Oh, brother.
I mean, props to Ben Affleck. It's a good article and he's using his celebrity to focus attention on a big problem. But as a symbol of what's happening in journalism today, this is just calamitous.
Sean Penn (and props to you for your Iraq trips), what hath you wrought?
Now the last sentence — describing with magical fluency and eerie exactitude what it is like for a human being to pass from life to death — will never be written.
Oh, what a powerful, physical, uplifting sense of relief.
I just bookmarked Whitehouse.gov. I'm thinking that what I get from the website might actually be interesting, relevant, useful and true. That's the first time I've even thought to visit the White House web site, much less decide to read it regularly. Amazing.
I've always been inspired by the idea of journalism as offering a polished mirror to society.
But if society is all messed up, what good does a mirror do? Where is the evidence that if people see that society is messed up, they will fix it?
I've always been inspired by the idea that journalism facilitates democratic conversation.
But if the conversation is harsh and fractious and divisive, isn't it more likely that journalism is going to fuel more of that kind of conversation, instead of setting a new tone?
Where will the impetus come for setting new standards for useful, tempered, civil conversation?
Then I see Obama today delivering his beautiful inaugural speech and I think: "This is where the impetus comes from. One guy doing it right."
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
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 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.
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