What is journalism?
The obligatory definition of the topic at hand is required before continuing. The dictionary says journalism is “the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast”. The lack of specificity of that definition is exactly why it requires its own subheading. Am I, a casual blogger, a “journalist”? Are the New York Times columnists “journalists”? What about the “gossip writers” of the disbanded Gawker “journalists”?
My position is that they need not be compared. They function in fundamentally different ways, despite the similar appearing outcome, a piece of written prose. Journalism reports news stories, things that are new, previously undiscovered, unknown or just uncovered. It’s about presenting facts in an accurate and independent fashion. In blogging the lines are blurred because anyone can start writing and gain readers. In order to become a journalist you must go to journalism school, prove you’re capable of finding and checking the facts of a story and proving you can write articulately and cogently. There are no such barriers to entry for blogging. Write something and post it online. Boom. You’re a blogger. Barriers to entry, while a difference, isn’t the primary difference. Bloggers present information, they don’t discover it. That doesn’t mean blogging is any lesser than journalism. Just as there are journalists that seem to consistently reveal government fraud, there are blogs that consistently present facts in a unique and compelling way.
Tl;dr: Journalists present new factual information, often discovered through a lot of hard work. Bloggers present their thoughts on that information. There are good and bad journalists (and outlets). There are good and bad bloggers. A data science analogy would be: journalists collect the raw data and do some analysis, bloggers do the visualisation and interpretation of that data.
Why is a free and independent press important?
A free and independent press is the bedrock of a democracy. Without it, authoritarian rule is too easy. Knowledge is power and the press is knowledge. The media is and always has been one of the vital assets to an authoritarian regime. With the media on your side, you can control what people think, or perhaps more importantly, what they don’t think.
Religion succeeded for as long as it did not because they were able to get the ideas of God out to the people, but because no other ideas or explanations for the phenomena explained by a god existed, thus it became doubtlessly accepted. Now that science has disproven all of the physical claims made the bible and other theistic documents, religious figures are constantly lobbying to stop the flow of information. For example some religious crackpots don’t believe Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection should be taught in school’s. Instead they think students should be indoctrinated into the creationist worldview. Imagine if it were the other way around, having censorship of religion. The uproar would be very amusing.
The classical model of economics posits that everyone participating in the economy is a rational agent. Thus too, is the assumption of politics. If everyone is presented with facts about their nation’s economic status, growth and political candidates then everyone can make the most rational decision they can. Hence the necessity of a free press, tasked to present truth, wherever it may appear. In the USA this was seen as so important protecting freedom of speech and freedom of the press became inscribed on the First Amendment.
If freedom of the press is paramount, what happens when it’s challenged?
Orange
Journalism is under attack. Reports are discredited by a single swish of the “fake news” wand. Then the media shoots back “no you’re lying” and then it ends up being a popularity contest, not a truth contest. That’s how Trump won the presidency (among other things of course).
The terrible thing is, it seems that Trump and his supporters are occasionally right (well always right). The “Pigs, slobs and dogs” quote that people use to label Trump as a misogynist was only ever directed at Rosie O’Donnell.” Unfortunately for Trump supporters, he did also say “grab them by the pussy”. I’m sorry, but you can’t dismiss this as “locker room talk”.
While I could go on and on looking for ways the left and the right have lied, and continue to lie, about each other, this is not what this post is about. The reason I’m writing this post is not to bash Trump and the “alt right” or the “regressive left”, but to talk about where journalism itself is heading in this era. Trump eventually got what he wanted from the press, that would call him out on his lies. Trump called them liars and eventually they had to try to compete with his sensationalism and extrapolate some of his comments for attractive headlines of their own. A bottom of the moral barrel attempt to compete with a twitter-popular president. While the motives of the media may have been to capture the attention of the public, drawing it to what is really true, it seems the means do not justify the end here, for the very value in good journalism is having certainty over the truth (to a high degree anyway) of what is reported and reporting it in an impartial manner.
Trump’s smear campaign against “mainstream media” was destructive. Now his voters and likely many of his opponents congregate into smaller, more concentrated, confirmatory groups. Out of the debris of mainstream media has spawned a new generation of echo chambers on both the left and the right. The reason the left and right seem so distant is because they not only disagree on matters of opinion, but on matters of fact. It’s the age of “post-truth” I hear people say. No. It’s the age of “anti-truth”. “Post-truth” connotes some sort of spiritual epiphany that truth no longer matters. It does, and hence I shall call it the “anti-truth” era, a more negative sounding, fear-inducing term.
Trump supporters will continue to tell you that Trump can’t be anti-truth because “he says what he means and means what he says”. Haha. He changes what he means every 20 seconds. What use is that? It’s of no help to the journalists who wish to report on Trump because he can and will change his opinion like it’s nothing. However, you should be willing to change your opinion. But, when the public is meant to vote for the realisation of your opinions, you have newfound responsibility to ensure your opinion is as factually supported as possible before bringing it to the public. The public needs a consistent opinion to make decisions, in order for democracy to function properly.
Trump does not make journalists’ jobs easy. Journalists did sign up for an easy job either. Always reporting the facts is the surest way to avoid moral corruption and ensuring you give society the best chance to improve. Even if people ignore the facts, it can only be for a matter of time. One day they will see an apple fall from a tree and hit the ground, because gravity does exist.
Teal
Coincidentally, or, perhaps not, a public advocate of Trump’s is Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. Thiel has had his own conflict with the media. One of today’s big debates is where the line should be drawn between privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of enterprise. Should facebook be allowed to use our data to manipulate us into buying things since we willingly gave it up? With respect to journalism though, it’s really a a call between privacy and freedom of speech, rather than enterprise.
http://gawker.com/gawker-was-murdered-by-gaslight-1785456581
Nobody Speak: Trials of a free press. Is a documentary about how Gawker went bankrupt.
A quick summary: A sex tape of Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) was released by Gawker media. Hogan didn’t like it, so he sued gawker.com for invasion of privacy. The trial went on and on with Bollea’s lawyers using all the tricks in the book to extend the trial length so that any insurance Gawker had would be used up.
Bollea was suing Gawker Media for $100 million in damages. Gawker argued it’s newsworthy and that it couldn’t be invasion of privacy anyway because Bollea would talk about his sex life in public. Bollea argued that it was only Hogan (the character) talking about Hogan’s sex life. Bollea’s sex life is separate and private. In the end Bollea won a $140 million suit. Gawker no longer exists. Oh, and to tie it back to the colour of this section, Hogan’s legal team was funded by billionaire Peter Thiel (to the tune of about $10 million).
Gawker was seen by some as a bully, reporting nothing more than gossip made to make people look bad based on information discovered about their private lives. To others Gawker was the outlet not afraid to say what needed to be said in the age of political correctness. If it’s the latter, than there is no debate that Thiel’s actions undermined democracy. However, it’s not the latter; at least not definitively.
The disagreement is first about what constitutes “news”. According to mediacollege.com there are 3 things that are considered before calling something “newsworthy”.
- Timing = “news”, unsurprisingly comes from “new”. Recent news is always more sought after than old news.
- Significance = how many people does it effect? How big is the effect on each person?
- Proximity = how close is the news? The closer the news, the more newsworthy.
- Prominence = why do you see more famous people in the news? Because, they’re famous. News stories involving famous people are reported more simply because more people know them, and thus will read the story.
- Human interest = typically a human interest story breaks the other rules and could be an anecdotal sad or happy story about, well, human interest.
With this in mind, here is the story that Gawker ran on Thiel in 2007. This story reveals that Peter Thiel is gay. Gawker would argue that this is newsworthy for a) significance and b) prominence. In Silicon Valley, and in particular the venture capitalist subset, the demographic is heavily on the side of straight white males. Thus, for it to be revealed that Thiel, widely regarded as one of the smartest people in the Valley, is gay, it is significant. Given Thiel is and was prominent, especially within the Valley, this would also be an argument to make for the story’s newsworthiness.
Thiel, however, pleads privacy invasion. He had not come out as gay before Gawker released the article. Does Thiel being gay really have any significance? For gay people looking to become venture capitalists, maybe. Is that enough of a reason to disclose information about someone that they obviously, by virtue of not having said it themselves, not wanted disclosed. I don’t think it is.
While I don’t think Gawker has a case in claiming that Thiel’s homosexuality be newsworthy, I also don’t think Thiel has a case to claim that shutting Gawker down by funding a massive law suit is right.
Firstly, Thiel has donated to the Committee to protect journalists and has talked publicly about the value of freedom of speech. He states “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations”. I agree with Thiel’s statement and Gawker should be punished for such a violation of privacy. To have Gawker’s right to freedom of speech stripped, by forcing them to close their doors is too harsh a punishment in my opinion.
Ironically, Thiel was one of the first investors in Facebook. A company with seemingly no regard for user privacy. Not to mention one of his personal companies, Palantir, works alongside the CIA in data gathering projects.
Musk
Thiel is famously the first outside investor in Facebook. Less famously, though just as noteworthy is that he co-founded Paypal, alongside Elon Musk and the rest of now hugely successful Paypal founding team.
Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018
Why Elon? You’ve done so much right, and now you’ve managed to tarnish your reputation. Perhaps your intentions are good but rating journalists? This is a sure fire way to ensure only the popular is trusted. This is, if anything, contributing to the anti-truth era. You validate people’s concerns that information may be wrong by ensuring that if they are wrong there is a quantitative value for the lack of intellectual responsibility, the number of people who said this was a trustworthy journalist.
Just yesterday I put you (Elon) on a list of three people I’d have at a dinner party — Richard Branson and Richard Feynman are the other two for anyone wondering. So, Elon, you’re definitely not off my most admired people. This is just petty though. The week before you decided to bring this idea to the public, Tesla was being pounded by the media for missing deadlines, lacking real profitability etc. This is not the solution. The solution is to meet deadlines and progress to the point of profitability.
This is the way Elon has done things in the past. “Elon Musk the crazy guy who thinks he can start a rocket company”. He has started a rocket company and it has been the single biggest innovation producer in the space-travel industry for decades. This is how all people receiving negative press should react. Prove the press wrong, give them no reason to slander you.
A rating system for journalists would be disastrous. Who rates them? You might say that rating is good because then journalists will write better stories for fear of being rated poorly. That’s true. They’ll write much better stories. The metric of better being how many clicks one can get that convert into high ratings. It will have nothing to do with the truth value of a story. Even if someone has a legitimately high rating, if they began to write slightly skewed stories, you’d be anchored by the rating to view it as impartial and then be ever so slightly moved over onto one side of the fence, all the while thinking you are being perfectly impartial and that you are making up your own mind.
There is a way in which rating could work though. Not by popular opinion but by a strict adherence to a rubric. Don’t ask me how or who is voting on how well a journalist does on a particular story.
A potential rubric, each axiom being rated between 1-10 and then given a total out of 50.
5 Rules for journalism:
- Accuracy – no deceptive handling of facts
- Independence – not on behalf of anyone else (transparency)
- Impartiality – there is more than 1 side, try and report both
- Humanity – be aware of the consequences
- Accountability – admit mistakes
The Washington post offers another solution. That is that Musk ought to support the economies of local towns in a way that allows local journalists to go about their jobs.
What next?
Next we do our best to maintain both our right to privacy and to freedom of speech. We speak and write, as I am doing now, to exercise this freedom and bring popular or unpopular, orthodox or heterodox views into view. We must support independent journalism and make it known when something is blatantly wrong. At all times the right to privacy must be protected with the same amount of rigour, for without privacy a democracy doesn’t exist, and so freedom of speech and an attempt at maintaining and independent free press becomes futile.
