(Originally published on July 17; Updated on July 20)
News Corp. and its journalists (maybe even its executives) have been charged with hacking into private phone lines, or computer, or files. Big deal. Who cares? It’s not like journalists don’t do this stuff — or use similar tactics — each day anyway.
Despite the blatantly illegal and widespread allegations against News Corp., the only real reason this is that big of a deal (which led to the closing of one of the UK’s most popular tabloids), is because for news media, News Corp. symbolizes the corporate and devil-some nature of today’s news industry. (Here is more.)
News Corp./FOX News Czar Rupert Murdoch is kin to greedy, business-minded evil-doers who frolic in the newsroom, tarnishing “objective” news with “conservative” twists. All of this has been documented in books, lectures, documentaries. Amazon.com returns 556 books on the topic.
I may agree with some of these takes on Murdoch and the troubled news industry, which has been influenced by market, but I do not see the interest in Murdoch, News Corp., or FOX news as any more dangerous than the journalism of the past — or as any more futile to the normative goals of the press (to provide information, spread democracy, etc.) today.
We are told:
– Be wary of what we print, because publishers and advertisers influence news content through dollars and social pressures.
– Don’t ask too many “tough questions” or the sports agents, college athletic coaches, or politicians will shut you out and we’ll lose our marketshare of the coverage.
There’s no way to get around the legal infractions that Corp. people have been accused of doing. So, in that way, my comparison to other practices and standards of journalists doesn’t make sense. Allegedly, they broke they law. Kicking me out of a locker room for asking an offensive question — or one the coaches don’t want answered — is not, necessarily, illegal.
But getting the news (or making the news) as News Corpers did by getting medical records, private documents, and even paying for information is what journalists do!
Indeed, the U.S. newsworld is built upon the actions and practices of media legends Hearst and Pulitzer, to name a few.
Still today, the Pulitzer Prize is the most cherished award a journalist in the U.S. can earn. Yet, the newspaper wars of the early 1900s in the U.S. focused around making information up, paying for it, or just making it themselves. And Pulitzer was a big player in that war.
A recent book, The Murder of a Century, tells this tale quite well. It is, of course, one of possibly countless reminders of journalists who planted evidence, paid for interviews, or broke into homes, offices, and private lives to get the scoop.
Today, the journalistic community argues against Yellow Journalism with new standards of verification, accuracy, objectivity, and obeying moral and ethical standards and guidelines. (Though, we often forget that these standards are set by the boardrooms and by dominant cultural and social demands. Historically, ignoring the news of Blacks and other social minorities was a standard. Today, naming sexual assault victims has become taboo. And, apparently, hacking is wrong, too.)
As a reporter, I was taught to read documents upside down. To walk backwards. To play with the rules of “off-the-record” and “deep-background.” We encourage journalists to make “decisive moments” with their camera from across the way — to capture images that show grief and sorrow, maybe even without the image’s subject knowing. It’s ethical. Indeed, it’s the only way to reveal the truth of the moment.
Most troubling, though, are other, more subtle journalistic practices that are almost never questioned, but that appear each day in newswork.
Quite rarely, for instance, do journalists attempt to understand the effects of grief and shock. Here’s a pretty touching story from the Boston Globe about a funeral. In it, we hear emotional testimony of a person’s life and the wrong that was done to her. Do we do more harm in telling the story than not?
Very rarely does it seem journalists are aware of the nature of such interviews.
I’ve seen it (and done it) myself: Loved ones struggling with recalling a violent crime and death are coached to tell every detail and then tell how that “makes them feel.” Take me to where she was shot. What did it look like? Did you hear her scream?
Most important, journalists don’t seem to educate sources about the danger they may put themselves in if they talk to us. If we did that, sources might shut-up. We are reporters, not counselors, not philosophers.
Journalists don’t see it their job to inform sources of the legal ramifications of what they say. News reports are often entered into the court system by counsel. What of retribution by bosses, neighbors, family members against sources for what we publish? We are not lawyers or family and career counselors.
And we do not tell our readers about the effects a local business story may have on that company’s revenue and stock price. If we did that, I suspect, journalists would look more like PR people than they’d like to admit. And readers — well, what would they think?
See? This is all much more complicated than we might initially think. Journalists’ everyday motivations and goals are far beyond “finding the news,” and the way in which they “get the news” is far less noble thank we are led to believe.
Today, newsworkers would say that we have evolved beyond actions that would have made Pulitzer proud. I don’t know if that’s true. The way we work today is different, but I don’t know if it is more “professional.”
Murdoch’s alleged mistakes and his people’s alleged misdeeds are news because of the scope of the charges, most definitely. But, to what degree is the news coverage really an attempt to set boundaries of un-journalistic methods in order to secure the rest of the journalistic community that our own practices are legit, fair, transparent, and holy?