Posts tagged ethics
Spongebob Learns a Lesson in Journalism Ethics
Well this might be the best episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever. You can watch the whole thing here.
If you don’t, here’s the spoiler version:
Mr. Krabs starts his own newspaper, The Krabby Kronicle, and makes Spongebob a reporter. But Mr. Krabs wants some embellishment in the stories. He says:
SpongeBob, what’s the meaning of this? ‘LOCAL RESIDENT WATCHES POLE’? No one’s going to pay to read this malarky. When you write these stories, you’ve got to use a little imagination, boy. Maybe instead of “Man Watches Pole,” you could say something like, “Man Marries Pole.” Then you could alter the photo a little to fit the headline…
After which Spongebob’s readers get angry at his yellow journalism and he ends up teaching his publisher a lesson.
Image: Screenshot from the episode.
H/T: Romenesko for the find.
Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.
A new entry in The New York Times’ stylebook on “illegal immigrant”.
On Tuesday afternoon, a group of advocates against the use of the term “illegal immigrant” gathered outside The New York Times building in Times Square to deliver a petition of protest. Organizers said the petition, which asked the paper to stop using the phrase contained more than 70,000 signatures collected online.
And here is the new entry, (by way of Poynter, if you’re looking for context):
illegal immigrant may be used to describe someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authorization. But be aware that in the debate over immigration, some people view it as loaded or offensive. Without taking sides or resorting to euphemism, consider alternatives when appropriate to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions: who crossed the border illegally; who overstayed a visa; who is not authorized to work in this country.
Unauthorized is also an acceptable description, though it has a bureaucratic tone. Undocumented is the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, but it has a flavor of euphemism and should be used with caution outside quotations. Illegal immigration, because it describes the issue rather than an individual, is less likely thanillegal immigrant to be seen as troubling.
Take particular care in describing people whose immigration status is complex or subject to change – for example, young people brought to this country as children, many of whom are eligible for temporary reprieves from deportation under federal policies adopted in 2012.
Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.
When the Government Comes Knocking, Who Has Your Back?
Hat tip to Josh Stearns for making us aware of this 2012 report.
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what happens when the government demands that these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? Will it tell you that the government is looking for your data so that you can take steps to protect yourself?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of 18 major Internet companies — including email providers, ISPs, cloud storage providers, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. We looked at their terms of service, privacy policies, and published law enforcement guides, if any. We also examined their track record of fighting for user privacy in the courts and whether they’re members of the Digital Due Process coalition, which works to improve outdated communications law. Finally, we contacted each of the companies with our conclusions and gave them an opportunity to respond and provide us evidence of improved policies and practices. These categories are not the only ways that a company can stand up for users, of course, but they are important and publicly verifiable.
While some Internet companies have stepped up for users in particular situations, it’s time for all companies that hold private user data to make public commitments to defend their users against government overreach. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about what data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy when it is possible to do so.
Read through for the report’s findings.
Still unsure of “phoneography” having a place in the professional sphere? On March 31, 2013, The New York Times used an Instagram shot for the front page cover story.
Granted, it was a professional photographer who took the photo, but it’s quite a statement nonetheless. Perhaps you really should sign up for those Photojojo University Phoneography 101 classes…
Related: From the FJP archives, Photojournalism vs. Instagram.
UPDATE: Another interesting aspect about the New York Times’ use of this photo is that it isn’t from a recent shoot. Instead, it’s from last year. Nick Laham, the photographer, is based in Brooklyn. His personal site is here.
And Now a Few Notes on Plagiarism
Over at Poynter, Roy Peter Clark argues that “serious acts of literary theft have been mixed up with trivial ones. Carelessness has been mislabeled as corruption. Clear norms of personal morality and professional ethics have been confused with standards and practices.”
He’s writing, in part, against the backdrop of what Craig Silverman calls journalism’s Summer of Sin, which, in 2012 saw the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Boston Globe, Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer among many others getting caught for plagiarizing.
Clark though thinks we’re oftentimes too quick to throw the P-word around, and doing so in many instances is like “shooting a fly with a bazooka”:
Too scrupulous an ethic on plagiarism will lead, I fear, to witch hunts. Plagiarism — along with its cousin fabrication — should be policed. The punishments for wrongdoers should be harsh. But the word plagiarism should be confined to clear-cut cases of literary and journalistic fraud.
So here are ten practices Clark believes are not plagiarism. Be sure to read through for his explanations of each:
- The so-called act of “self-plagiarism” is not plagiarism.
- So called “patch writing” — as long as it credits sources — is not plagiarism.
- Inadequate paraphrasing of a credited source is not plagiarism.
- Use of a clever or apt phrase — up to the level of the sentence — is not plagiarism as long as you thought of it independently, even if you find that others have used it before.
- Literary allusions — even a mosaic of esoteric ones — are not plagiarism.
- Boilerplate descriptions of news, history, or background are not plagiarism.
- Ghost writing is not plagiarism.
- Writing for genres — such as the legal brief or the sermon — in which there is a long tradition of borrowing without attribution is not plagiarism.
- Copying from other writers in what are considered collaborative ventures –newsrooms, wire services, press releases, textbook authorship — is not plagiarism.
- Copying from or borrowing the general ideas and issues that are emerging as part of the zeitgeist is not plagiarism.
Yes, he says, there are ethical boundaries in the above, but they should be seen and treated as such, and not labelled with a Scarlet P.
Roy Peter Clark, Poynter. Why we should stop criminalizing practices that are confused with plagiarism.
And, yes, I structured this to push Clark’s point. — Michael
A World Without Leaks
Via Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor, New York Times.
Imagine if American citizens never learned about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Imagine not knowing about the brutal treatment of terror suspects at United States government “black sites.” Or about the drone program that is expanding under President Obama, or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
This is a world without leaks.
And a world without leaks — the secret government information slipped to the press — may be the direction we’re headed in. Since 9/11, leakers and whistle-blowers have become an increasingly endangered species. Some, like the former C.I.A. official John Kiriakou, have gone to jail. Another, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is charged with “aiding the enemy” for the masses of classified information he gave to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. He could face life in prison…
…Declan Walsh, a reporter who wrote many WikiLeaks-based stories for The Guardian before coming to The Times, calls leaks “the unfiltered lifeblood of investigative journalism.” He wrote in an e-mail from his post in Pakistan: “They may come from difficult, even compromised sources, be ridden with impurities and require careful handling to produce an accurate story. None of that reduces their importance to journalism.”…
…Whatever one’s view, one fact is clear: Leakers are being prosecuted and punished like never before. Consider that the federal Espionage Act, passed in 1917, was used only three times in its first 92 years to prosecute government officials for press leaks. But the Obama administration, in the president’s first term alone, used it six times to go after leakers. Now some of them have gone to jail.
The crackdown sends a loud message. Scott Shane, who covers national security for The Times, says that message is being heard — and heeded.
“There’s definitely a chilling effect,” he told me. “Government officials who might otherwise discuss sensitive topics will refer to these cases in rebuffing a request for background information.”
Margaret Sullivan, New York Times. The Danger of Suppressing Leaks.
On the Dilemma of Student Journalism
Jonathan Peters and Frank Lomonte in The Atlantic’s College Journalists Need Free Speech More Than Ever:
This is not your father’s journalism industry.
NBC News has a Storify page, the New York Times has a Tumblr, and PBS has a Pinterest board. The Associated Press has built a partnership with dozens of news companies to collect royalties from aggregators. The Wall Street Journal has produced original videos for YouTube, and the people formerly known as the audience can submit photos to CNN through its iPhone app.
The Problem
In short, the two argue that today’s college journalists are being asked to fulfill community needs for professional news, but are not provided with the legal assurances of safety that professionals are afforded.
For years, they explain (and applaud), there has been a growing consensus that journalism programs ought to become something like teaching hospitals for news production:
* In a 2010 report on sustaining democracy in the digital age, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy concluded that colleges and universities needed to enhance their roles as “hubs of journalistic activity.”
* In a 2011 report on twenty-first century journalism, the New America Foundation challenged journalism programs to become “anchor institutions involved in the production of community-relevant news.”
* In a 2011 report on the changing media landscape, the FCC Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities recommended that foundations fund “journalism-school residencies” for recent grads to manage “efforts to produce significant journalism for the community, using journalism school students.”
* In a 2012 letter to university presidents, leaders of six of the nation’s largest foundations argued that journalism programs must “recreate themselves if they are to succeed in playing their vital roles as news creators” and that “universities must become forceful partners in revitalizing an industry at the very core of democracy.”
But they worry about the impacts of such legislation as Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, a 25-year-old Supreme Court decision that has been extended to college settings by four federal courts of appeals covering 16 states. It states, in short, that educators may regulate school-sponsored speech “so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” An open invitation to limit free speech.
The Alternative
Peters and Lomonte make two suggestions:
- At the college level, courts should adopt the standard established by the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which holds that student speech cannot be punished or restrained unless “students’ activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”
- States can create extra speech protections (following the lead of California, Illinois, and Oregon) by enacting statutes to protect college journalists and their advisors.
Read the full piece here.
FJP: This is a discussion I’ve had both in college, when I was editor of our campus news magazine, and in J-school. I’ve seen undergraduate students repeatedly hesitate to produce hard-hitting pieces that criticize their university because they can’t rely on their work for the school publication to remain uncensored by the school administration. In J-school—and I’m lucky enough to attend the big C, which has the resources to protect its students in certain cases—legal protection is certainly not available in the same way it is at many news organizations. Yet in both places, I’ve witnessed students repeatedly called upon to produce professional work and serve well-reported, fact-checked news to their local communities.
What worries me the most, however, is a potential cultural byproduct of these limitations: I worry about the impact these constraints have on the development of a student’s ethical framework and confidence as a reporter during his or her most formative years as a young journalist. How many potentially brilliant investigative journalists are we discouraging by limiting their opportunity to freely practice at the university level? Happy to see The Alantic cover this, and happy to see California, Illinois and Oregon’s statutes.—Jihii
How the Bradley Manning Case Endangers Journalism
Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler begins a recent New Republic article like so:
After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma’am.”
This last line, the simple, “Yes, Ma’am,” is important.
It’s not that Manning leaked to WikiLeaks the government is saying. It’s that he leaked at all. More specifically, in the government’s view, the act of leaking is “aiding the enemy,” and it is those charges — a capital offense, although the prosecution says they will not seek the death penalty — that it looks like they are going to pursue.
As GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram points out:
[I]f Manning is found guilty of “aiding the enemy” for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks, it could change the nature of both journalism and free speech forever.
Why? Because as Benkler points out, the charge for which Manning is being court-martialed could just as easily be applied to someone who leaks similar documents to virtually any media outlet, including the New York Times or the Washington Post. In other words, if the U.S. government has seen fit to go after Manning and WikiLeaks, what is to stop them from pursuing anyone who leaks documents, and any media entity that publishes them?
And, as Benkler, who’s an expert witness on the case, further explains:
[T]hat “Yes Ma’am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too…
…The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.
Chilling, indeed. As Ingram sums up:
Benkler’s warning shouldn’t be taken lightly: if Manning is guilty of aiding the enemy for simply leaking documents, then anyone who communicates with a newspaper could be guilty of something similar. And if the leaker is guilty, then the publisher could be as well — and that could cause a chilling effect on the media that would change the nature of public journalism forever.
Yochai Benkler, The New Republic. The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case.
Mathew Ingram, paidContent. If Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks are guilty, then so is the New York Times.
Journalism ethics is nothing more than a measure of the scurrilousness your brand will bear. That’s it. Ethics has nothing to do with the truth of things, only with the proper etiquette for obtaining it, so as to piss off the fewest number of people possible.
Please Stop Tweeting, Immediately
If you’re currently on Twitter, and if you’re anywhere near a stone’s throw from the #dorner tag you’re reading about a shootout between police and Christopher Dorner, getting links to police scanner audio feeds and video feed links to helicopter footage.
All of which adds to a confusion of facts for all involved.
The San Bernadino police are asking people to stop with the live tweeting. Meantime, the FAA has implemented flight restrictions around Big Bear, where the shootout is taking place, according to Southern California’s ABC7.
By an Employee of the New York Times in Damascus Syria and Anne Barnard
Sunday Times to Freelancers: We Don't Want Your Syria Stories
England’s Sunday Times is no longer accepting freelancers’ work from Syria, saying that to do so puts reporters at risk.
Via the Press Gazette:
After submitting pictures from Aleppo this week [freelance photographer] Rick Findler was told by the foreign desk that “it looks like you have done some exceptional work” but “we have a policy of not taking copy from Syria as we believe the dangers of operating there are too great”.
Findler, 28, has been published before in The Sunday Times and has been to Iraq, twice, Libya and this is his third trip to Syria.
He said: “Surely it is that photographer’s decision to choose whether or not they take the risks.
“I thought part of photography was the fact that some people in this world do take exceptional risks to show the rest of the world what is happening.
“I just don’t know what else to do any more. I really feel disheartened and extremely let down.”
“This is not a financial decision. It is a moral one,” Graeme Paterson, the Sunday Times policy deputy foreign editor, told the Press Gazette, when asked to explain the decision. He added that the paper has staff reporters in the region.
“In the light of what happened to Marie Colvin we have decided we do not want to commission any journalists to cover the situation in Syria.
“And we take the same view regarding freelancers speccing in material. Even if they have returned home safely.
“This is because it could be seen as encouragement go out and take unnecessary risks in the future.
“The situation out there is incredibly risky. And we do not want to see any more bloodshed. There has been far too much already.”
Colvin, an American war correspondent working for the Sunday Times, and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed last February in Homs by rockets fired by the Syrian government.
How to Cover Rape Responsibly
In light of the recent coverage of rapes in India, Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia J-School, recently wrote a blog post for Women Under Siege on covering rape responsibly. Start with some background from Poynter on why journalists are covering rape differently in the US and India.
Professor Benedict sheds fascinating light on the issue:
In short, when we cover rape in the Sudan, Rwanda, the Balkans, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and now in India, we look at why the men do it. We write about the beliefs of child soldiers that raping a virgin will protect them from AIDS, or about the way men are trained to see women as booty in war. We discuss rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And lately, concerning India, we’ve been running stories about the traditionally subservient role of women, how the economy is liberating them, and the subsequent violent reaction of men.
But as soon as we look at rape among our own, whether civilian or military, this perspective is entirely neglected. Instead, we ask questions about the victim: what she was doing, her past, how she was behaving, her relationship to the assailant, whether she’d been drinking, etc., etc. And we cover rape as a psychological aberration, never asking how and where men learn to rape, never seeing it as symptomatic of something in our culture. Thus we entirely neglect to look at why this crime continues to rise as other crimes drop, why one in six women is raped in her lifetime, why one in three women is sexually assaulted in the military, and why no woman in America walks free of the fear of sexual predation and violence.
Keep reading for the hopeful part, and the questions she would like to see answered instead.
Image: via Women Under Siege, word cloud generated from headlines calling what happened in the Air Force; Steubenville, Ohio; and at the Horace Mann School and Penn State University “sex scandals.”
Researching Journalism, Ethics and Technology
We received a question some time ago from theinsightfulmouse which went like this:
I am planning an undergraduate thesis on the effects of technology on journalism ethics and looking to narrow my topic. Do you all have any ideas or suggestions of interesting, complex issues to research relating to journalism, ethics and technology?
Well, insightful mouse, there is a universe of interesting questions in the realm of journalism ethics, especially regarding online journalism. We’ll offer you some starting points for research rather than fleshed out ideas, because those will very much depend on your personal interests and investments.
You might like to search our Tumblr archive for ethics posts. We’ve written, for example, about the ethics of news vs. reviews, privacy on social media, linking, curation, and Instagram, all of which are debates that have since developed and could use more digging. Also see our transparency tag, which is something that you can deep dive into for a number of questions. Other great places to explore for ideas are the Public Editor’s Journal over at the NY Times, and Poynter’s Everyday Ethics.
Very useful (and fun, if you geek out over this stuff like me) is reading the ethics guidelines of various news organizations (here is a great list), many of which address online journalism. NPR has a great ethics handbook in which the visual journalism section deals with issues of digital attribution and manipulation (not necessarily the most compelling research topic, but useful to bookmark if you’re a journalist). Finally, and arguably the mecca of these questions, can be found in this discussion that Poynter hosted on journalism ethics in the digital age, on which a book is also in the works—I wrote a reaction here. The people involved are also key people you might want to reach out to help focus your ideas.
You did ask this question some time ago, so if you’ve already narrowed down a topic, do share it with us! —Jihii
Have a question for us? Ask.
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