Journalism ethics and the inquiring egghead
Your assignment for today is to read Good News, Bad News by Jeremy Iggers. Especially if you are a journalist. Especially if you are a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
When Doug McGill and I developed our abstract for the 2006 Media Ethics Colloquium, we answered the question “Who is a journalist?” based on the following (a summary from the abstract):
Commercial news organizations do not get to decide who counts as a journalist; audiences get to decide who counts. So would-be journalists must create legitimacy among the publics they would serve. And we suggest three ways that may be done outside of a traditional newsroom: 1) be loyal to the audience first, 2) make the invisible visible (i.e. cover those people and topics the so-called mainstream media ignore), and 3) operate with a discipline of verification and as a custodian of facts. Do these things and you may properly call yourself a journalist.
Our abstract was combined with Iggers’ by the colloquium sponsors because we are working roughly in the same general direction–the commonality for the sponsors being technology, i.e. what the interactivity of the internet makes possible for a citizen journalism.
Yesterday, the three of us had our first meeting face to face for the purpose of figuring out how to cram our abstracts together or how to make something rise from the ashes. We went the Phoenix route.
The meeting was wonderfully productive because Iggers and McGill are generous thinkers unafraid to take a hard look at something and say what they really think. Iggers has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and I believe ethics is his specialty.
Iggers’ work in journalism ethics (that book you should have purchased a few moments ago) gives our project an important focus–and you’ve read it before right here on Rhetorica. It’s the articulation of the purpose of journalism from The Elements of Journalism: The purpose of journalism is to give the public the information it needs to be free and self-governing. I’ve often edited that to “make civic life work” because I consider it more culturally, politically, and socially inclusive–but never mind. McGill and I had approached this purpose (not specifically articulated in our abstract) in terms of professional procedure. Iggers approaches it in terms of ethical practice or, perhaps, moral procedure. His book demonstrates how the current discourse of journalism ethics actually hinders ethical practice based on an ethic of social responsibility. I don’t need to explain that now. Why? Because you just bought book and can read it for yourself.
So, our abstract is changing. I’ll post details once I’ve begun writing the first draft. I hope you find it enlightening and provocative.
Hint: Iggers challenged the idea above that “commercial news organizations do not get to decide who counts as a journalist; audiences get to decide who counts.” That’s kind of a default idea for me following from my particular school of rhetoric (social-epistemic). Text and its use by an audience plays a central role in my understanding of how we use rhetoric to create what we know in a transaction among interlocutors. This presents a problem for me as a teacher of journalism. If an audience uses a text in journalistic ways (i.e. the purpose I mentioned) then I am bound to define it as journalism. Which means I have to define, for example, The Daily Show as journalism (Iggers pointed out a more uncomfortable example).
So I can’t really do that. If journalism has a (procedural/ethical) purpose–on which all three of us agree–then we must be able to identify its practice independent of any use by an audience.
My question was: Who gets to decide what’s journalism? My default answer is: the audience. But it doesn’t work if our purpose is to answer the question “Who is a journalist?” and include citizens’ practices in the answer. Iggers’ answer to my question was more useful and interesting. Stay tuned.
One last plug (for Iggers): If you live in Minnesota, read The Daily Planet.
