Journalethix

Was it un-American for Woodward and Bernstein to investigate President Nixon’s involvement in Watergate?  Or was it un-American that the President of the United States was breaking American laws?  Was it un-American for Matt Drudge to use the Internet to break the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal?  Or was it un-American of President Clinton to abuse his power in office?

Journalists, in their role as the “Fourth” and now increasingly “Fifth” Estate with the rise of blogs, have had little trouble questioning authority, particularly that of Presidents, exercising the American right of free speech in the the pursuit of—what else?—the TRUTH.  Which is why an article by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald is so disturbing.  Greenwald’s June 30 article “New Study Documents Media’s Servitude to Government” examines not a negligible shift in the way mainstream media uses the term “waterboarding” with regard to torture.  

I’ll spare you the details here; Mr. Greenwald does a fine job of laying out his case himself.  But it suffices to say that the shift is more than conspicuous.  The term “waterboarding” has been around since at least the 1930s.  Major newspapers overwhelmingly referred to it as “torture”—roughly 80% of the time the term was used across the board in their publications regardless of what country was performing it.  Then, in 2004, it was still referred to as “torture” roughly 80% of the time-but only if other countries were employing the “harsh interrogation” technique.  When American’s used it, newspapers after 2004 referred to it as torture no more than 5% of the time, and in the case of The New York Times, less than 2%.

Is the press un-American for calling waterboarding “torture”?  Of course not, but I’m sure that’s what it’s afraid of.  I don’t know which is worse: mitigating the truth through semantics because it is afraid of politicians or mitigating the truth because it is afraid a myopic public won’t buy its content.  Either way, the primary purpose of journalism-to seek truth and report it- is lost, and the practice of journalism is useless.

Now, I am not saying that I agree that waterboarding is torture.  Maybe it’s not.  Societal norms evolve all the time.  Interracial marriage used to be illegal; then our standards evolved.  Waterboarding may have been thought to be barbaric, but then we realized it was necessary for national security and not that bad.  I really couldn’t care less.  What I do care about is that the media is consistent.  Either waterboarding is torture in Greenland and the United States or it’s torture nowhere. To play it off as one way for one country and another for our own is not only to blur the lines of what is true and what is not, but it makes the media look foolish and incredible. 

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, let’s make sure it’s a duck wherever our story takes place, and not only when it’s the convenient thing for our audience to hear.

Copyright 2010 David R. Norton

Matt Pressman hits on a many legitimate reasons as to why the public hate the media including acknowledging liberal bias and errors in reporting.  But he also is right in noting that if left to “hacks” or untrained media agents, the news wold be a whole lot worse.  FULL ARTICLE.

The reigning government in Iran recently just upped the anti as Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s highest ruler, condemned the election protests, declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner, and accused the U.S. and other western states of “meddling” in Iran’s affairs.  However, the U.S., in an official sense, has done no such thing.  The U.S. media, on the otherhand, has definitely taken a stand in the developments in Iran, and it appears, a side.  While the media has entertained the possibility that the election might be legitimate, the overwhelming majority of coverage has been toward the protests and the assumption that the results were rigged.  Even social networking sites, such as Twitter , which have been the focus of media coverage, have by proxy of user generated apps allowed users to voice support for the protests by a myriad of means, even turning icons and avatars green.  The Obama Administration, on the other hand, has only expressed “concerns” that violence is not demonstrated toward “peaceful protesters”, which says nothing about support one way or the other for either presidential candidate.

One of the hallmarks of journalism is its commitment to strive to eliminate bias wherever possible.  However, as CNN Chief International Correspondant Christiane Amanpour said of objectivity in response to her coverage of the Bosnian crisis in the 1990s: “objectivity doesn’t mean treating all sides equally.  It means giving each side a hearing.”  In some cases, where voter disenfranchisement has been all but confirmed (and judging by the outcry in Iran and the evidence on social networking sites, it is obvious that something has gone awry), it is the job of the journalist to pursue truth and cry foul when the available evidence points to the obvious.  And often that means “meddling” or simply telling the story and getting the facts.  Journalists have given both sides a hearing here-covering Ayatollah Kohmeini’s stance on the issue as well as broadcasting Hossein Mousavi’s statements in addition to the statements and views of the protetors.  And I would argue the ratio of incumbant coverage to protest coverage is directly proportional to the willingness of each side of the issue to talk; and the public, through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have clearly voiced which side they are on.

Far from meddling, U.S. journalists are merely doing their job, reporting what they know from the people willing to talk to them.  And even if they were being proactive in espousing one side over the other (and U.S. newspapers do it all the time by endorsing candidates in our own elections), sometimes the ethical thing is to take a side when the subject is of unusual and often global importance.  And espousing democracy over a dictatorship is the ethical thing to do.

Copyright David R. Norton 2009