rolls in like an inexorable tide, I have watched the elections, done some reading and made a resolution as a journalist, a citizen, and a guy.

It's a resolution about, um, morality.

It's about how to determine what's right from what's wrong, wholesome from unwholesome, especially in the making and consuming of the media.

My resolution is about how to tell the difference between good and evil in the media, which flattens the bumpy richness of life into a single, thin, fluorescent or inky dimension.

I'm excited but nervous to be writing this.

Because on the one hand, I'm energized to be speaking openly about morality and journalism. That breaks an ancient taboo of my own profession, which is always an exciting day's work.

On the other hand, there are dangers to talking about morality in journalism, the high-walled kingdom of neutral "objectivity."

Robertson or Chopra?

It's easy for readers to spot that single word "morality," and immediately decide one has succumbed to rightwing scolds a la Pat Robertson, or to New Age fuzzyheads a la Deepak Chopra. (The latter being much the greater likelihood for me, Buddhist as I am.)

But it's just this pigeonholing of anyone who talks about morals that fuels my drive to find the roots of the problem. Because surely it is dangerous not just for the media but for society.

If the people who create the mass media and the millions of other who consume it, don't have a language to talk with each other about what's right and wrong, what's healthy and what's unhealthy to consume, what kind of a mass media and journalism are we going to have?

At the very least, by simple logic, we will have a confused mass media and journalism. And at worst we'll have a wicked one, chaos always being exploitable by the intelligent but depraved. 

Simple Question

At the library I found three trusted guides through these tricky waters -- "communitarian" philosophers who explain why topics like morals, character and virtue are so little discussed in modern society at large. Not just in journalism and the media, but everywhere.

My guides were Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote ''Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy;'' Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of ''Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;'' and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief but inspiring essay called ''Spiritual Thinking.''

All three of these writers ask vivid questions to kick-start moral thinking. One question they all ask in one form or another is:

How come Lady Justice wears a blindfold?

And hey, is that really such a good idea?

The Blindfold Theory

We trust that Lady Justice is compassionate and wise. She's a role model for us all.

So as we choose which paths to follow in the year ahead, or make any other ethical decision, should we put on blindfolds too?

Is willful blindness the best way to make ethical, wise choices? Is it smart to block from our consciousness all those telling little winks and tics that we constantly receive from the life around us and by which, in reality, we navigate our daily rounds?

Hillary Clinton just won the New Hampshire primary based on a microsecond of tearing up, plus a tiny subtle hitch in her voice that apparently persuaded a few thousand women to switch their votes to her at the last minute.

Lady Justice would have missed it all.

The blindfold theory holds that on the societal scale, the rational process of balancing costs and benefits works better than seeking wisdom from within one's supposedly subjective conscience and soul.

Does that reasoning pass the common sense test?

I've got a big pile of poker chips placed on this question, because as a journalist I've worn a mighty moral blindfold for 30 years. It goes by the name of ''objectivity,'' the idea that journalists serve the public best by writing about issues as neutral bystanders, rigorously detached from what they observe. Without taking sides, we journalists are supposed to gather facts and deliver them to the public to ''let the readers decide.''

Sandel, Peters, Taylor

I've wrestled with journalism's objectivity problem before. After a fair amount of soul-searching, a few years ago I finally was able to describe (as many others have before me) the ethical shortcuts and rationalizations that journalists make in objectivity's name.

But until I read my three philosopher-guides, I'd never before felt that I understood the true roots of the problem. So how could I ever have hoped to resolve it?

The three authors are Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who wrote ''Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics;'' Jonathan Durham Peters, a professor of media history at the University of Iowa and the author of ''Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition;'' and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote a brief essay called ''Spiritual Thinking.''

For all three writers, the mighty blindfold is called liberal political theory, which is not just a theory of course but the bedrock faith of modern western society. These authors especially deplore the strain of liberalism that has dominated in the past half-century, which they say has removed individuals as moral decision-makers from public affairs.

Depressed Newsrooms

''According to this liberalism,'' Sandel writes, ''government should be neutral as to conceptions of the good life. Government should not affirm, through its policies or laws, any particular conception of the good life; instead it should provide a neutral framework of rights within which people can choose their own values and ends.''

By defining individual moral action in society as a choice between ready-made options, which Sandel calls the ''procedural republic,'' instead of developing the character of individuals to make subtle, case-by-case decisions, Sandel says society loses in the end.

''A political agenda lacking substantive moral discourse is one symptom of the public philosophy of the procedural republic,'' he writes. It has also ''coincided with a growing sense of disempowerment. Despite the expansion of rights in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that they are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.''

That sounds like the depressed atmosphere of mainstream newsrooms today.

Disempowerment in newsrooms today takes many forms, all the way from mass layoffs at newspapers that are downsizing, to the frustration of reporters who are assigned to cover celebrity scandals while skipping important civic issues.

Meanwhile, there is neither any substantive moral discourse in newsrooms about these trends, nor any suitable framework to have one. (Only fired and refugee mainstream journalists on the Internet can try that!)

''Satanic'' Arguments

John Durham Peters' critique of liberalism is more radical than Sandel's, especially on the right to free speech and the lengths to which he believes the media exploit it.

''There is something satanic about many liberal arguments in favor of free expression,'' Peters writes. ''Defenders of free speech often like to plumb the depths of the underworld. They tread where angels do not dare and reemerge escorting scruffy, marginal, or outlaw figures, many of whom spend their time planting slaps in the face of the public.''

In a talk at McGill University last year, Peters placed a red laser dot on liberalism in plainer English: ''Liberalism undermines itself by pretending to be above the battle, by pretending to be neutral. Lots of liberals say it's only a set of procedures and rules. But I would suggest that liberalism is one of the players. It's not a referee. And that liberalism needs to recognize that it too has a vision. And that even in claiming neutrality it thereby forfeits a kind of neutrality, because by always trying to seek the higher ground it ends up pushing people out of an ethical position.''

Looking back, I have never seen more moral hypocrisy than in mainstream newsrooms, such as at The New York Times where I worked as a reporter from 1979 to 1989, and as a bureau chief for Bloomberg News in its Tokyo, London and Hong Kong newsrooms in the 1990s. Of course, I count myself as one of the hypocrites.

Absolutism Corrupts Absolutely?

On the one hand, reporters and editors in all these newsrooms were deeply committed to ferreting out the truth, and sometimes showed great courage in doing so. This behavior alone demonstrates journalists' deeply personal and moral involvement in society.

Yet at the same time, whenever moral questions arose upon the publication of our hard-won factual narratives, our first impulse was always to exempt ourselves from any further dialog by citing ''objectivity.''

Our job was simply to gather and put out the information we dug up, we told our miffed complainants, and that was the end of our involvement.

The accuracy of the facts that we published, and not any further discussion about the moral shadings raised by the timing or manner of their publication, was the highest moral principle we felt beholden too. ''You've got a problem with what we published, talk to our lawyers,'' we'd say to anyone who raised questions.

Free speech absolutism was the alpha and the omega of our moral thinking. That was expedient, but was it right?

Reflecting on my newsroom experience in the light of Sandel and Peters, I think that by insisting on such moral disengagement, we journalists hurt society in several ways.

Three Problems

First, we abdicate our leadership role in society as clear, honest, reliable communicators. We limit the valuable contributions that we could make to society as exemplary communicators, by clinging to a hypocrisy that is visible for all to see.

Second, we contribute to journalism's decline by degrading the public trust that is journalism's principal foundation.

Third, and worst of all, by our moral obtuseness we fail to create a public space that facilitates robust and open discussion about what constitutes the good life -- the best forms of government, the best values and models of human behavior.

A multicultural and global society especially needs such a free and open forum to progress peacefully. If journalism doesn't create one, what social institution will?

These questions apply to citizen journalists -- the millions of bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and other ordinary folks who are reporting the world around them on the Internet -- as much and even more so than to trained journalists.

Because like it or not the institutions of journalism, and with them the traditional journalistic values they once protected, are crumbling. That turns the ethical imperative for creating useful journalism over to the people who account for the vast majority of hours that actually are spent today in society looking around, and then recording and commenting on what's seen, the essential journalistic enterprise.

So what's the answer?

Neighbors and Strangers

My philosopher-guides guides offer three variations on a civic-minded theme.

Michael Sandel counsels a revival of republican public philosophy that stresses the formation of individual moral character, much along the lines that Thomas Jefferson endorsed in his agrarian vision of democracy.

John Durham Peters advocates drawing on religious traditions that are in sync with each other and with secular solidarity. ''One of the central principles of the law in Judaism is kindness to the stranger, and one of the central principles of Christianity is love of the neighbor,'' he says. ''In some way, [those] are more powerful foundations for thinking about society than liberalism if you want a society with both solidarity and freedom in it.''

Charles Taylor, in his brief but enlightening essay, advocates a communitarian project similar to Sandel's and Peters'. Yet he cautions that any future peaceful world will require a burdensome body of laws and rules to maintain order.

''We will in many ways be living lives under even greater discipline than today,'' Taylor says. ''More than ever we are going to need trail-blazers who will open or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation, friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.''

My Resolution

Personally, I doubt that any such trail-blazers will be wearing blindfolds.

My New Year's resolution is to work as a journalist, to act as a citizen, and to live as a human being without a blindfold.

Instead, I'll try to simply use my God-given head and heart and eyes.

What I've Learned Teaching Citizen Journalism

ROCHESTER, MN -- Three years ago, I started teaching basic journalism skills to citizens in community education classes in Minneapolis.

Since then I've taught about a hundred ordinary folks -- school teachers, government workers, not-for-profit types, retired people, students and many others -- the basics of journalistic story structure, ethics and practices.

I taught at the Resource Center of the Americas, a Latino cultural center in Minneapolis, until it closed last August, and now am teaching for the Minneapolis Public Schools Community Education department.

My students take the class for many reasons. Some want to do journalism on the Internet to cover a favorite issue such as health care, human rights, or immigration reform.

Some want to learn skills to use writing not-for-profit newsletters, corporate reports or press releases. And some are simply curious to discover how journalism works, because they've been consuming the news media for years without understanding it. 

New Views

The class meets once a week for three hours over six-weeks, writing and rewriting articles between classes, reading and commenting on each other's work during class. I invite working mainstream reporters and editors to many classes, to describe to citizens their daily jobs, their attitudes towards their work, and to answer whatever questions the students have. 

The class has changed my view of my role as a journalist, of journalism's role in a democracy, and of the promises and pitfalls of the many forms of citizen journalism that are a part of the news media today.

Here are the seven main lessons I've learned from my citizen-students, so far:

1.   Citizens are an untapped source of expertise and positive civic energy that journalists can help unlock. Every one of my citizen journalism students has had years of personal experience in some important civic issue. They are aching to share that knowledge but have been hampered by A) Their cynicism about journalists and journalism, B) A lack of reporting and writing skills, and C) An incipient sense, like a vague but possibly potent memory, of journalism's role as a foundation stone of democracy. The best possible teachers of these skills and attitudes of democracy are journalists. But journalists and their employers need to rethink their purpose and role in society for that to happen. We need to start thinking about journalists taking weeks, months and even years away from their newsroom jobs, to go into classrooms and auditoriums and public meeting halls to teach and to remind citizens -- and to remind themselves -- about how to read and write journalism critically and intelligently, and about journalism's critical role in a democracy. Projects involving journalists fanning out into society in teaching roles would  renew trust between journalists and citizens, and show the way towards new business models for journalism, too.

2.   There is no substitute for a strong, independent, institutional journalism. My students are experts in many fields -- mental health, immigration, aging, urban planning, human rights, animal rights, sports, local culture, recycling, water and air pollution, organic food, the legal system on Indian reservations, alternative medicine, and the Minnesota electoral system, to name just a few. But even under the rosiest scenario -- with citizens becoming skilled online journalists in all of these areas -- the result would be a journalism of special interests, and not of inclusive public interest. Most importantly, such a journalism would not constitute the strong counterweight to government and corporate power that only an organized and healthy professional journalism can provide.

3. Citizens can help journalists reconnect to the wellsprings of their craft. It happened to me. Like many journalists these days, I'm a refugee from mainstream newsrooms, where I worked hard and happily for many years. Until, one day, the relationship just didn't work any more. Something about too many assignments that served corporate and not civic interests. I haven't made much money teaching citizen journalism, but I've found citizens who care about journalism like they care about clean air and water. It's energizing.

4.   Journalists need to learn citizenship skills, as much as citizens need to learn journalism. Time and again, I have been shocked in my class to witness the gap that's grown up between ordinary citizens and journalists. Even highly-educated citizens tend to be ignorant of the simplest facts about how journalism is created. Many students are surprised to learn, for example, that every word in a newspaper is not fact-checked before it's published. On the other hand, journalists who visit my class, and I myself, sometimes display an apparently ingrained, patronizing aloofness to the students, especially when we're called on our aloofness. We journalists tend to be super-sensitive when we're the ones being asked questions. Ordinary citizens know that at least some doctors are relaxed, approachable people. But based on my experience these past three years, few citizens have learned that lesson about journalists.

5.   A good citizen journalism class, like a great newspaper, allows for all types of expression -- artistic, poetic, literary, photographic, musical, comical and fun. Because it's created by human beings, journalism is a diverse and highly personal form of expression. Only by fully embracing that does journalism offer the complete picture of society that it should. I don't tell students what stories to write, and they repay me by singing their hearts out in every possible way. One of my favorite stories in class was by a Guatemalan immigrant who described buying bottles of "crema" -- a fermented sweet-and-sour concoction that tastes wonderful on strawberries -- whenever she needed to connect with home. (She brought actual crema and strawberries to class after we read her story and begged for a sample.) Another student wrote about a scrawny feline named Buffer, the pet cat in a home of human castaways, in a way that put the problem of homelessness in a tragicomic new light.

6.   Citizens create vital community consciousness through the discipline of writing journalistically. A magical thing happens in the class, every time. Over six weeks, students in the class write one story (or rewrite one) between classes, then share it with the entire class for feedback. This creates a bond of solidarity among the students. A sense of gratitude builds towards each person in class who shares their personal insights and experiences, often at some risk to personal pride. The insistence on telling the absolute truth that journalism requires, often forces students to reveal personal knowledge beyond what they had ever dared to publicly share. One of my students, a retired business consultant, wrote an article decribing his inner struggle at becoming a peace activist, while his son was serving in the Army in Iraq. His story created a sense of solidarity in the room that was mystically strong. This is perhaps a microcosm of how journalism could ideally work in society, creating community day by day. "My view of journalism has changed," one student emailed me after the course. "At its best, it serves like an amazing expansion of our personal experience, bringing truth into our consciousness." Bingo.

7.   I'm the one who needs to change. I began as a journalist in the heyday of Woodward-and-Bernstein in newspapers, and of John McPhee in magazines. So I often get nostalgic for spacious, context-rich narratives when I read the new citizen journalism appearing on the Net. "Giant Puffball Found in Clifton," read a recent headline from the hyperlocal website, Baristanet. Where is the "Why should I care?" paragraph in the story? Not to mention readers' calorie-free comments like one after the mushroom story: "Shrooms rule." When I settle down, though, I realize the error of my conservative reactions. Change is welcome, adapting smartly is the challenge, and Baristanet itself is a fantastic model. For mixed among its whimsical squibs on cute witches and record-shattering dosas are items reporting on urban trends, crimes, public protests, and so on. Baristanet is doing just what journalism should do. It reports on its community with ethical attention, it has fun, and it follows in word and spirit democracy's ultimate dictum: Citizens rule.

Journalism: Exploring the Moral Depths

In the fall of 2006, I participated in an academic colloquium on journalism whose other participants, mostly academics and scholars, took it as a given that journalism stands within a 2,500-year-old moral tradition that starts with Plato and continues through the world's great religions (the Judeo-Christian ones anyway), and philosophical traditions from the Enlightenment to the present.

That approach honors a profession that, strangely, hardly ever looks at itself that way. In more than 20 years spent as a reporter, editor, and bureau chief in newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad, I don't recall having had even a single conversation about the morality of journalism.

This made me curious to explore why, and the following blog posts are the result:

1. Why is Journalism Morally Shallow?

2. What is Journalism?

3. Why Do Journalists Sometimes Strut Like Experts?

4. Is Jon Stewart a Journalist?

5. A Journalist Chats with a Professor

6. ADD & Aspergers

7. Healing Love

8. Thinking About Journalism as Teaching

9. Thinking About Language as Spiritual Food

10. A Plea to the White House Press Corps

11. Journalism, the Individual Conscience, and Social Aims

12. Why Journalists Should Meditate

13. A Journalism of Morally Skillful Speech

Why is Journalism Morally Shallow?

A recent three-day colloquium on journalism ethics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul was entitled: "Who is a Journalist?" As the various academics and journalists in attendance debated this question, I found myself, a practicing journalist of 30 years, marvelling at a certain great divide in the  assumptions held by these two groups -- scholars of journalism ethics on one side, journalists on the other. The interesting thing was, the journalism scholars viewed the practice of journalism as a moral act, very similar to religion or philosophy or to writing serious literature.

To the journalists, meanwhile, such an outlook was virtually shocking. They  were trained to see the world in morally neutral terms, as a tenet of their profession.

 

Over a period of three days, I worked with professors who had thought and written deeply on issues ranging from whether journalism could be re-imagined as a caring profession, with similarities to professions like nursing or social work; to the moral stance of journalists who report stories of great consequence (e.g., genocides) that nevertheless are ignored by the mainstream media; to the moral puzzles involved in journalists reporting on "virtual" events in cyberspace as opposed to "real" ones in the real world.

Truly, these are really rich and deep moral questions that intimately involve journalism, which keeps you might say mankind's daily diary of social breakdown and disease. And yet, my exposure to these explorers of journalism's moral and ethical depths was matched by a simultaneous realization, that at least in my experience, working journalists have not had the slightest exposure to these questions. Nor, generally speaking, do journalists generally show the slightest interest in them. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is almost a reflex reaction by journalists against academics, not necessarily personally, but rather to the theories that academics build and propose. Journalists make a point of hating theories and glamorizing facts. It's a really unfortunate trait that weakens the profession.

In ten years as a reporter at The New York Times, and five as a bureau chief at Bloomberg News, I don't recall a single newsroom conversation or meeting I ever attended that was called for the purpose of making a careful application of moral principles to a specific story.

Sure, we journalists have ethics codes, and we make quick reference to one or another item on the list when a problematic story comes up. But usually, that's the extent of the process -- a cursory scan of a very small list, then choosing one item from the list to wield thereafter not as a light to guide deeper moral inquiry, but rather as a shield against the complaints and fiery emails and threats of lawsuit that may follow publication.

Nearly always, the so-called ethical discussion is limited to the small circle of people who are directly involved in the story -- e.g., those quoted or interviewed as sources for the article, the reporter, and those whose work or reputations might be affected by the story. The wider ripples of journalistic work into society at large or on constitutive groups such as, say, children or women or immigrants, are considered beyond the practical, or indeed the properly moral, ambit of a journalist's daily work.

Morality in newsrooms is a very practical business, tailored to maintain deadlines and reputations and the rolling of the presses day and night. It's a business at the end of the day, and ethics must serve the business as everything in a business must. As one of the colloquium's journalism scholars with summed it up, with a casualness suggesting he was uttering a cliche in his circles: ''Ethics codes are post-hoc morality.'' Bingo.

Is a blogger a journalist? Is John Stewart or Stephen Colbert a journalist? How about the neighbor lady who attends every meeting of the local school board and then sends detailed reports of those meetings to all her friends? Or the retired airline stewardess (true story) who took up Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a special interest and now writes a blog that even experts consider authoritative?

What is Journalism?

Fast-forwarding to the end of the conference, when something like a consensus view emerged, most of colloquium participants had either embraced, or appeared to be drifting, towards the conclusion that ''Who is a Journalist?'' is really not the most useful or relevant question. The more useful question nearly always, we seemed to agree, is ''What is journalism?''

The latter question keeps attention focused on the usefulness of a text, as opposed to the credibility of a person. And that focus in itself seems a paragon of usefulness because, as we all know, people are famously fickle and ever-changing in their views.

More to the point, whether they are presidents or parents or friends, sometimes people are credible and sometimes they are not. Even Moms tell stretchers from time to time, though they'll never tell you when they do.

Then again, people are basically unknowable -- especially ones you haven't met before, who make up 99.9% of the people who write for the world's newest and already most popular publishing format for news, the Internet. So whom can you trust? Especially in a world where, thanks to the Internet, nearly anybody can be a journalist at any time, asking ''who is a journalist'' sets the bar far too high above the limit of possible, practical knowing.

Whereas a simple journalistic text, for all its problems as a container of possibly social useful meaning, is much easier to assess. The facts are all there, the quotations are all there, the assertions are all there. Each of these can be placed under a microscope of close and sustained attention, plumbed for shades of meanings and associations,  compared to other texts, and above all tested by the reader against reality.

Seen in this way, from the standpoint of the possible social utility of a journalistic story, asking ''what is journalism'' instead of ''who is a journalist'' emerged as much the superior question to ask.

The colloquium participants offered many definitions of journalism over our three days together, but nearly all of them touched on the notion of writing for public distribution about public issues, with the intention to help or heal. Working from such a definition, determining whether a given text is journalism or not is quite straightforward: Is it about a public issue? Is it written for public distribution? Is the writer's intention to help or heal?

Getting an answer to these questions, moreover, is no mere matter of purely philosophical or abstract import, because an answer in the affirmative means that a reader is holding a piece of writing that contains some possibly useful information or ideas for society which is, furthermore, worthy of some level of trust.

Exactly how much trust to accord to a given text is a second-level question, drawing in other considerations, that lead to a second-level answer: is a given text good journalism, or mediocre journalism, or bad?

Indeed it became clear to many of us, only a day or so into the three-day colloquium, that the question ''Who is a journalist?'' was a question of  the highest abstract order, unlikely ever to yield much practical result. Because it is like asking, as some philosophers do, ''What is a coffee cup?'' or ''What is an automobile?''

Well, who the heck knows? If you take the engine out of a car, is it still a car? Now take away the doors. Still a car? Now the windshield, bumpers, dashboard, seats, chassis and wheels. Have we still got a car here?

But at this point of course the absurdity of continuing such a line of questioning, at least from a practical standpoint, becomes clear. We could have spent three days peering around every corner in some Platonic heaven, looking for a ''pure'' journalist in a trench coat and fedora.

But where would that get us, back here on earth?

Instead, we quickly saw the advantages of surfing to a web site, choosing an article, and asking: i's this journalism?''