
Why can’t we just admit that journalists are human? - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/31/why-cant-we-just-admit-that-journalists-are-human/
======
padobson
I'm not sure journalists deserve the benefit of the doubt. The press in the
United States over the last 15 years has anemically covered two wars, the
burst of the housing and related securities bubbles, the crippling government
corruption associated with said bubbles, warrant-less wire-tapping, executive
orders to assassinate US citizens, and the US military playing hopscotch with
international boundaries.

All while creating an atmosphere of fear that empowers government to go
further when the role of the press is supposed to hold government in check.

I'll admit that journalists are human when someone can show me a journalist.
It's been a long time since I've seen one doing the job.

~~~
pstuart
But what good is journalism if people don't read it or believe it? Did you
catch the game last night? Dancing with the Stars? American Idol? My cat pix
on Facebook? Who wants boring bad news where there are so many distractions to
be had?

Probably the best "mainstream" journalism is coming from The Daily Show and
The Colbert Report, and they're already preaching to the choir.

It makes me so sad.

~~~
0003
I would disagree that DS and CR are journalists. They are smart, discuss
political and socio-economic events, and while they do partake in
investigative reporting, they are not in the same league of hard-reporting by
as performed by the AP, propublica and other foundations, and local big city
papers.

~~~
pstuart
Agreed, not in the proper context of research or depth of the parties you
cited.

If journalism is considered to be "making people aware of what is going on",
then I believe my contention has merit, especially when it comes to the
distasteful arena of politics.

------
gyardley
Do journalists _want_ to be seen as human? I doubt it.

There's been plenty of exposes from insiders over the years claiming that news
organizations are comically biased, both in their choice of what to cover and
how they cover it. Yet journalists are still _seen_ as fairly impartial,
making their biased messages more effective.

Firing guys like this one is just self-defense for the journalistic profession
as a whole. Too many journalists like him, and they won't be able to get their
message across.

------
nhebb
I'm a libertarian (small "l"). I'm liberal on most social issues but
conservative on fiscal issues, so I tend to vote Republican. Do you know how
many times media figures have implied that I'm a racist by proxy because of
that? Calling someone a racist used to be a serious charge, but it's so over-
and mis-used in this campaign season that I can't take it seriously anymore.
Most of the time I just shrug it off, but when the Yahoo guy joked that
Republicans delight in black people drowning, I was pissed. Really pissed.

I'm really getting sick of being called a racist because I prefer a smaller,
less intrusive government. If the Yahoo guy has such a binary vision of the
U.S., he should seek out work in opinion journalism. And of course, Yahoo was
right to fire him. He offended roughly half of Yahoo's potential customer
base, and no sane organization wants that kind of PR nightmare.

~~~
corin_
The problem is that there's so few options to chose from that chances are
whoever you vote for won't share lots of your opinions, and their party
possibly even less.

In most of life you can avoid having people as friends, or working for
companies, and so on, based on these issues. You probably wouldn't find
yourself defending a friend as "yes he's racist and homophobic, but he's also
<good points here", whereas when picking a political party you end up with bad
points.

I get that not all Republicans are racist, but with your party having given
voices to so many far-right wackos, it's hard not to tar you all with the same
brush sometimes.

~~~
anamax
> I get that not all Republicans are racist, but with your party having given
> voices to so many far-right wackos, it's hard not to tar you all with the
> same brush sometimes.

Yeah, like Westburo Baptist Church, David Duke, and the Truthers.

Oops, they're all Democrats. As are the New Black Panthers, who actually
physically threatened folks at voting places during the 2008 elections. As are
the "black bloc" folks.

I'm not saying that there aren't far-right wackos, but there are just as many,
if not more, wackos that are Democrats.

And, Dem-affiliates are committing the majority of the political violence
these days. Remember WTO in Seattle? Isaac kept this down during the Repub
convention but the Dem convention won't be as lucky.

Care to explain why Dems don't get tarred with that brush?

~~~
corin_
My first answer is that it's because Democrats don't campaign on these things,
stuff like homophobia.

The wider answer is simply that people don't hear about these things as much.
Maybe some Democrats do campaign with far-right policies, but... I'm not aware
of them. Wesburo Baptist Church for example, I've never heard anything about
their members being democrats, though I would query that claim given they
aren't a political group, so even if some of them are, likely not all of
them... not to mention Wikipedia tells me their general opinion is that Obama
is going to hell for being "the antichrist".

End of the day I've heard plenty of data points for Republican wackos, and few
for Democrat ones, so that's where my opinion comes from. Maybe it's because
I'm English that I haven't heard a different story, but plenty of Americans I
know have the same opinion.

~~~
anamax
> My first answer is that it's because Democrats don't campaign on these
> things, stuff like homophobia.

Oh really? A cite would be nice.

The official Republican position on gay marriage is exactly the same as Bill
Clinton's. Obama had that position until about six months ago.

Are they anti-homosexual?

> not to mention Wikipedia tells me their general opinion is that Obama is
> going to hell for being "the antichrist".

The occupy folks have a similar opinion of Obama these days and no one
suggests that they're not good democrats/leftists.

Yes, there are some intermural arguments, but when it comes down to it,
they're democrats, as are the Larouche folks and a bunch of other wackos.

> The wider answer is simply that people don't hear about these things as
> much. ... End of the day I've heard plenty of data points for Republican
> wackos, and few for Democrat ones, so that's where my opinion comes from.

That's a very different argument. (Data point - would you say that The
Guardian reports everything of interest? Or, do they have a position that they
argue?)

While your opinion may be understandable, it isn't actually based on reality.

------
rwl
I read quite an interesting article recently about how the newspaper industry
is changing due to consolidation. (It's here, but behind a paywall:
<http://harpers.org/archive/2012/09/0084046>)

This article traces the cause of a demand for objectivity in journalism to the
shift, in the 1960s and '70s, away from Citizen Kane-style private ownership
to corporate ownership of newspapers: "Publicly traded conglomerates such as
Times Mirror, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett bought up large swaths of the
industry. And once shareholder returns became the priority, corporate
overseers began pressing for consolidation, newsroom cuts, and other vaunted
`efficiencies.'...To be fair, this new model had its upside for civic life: a
press more focused on objectivity and sales-generating scoops than on
promoting any particular proprietor's ideology, personal investments, or pet
causes."

The downside of that shift has been the disappearance of markets with multiple
independent newspapers. According to the article, the percentage of U.S.
cities with at least two competing daily newspapers fell from 58 percent in
1910 to 2 percent (!) in 1971. I'm sure it's even lower now. The article goes
on to trace the chilling effects this disappearance of local competition has
had as corporate conglomerates, no longer as profitable as they once were,
sell off small local papers that now have a monopoly on their local market to
private owners with political motivations.

But the point relevant here is that the expectation of "objectivity" from
journalists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that has been magnified to
inhuman levels by media consolidation. When you only have one place to turn
for your local news, _any_ identifiable perspective looks like a slant. (A
further confirming data point: I once read an essay by George Orwell, who in
many columns for the _Tribune_ happily and openly discusses the paper's
political slant, in which he lamented the steep decline in the number of daily
papers in London...to something like a dozen.) Journalistic objectivity is
almost a straw man, a stand in for the thing we really need in the news
business: a greater number of independent perspectives.

On the other hand, I have often heard a claim that I think has some truth to
it but may seem opposed to this one. The ubiquity of modern media puts media
consumers in a paradox of choice: since there's so many choices for where to
get news, people tend to just select the one source whose perspective they
agree with, and ignore the others. That claim, if true, would seem to
contradict the idea that what media consumers really want is a greater number
of perspectives.

But I think, actually, the two claims are compatible. First of all, the claim
that the demand for journalistic objectivity is a product of the decline of
competition in news is, in the first instance, a claim about local news
markets, whereas I mostly see the "paradox of choice" argument made in
connection with national news media. Second, to the extent that the claims are
about the same media sources or markets, they are only incompatible if the
paradox-inducing array of choices for media are truly providing independent
perspectives. Having a lot of choices only leads to paradox if you can't
figure out what differentiates the options. That, anyway, has been my own
experience: I don't generally seek national news from multiple sources
because, whenever I look at other options, they all seem to be reporting the
same thing in much the same way.

In short, it looks to me like the answer to both the unrealistic demand for
objectivity and the paradox of media choice is to have a greater number of
independent perspectives in news media. I hesitate to summarize this as a need
for "more competition" in news media; there's a lot of competition already
between the corporate conglomerates already, but that hasn't led to more
independent perspectives. We need more of a certain _kind_ of competition,
competition that I think will only arise among local, independently-owned news
sources.

~~~
chc
Having a greater number of independent perspectives that lack objectivity is
like having a greater number of clocks that are all set to different times.
The advantage is illusory -- there's still only one correct time, and now
there's an even lesser chance that you're looking at the clock that tells it.

~~~
rwl
Obviously, proposing that we need more independent perspectives does not mean
that I think journalists should abandon their professional ethics, or that
there's no distinction between news reporting and opinion pieces. Journalists
still need to report the facts, and in that sense, we _should_ expect them to
be objective.

Unfortunately, reporting the news is usually not like reading a clock.
Composing any article involves making a variety of decisions in a variety of
circumstances -- where to be, who to quote, which connections to prior events
to draw, how much background to report -- that all affect what goes into an
article and what does not, and which give it an inherent perspective. Two
journalists might write articles which consist entirely of reporting objective
facts, yet provide quite different narratives about the same events.

The demand for "objectivity" becomes unreasonable when it asks for even this
curational perspective to be eliminated. There is plenty of room for a greater
number of independent perspectives in our news sources, even _within_
journalists' obligations to objectivity and "straight reporting."

------
tokenadult
I see that this opinion piece by a journalist (so described in the
biographical squib on GigaOM) has reached the front page of Hacker News. As a
definition, I'll say that a journalist is "a reporter who writes for an
editor," a definition I heard quite a few years ago to deny that certain solo
bloggers are journalists. I think the issue of writing for an editor is
important, because I have been a reporter who wrote for an editor (at an
obscure company in Taiwan that published English-language trade magazines for
international businessmen procuring products in Taiwan). I later became an
editor for the same company, and learned how to read raw manuscripts from cub
journalists while still doing some beat reporting of my own.

Journalism is not easy. Finding a source who will tell you the facts and not
lie to your face is harder than you might think. Finding reference materials
that accurately represent the world of reality is still not trivially easy,
even in this age of the World Wide Web. (Some subjects, notably some medical
subjects, are notoriously misrepresented on the Web. Wikipedia is plagued by
edit wars

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>

and is still not based on reliable sources for many of its key amateur-edited
articles.)

Even if a journalist carefully gathers correct facts about the external world,
the journalist is swimming uphill, because the journalist is writing for
readers who on many subjects already have their minds made up. I almost think
the title of this submission should be followed up with a submission titled
"Can't human beings acknowledge that all humans are human?" because
confirmation bias

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>

(yeah, this is a rare example of a good Wikipedia article on a controversial
subject) is a common feature of the thinking of all human beings, so it's not
easy for anybody to learn new knowledge simply from observing the facts of the
world. Persistent misconceptions persist because they fit the cognitive biases
of the human mind.

So rather than give in to the cognitive bias of tribalism, decrying
journalists as members of the other tribe, while praising HN participants as
smarter than journalists, I'll suggest that each of us lay out our
observations of facts, examine one another's statements, and generally proceed
with tolerant awareness of our own foibles and yet bold pursuit of truth.

On the issue of the submitted article, if someone employed by a news
organization makes a factually unsupported comment slurring a big part of his
audience, I'm okay with his employers seeking a new person to fill that
position. There is a meaningful distinction between a journalist, a reporter
who writes for an editor, and a freelance commentator, and if the person who
makes off-the-cuff remarks disparaging other people gets good enough at that,
he can gain a job like Stephen Colbert's--IF he shows a sense of humor about
himself as gentle as Colbert's.

~~~
001sky
I find the 'strategy' of defense in the article rather odd, and misplaced. The
problem with the article is it frames the issue as one of "bias" but , as you
point out, that is a strawman, and this is not your normal case of Bias. Its
not the reporting of some true things at the omission of others. Its not
asking questions that lead to a similar result.

(1) Fabrication vs Bias. The "journalist" has no data to support his
suggestion. It is malicious in intent. It isn't that it is a "bias" to one
side or the other. Its the tactical depoloyment of that. Making stuff up and
putting words into people's mouths are not _reporting_ the _news_. Its not
even biased reporting. Its propoganda.

(2) Humor defence. Is weak. Its a racially tinged remark. What if it was
sexist? What if he was Joking about rape? What if he was _fabricating_ about
rape as a joke? Make jokes about rape and you will end up in court for
creating a _hostile work environment_. [edit: Political affiliation is not a
protected class, but do you want to create a nasty environment based on
political beliefs? Even if its ok in _news_ , what about _engineering_?
Recruiting Strategy?]

(3) PR spin. The individual that was fired was a part of the eco-system. He
surely has friends and connections that he's worked with. Do these people also
look foolish now? Probably, a bit. We should expect some articles coming forth
to protect the subjects reputation a bit. By doing this, the authors are of
course acting in their own self interest. And, the way the article puts it,
this Yahoo! was dismissed somewhat with predudice (They counted to 1...) and
most folks don't want to be associated with that.

(4) CEO Spotlight. The bias was anti one party. Thus, implicitly, it was pro
the other. Even if this remark was in your favour, would you want to be
associated with manipulative, fabricating, bull-baiter employee? Would you
want to have this guy be in charge of the _News_?

At a professional level, Yahoo handled the situation well. Like a band-aid,
the did one-quick ouch. At a personal level, you sort of feel bad for the guy
that got fired. But the fact that it bordered on an ethics issue directly
related to his job performance tempers the sympathy.

------
makmanalp
> Should journalists be allowed to have opinions? If so, when and where — and
> how — should they be allowed to express them?

How about they start with "in my opinion" or some other obvious marker, and
everything else should be assumed to be fact?

> Why can’t we just admit that journalists are human?

Those of us with a bit of experience already know that journalists are "human"
and that these transgressions are made, and will read the same story from a
bunch of other outlets to compare.

Of course the general public is not forgiving when it's your damn job to
overcome the human impulse to be partial. Do we forgive judges for doing the
same? I hope not. You've been trained to cope with and recognize your personal
biases, and to at least give a best attempt to separate them out and maybe put
them to the side.

What's even more frustrating is the "I'm only human" defense when you're not
so sure that the manipulation was non-deliberate, to incite an increase in
readership. I think there is a reasonable due diligence that can be easily
identified as done or not done. If you haven't, then you don't get the benefit
of the doubt.

~~~
slantyyz
> How about they start with "in my opinion" or some other obvious marker, and
> everything else should be assumed to be fact?

Sadly, I think the problem is that journalists have the same dilemmas as
teachers. If you're a teacher, you're generally considered to be a teacher
whether you're at work or not, so you have to uphold some arbitrary standard
for public behavior 24 hours a day (i.e., make sure no photos of you being
drunk while on vacation show up on something like Facebook).

A "journalist" who isn't perceived as being "objective" 24 hours a day
(impossible) will rightly or wrongly be criticized as having their opinions
bias the work they produce.

------
spindritf
The problem here is not that the journalist is human, had an opinion, or has
shown a little emotion, the problem is that he mindlessly bashed subjects of
his reports revealing bias that is most likely crippling his ability to
properly do the job and apparently influencing published materials.

~~~
batista
> _The problem here is not that the journalist is human, had an opinion, or
> has shown a little emotion, the problem is that he mindlessly bashed
> subjects of his reports revealing bias that is most likely crippling his
> ability to properly do the job and apparently influencing published
> materials._

Yes, whereas cunningly (instead of "mindlessly") bashing subject of your
reports gets you promoted.

Fact is, almost all news stories have an agenda, and all newspapers cater to
various interests.

------
AiMeCee
Hmm, I haven't read the articles yet, and it's the next thing I'm going to do,
but I would like to say some words : Admitting journalist are human is not a
problem for me, I can understand that they have differents opinions of mine,
political views etc... but there is three things which come regularly and that
I can't accept from them and consider as a professional mistake : -to not
study a subject widely before writing a paper or when making a report. (as a
daily reader of newspaper and media website I've come across many of those
mistakes...) -to not apologize or at least recognize for their mistakes when
it's proven that what they have written is wrong... (just a recent exemple,
how many media are going to acknowledge that the picture they used was not the
good one in the issue of a christian girl accused of blasphemy in Pakistan ?)
-to claim of being "objective" for some of them...

And I'm not saying that all journalist have those flaws...

------
columbo
> Should journalists be allowed to have opinions[1][3]?

I'll play devil's advocate and say No.

> Should scientists be allowed to have opinions?

> Should programmers be allowed to have opinions?

No. You can't just -believe- that PostgreSQL is faster than MySQL or that ruby
is easier to code in than java just like you can't just -believe- that our
lifestyle is leading to the increase in global temperature.

Would you trust a programmer who answers a question with "Well I feel like X
is true, therefore that is what we should do."

> Should journalists, scientists or programmers be allowed to have INFORMED
> opinions[2]?

Yes. Of course. That's our job.

"After doing the research there is no clear consensus on the performance
differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. However there are certain concrete
and philosophical differences that lead me to choose PostgreSQL, they are as
follows..."

Journalists need to be smarter than the reader. They need to give an opinion
that isn't just pandering to their readers (or their investors). They need to
provide insight beyond the facts regardless of what that does to their own
personal beliefs.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion>

[2] - “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed
opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”― Harlan Ellison

[3] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Im_entitled_to_my_opinion>

~~~
randomdata
> Would you trust a programmer who answers a question with "Well I feel like X
> is true, therefore that is what we should do."

Absolutely. Preparing formal proofs for every possible option is logistically
impossible. A good programmer will have an intuition and form an opinion about
which options are better suited for the given problem. With that, even the
best programmers can get it wrong sometimes - they too are only human.

~~~
chimeracoder
You're conflating two things - in one situation, an objective answer exists
('Which database is best for our purposes, for some understood definition of
'best'?), and the means for identifying that answer are clear (ie, performance
testing/profiling), but it's logistically impractical to carry out that
process.

In the other, there _is_ no objective answer: even the most debated political
topics are inherently subjective, because the tradeoffs involved are value
judgements (ie, whose satisfaction is worth more? is X/Y/Z immoral?) and
there's no process - however slow - that will prove an 'objective' answer to,
say, whether abortion/gay marriage is 'moral', or whether it is 'moral' to tax
the rich to feed the poor.

------
batista
> _Yahoo fired its former Washington bureau chief on Wednesday for a joking
> comment he made during a video broadcast from the Republican convention.
> Isn’t it about time we admitted that journalists have emotions and opinions,
> rather than expecting them to be impartial robots?_

The worst is the hypocrisy of it. All major political news stories have ten
tons of hidden agendas, prejudices and interests they cater to, but when a guy
makes a joking comments it's suddenly too much...

~~~
mpclark
But isn't it like dropping the F-bomb at work? It's a matter of professional
standards, just something one doesn't do.

