
Social Media Guidelines for the Times Newsroom - coloneltcb
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines.html?_r=0
======
koolba
From their new guidelines:

> In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions,
> promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do
> anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.

Is this for real or was it an erroneously early April Fools gag?

~~~
zaroth
Consider what's happened to the NFL with the anthem protests.

By not putting a strong policy in place (or rather, not consistently enforcing
the policy they had) to avoid politics in the workplace, the brand has been
damaged and the product they are selling has been hijacked.

Employers need to carefully weigh the pros/cons of letting employees
participate in politics while they are representing the company. In the NFL
that would include time on the field.

For the Times they judge that to include _all_ social media use -- a clearly
much higher bar brought on by journalistic responsibilities which hits at the
core value of NYTs entire service.

~~~
wfo
Or you can view it as a high-profile step in an ongoing employer power creep.

When you work for a company, how much of your life does that company own? Do
you have any rights as a private citizen at all if you have an employer? Can
they tell you what to say in your off time? Can they tell you who to vote for?
Whether or not to stand when a certain song is being played? Whether or not
you can own a gun? Which political organizations to join? How about where to
eat? Who to be friends with? What conferences and meetups to attend? Whether
or not to smoke and drink alcohol? How much to exercise? When and where to pee
and to surrender your bodily fluids (step over here for this mandatory drug
test, please)? Can they own the ideas that you think of when you are not
working, like they do in tech?

The most fascist governments in all of human history would salivate at the
chance to exert this much control over their people. While here if you
disobey, you are not sent to jail or killed, instead you lose your livelihood
and health care, which for the poor approaches a similar end result.

~~~
zaroth
As long as you are an employee at will, you can be fired for any reason that
is not protected by law, or no reason at all. You choose where you want to
work, and a rational part of that choice is how much you are comfortable with
your employer looking over your shoulder, and how much they might try to
dictate how you behave in and out of the office.

If a company can make a reasonable argument for why they have a certain policy
as a condition of my employment, I am willing to consider it. If I find the
policy anathema to my personal beliefs or lifestyle then I'm not a compatible
employee for that company and I won't work there. Rational people might decide
to avoid even companies like Google and Facebook for these reasons!

Can companies intrude too deeply in their employees personal lives? Certainly.
But what we're talking about here is not personal life but public persona as a
representative of the company, so I think you've gone a bit hyperbolic and it
undermines your argument.

We see companies firing employees for bad behavior inside and outside the
office all the time. Weinstein would be an obviously attrocious example / the
PyCon developers or the Google engineer perhaps more borderline examples.
Sometime we laud these public firings other times we question them deeply.
Curt Shilling was fired for a Facebook share.

I can't judge if these are all right or wrong, but I do believe they are legal
and should be legal for a company to choose its employees based, in part, on
how they conduct themselves. And we are free to judge _companies_ on how their
employees conduct themselves, and how they react to their employees conduct.
How meta!

This feedback cycle is an extremely powerful force now due to social media but
I don't think we can or should put the genie back in the bottle. There are
various forces pushing in different directions and there certainly can be
negative feedback when people perceive a firing to be unjust.

One thing is for sure, a company's reputation and brand is a lot more complex
to manage when every employee is an "ambassador" and everyone is watching what
they are doing/saying, and it's all recorded in searchable archives.

Maybe it would be great if more often we could separate unsactioned employee
actions from the employer themselves. But at the same time people use it as a
lever to exact control over what they perceive as misbehavior. When rational
people disagree over what constitutes offensive behavior, and both sides
expect the company to _do something about it_ then shit hits the fan!

------
danso
> _On that same note, we strongly discourage our journalists from making
> customer service complaints on social media. While you may believe that you
> have a legitimate gripe, you’ll most likely be given special consideration
> because of your status as a Times reporter or editor._

One of the more sensible precautions IMO. It's very easy to get a company or
institution to acknowledge to your complaints when you pull the "Do you know
who I work for?" card. Difficult to be unbiased when things go your way.

~~~
matt4077
It's also the sort of old-school professional integrity that feels almost out-
of-place these days.

I mean–Imagine a life of constant vigilance against, for example, the
corrosive corruption that sneaks in via the power of your employer's name to
get your billing snafu at Comcast escalated.

And then every actual contact with the general population is just a litany of
insults, attempts to tie your work to some grand conspiracy "the media" is
engaged in, or accusations of taking money from the "global warming
scientists-environmentalist complex".

C.f: the idea that the New York Times (first published 1851) is a CIA front
operation, founded by a 1950's propaganda effort. Peddled downthreat
(hopefully) with the "you're naive if you don't believe" shtick.

------
coloneltcb
this is so misguided.

This sums up my feelings exactly
[https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/918864859537829889](https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/918864859537829889)

Be circumspect. Cover your tracks. Don't show you're biased. Be biased in
private!

~~~
nipplesurvey
good message, but when delivered by someone who writes for the post it loses
some credibility

------
toastking
This honestly seems like it's taking their reader's intelligence for granted.
When people see content from the NYT's they know the point of view it's coming
from. I get that the actions of Time's reporters reflects on the paper as a
whole but pretending that reader's don't understand that journalists have
opinions takes them for granted.

~~~
foota
I believe you're misusing take for granted here. To take for granted is to
assume that something is true. So your first sentence would read "This
honestly seems like... assuming their readers are intelligent" which seems to
be the opposite of your point.

------
jdoliner
Judging by these guidelines I see no evidence that NYT actually wants their
staff to be unbiased. Only to appear unbiased. This, I presume, is because it
allows them to present biased opinions as objective truths. An art which the
NYT has perfected over the years.

~~~
quadrangle
It's more likely that they just _are_ biased in the sense that organizations
and people have bias. There's little basis to assert that they are
consciously, intentionally biased and trying to hide it. All their efforts to
appear unbiased probably go along with a desire to be unbiased. Actually
achieving some mythical unbiased view is much harder than some guidelines to
avoid amplifying impressions of bias.

In short: even when they present biased opinions as objective truth, they
don't have whole meta-conspiracy around planning to do that. Nobody is writing
these social-media guidelines thinking "this will better allow us to get away
with presenting our political angle as objective truth" or anything like that.

~~~
tanderson92
> There's little basis to assert that they are consciously, intentionally
> biased and trying to hide it.

You might consider reading "Manufactured Consent", by Noam Chomsky.

~~~
quadrangle
I'm aware of Chomsky's thesis and basically agree with it. My comment is
totally aligned with the thesis as I understand it.

Chomsky's thesis doesn't suggest that entities like the NYT are intentionally
biased and crafty in hiding it. His thesis suggests that the basic nature of
news media as we know it, the economic models, social structures, etc.
inherently work in a fashion that reinforces mainstream thought and rejects
challenges to it.

I think Chomsky is right. My point is that the NYT is behaving exactly as
Chomsky would expect _including_ my suggestion that they aren't consciously
_aiming_ to be biased and hide it. They exist in a broader context where they
can't even see their own bias (which is common in many cases, even outside of
this topic of journalism).

------
cpr
It's naive to think that Operation Mockingbird
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird))
isn't continuing to this day.

These major organs of the media function simply as a fourth branch of
government.

------
rndmwlk
>As you can see, we have tried to strike a balance.

...I can't see that.

------
thatfrenchguy
> If our journalists are perceived as biased

The point of journalism is to be biased, no-one is neutral. Pretending to be
neutral is a huge issue, because it means as a person you can't see your own
biases.

~~~
indubitable
This may depend on what you mean by journalism. When I visit news sites, I am
there exclusively for factual information on events that are occurring. I do
not want to know what the writer happens to feel about these issues.

This probably sounds somewhat radical in today's times, but that's largely
because of how the media has changed. In my opinion that change has been for
much the worse. An example of what I would consider phenomenal reporting is
this [1], the New York Times coverage of Watergate, just before the election
of 1972. It is pure professionalism. I have no clue what the author thinks of
the situation. There are no moral or character judgements, labels, or
aspersions directed in any way. There is no implication or connotation of
anything beyond what is there. It is a simple clean and elegantly written
reporting of information with all basic relevant facts quantified so much as
possible. It is then left entirely up to the reader to survey the evidence and
come to their own conclusions. It's unpleasant to compare that to the media of
today.

[1] - [http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate-
mys...](http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate-mystery-the-
watergate-mystery-after-19-weeks-of.html)

~~~
zghst
Amen

------
rdtsc
> If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in
> editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the
> entire newsroom.

Continue to be biased. No problem there. Just don't make the mistake of
showing that bias too much.

> We can effectively pull back the curtain and invite readers to witness, and
> potentially contribute to, our reporting. We can also reach new audiences.

Don't lift the curtain too much. Or people will start paying attention to
what's behind it. That's really straight from the Wizard of Oz. A Freudian
slip perhaps.

But it is true in a way. To manufacture consent effectively, there has to be a
minimal veneer of impartiality. Someone glancing at them in passing should be
able to say "Look, the free and unbiased press at work".

------
elandybarr
For those who do not have the context, senior figures at The Times were caught
on camera talking about ties to people associated with the Democrat Party and
talking about working closely with an individual at YouTube to favorably
curate their front page. This individual also discussed a close personal
relationship with former FBI Director James Comey.

If you want to watch the videos for yourself, look up "Project Veritas", and
you can see the footage that likely prompted this post.

~~~
danso
I doubt that that undercover string precipitated this policy, which no doubt
took longer than a week to formulate. For starters, the thing you mentioned
was chat taped during an _undercover sting_ , of which social media guidelines
would not govern.

------
weinzierl
> We consider all social media activity by our journalists to come under this
> policy. While you may think that your Facebook page, Twitter feed,
> Instagram, Snapchat or other social media accounts are private zones,
> separate from your role at The Times, in fact everything we post or "like"
> online is to some degree public.
    
    
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------
      in fact everything we post or "like" online is to some degree public.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------
    

This is good advice for everyone.

In fact, I'm not sure if _' post or "like"'_ isn't even a too narrow
definition. For example _" stories clicked"_ is probably a much more
interesting metric than _" likes"_, and we can never be sure that this data
doesn't become public.

~~~
Alex3917
Even things in your newsfeed that you pause over for half a second without
clicking on can be tracked and made public also.

~~~
jdoliner
Things you never saw at all could be made public too. How would you prove them
wrong? And would it even matter if you did? It seems like a fools errand to
worry about this, even if you do everything right you can still get just as
screwed.

------
dmckeon
The phrase:

> our journalists

is used 14 times. Do the serfs go with the land, or can they have _any_
private/personal online presence?

I get that the Times is using "our journalists" as a shorthand for
"journalists employed by the Times" or "people who work at the Times'
newsrooms" but this seems like an exclusion of many significant personal
opinions from online spaces.

It also seems to be a shift from journalists having both a private persona and
a separate public body of work to a single public persona who is always and
constantly expected to be on the public stage - like an on-call physician, a
well-known trial lawyer, a politician, a celebrity, or an actor.

We might expect that shift for a small percentage of the people in journalism
- the ones whose names might be recognized by any reader or viewer - but do we
want it for all journalists?

