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.
>>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.
A thousand times this. Recently one of our news organizations published an article (on their online edition) about how Samsung paid Apple the 1 billion in coins delivered with 30 trucks. That tells you every god damned thing about so called journalists today. Fuck those guys.
They are also employees, and like employees everywhere they face an immense amount of pressure from above to produce more, in less time, for less cost.
I sat in a large newspaper newsroom and watched it happen around me a few years ago, when the internet tourniquet started tightening. The journalists, subs and everyone else involved in producing a quality product were at their wits end as the management tried to take us ever closer to the minimal viable product they could put advertising around. A team of 14 running five weekly papers was fired and replaced by existing labour cut'n'pasting articles from the main daily paper produced at the site.
Believe me, journalists know that their once respected profession is going to hell in a handcart. But it's not their fault, and largely there's not much they can do about it.
It's also hard for normal folk to see this because a very, very few writers get larded with resources, oodles of time to investigate stories, and big salaries, and these are the ones that are talked about. It is like assuming all CEOs are dishonest, earn a few million a year and fly everywhere by private jet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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
(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.
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.
>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...
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.