One Hand Clapping

The coming federal-court case about blogging
Jeff Jarvis and Bill Hobbs, both bona fide journalists in the traditional sense and highly-regarded bloggers, both yesterday about the relationship of blogging and journalism. Says Jeff,

I'm waiting for the first, inevitable fight over blogger credentialing to a political convention or the White House press office or to a city police press room. You can see it coming: Blogger applies; blogger is rejected because he's not a "legitimate news organization;" blogger sues; blogger wins. For who's to say who gathers news and who doesn't?

Bill says that "Blogs are the future of written journalism." Here’s my take on journalism and blogging.

Journalism is a job, not a profession. I have no small amount of formal journalism training, and I can tell you that there is no particular skill to it that is particularly difficult or unobtainable by average people.

There is no "accountability" of journalists in any meaningful sense. There is no equivalent of a bar exam for journalists. There is no licensing procedure for journalists. There is no minimum education level required, nor any particular special kind of training at all. Fill out an employment application, get hired at minimum wage or better, and presto, you're a journalist. Or just take a pad and pencil, call some folks on the phone and do some interviews, and you're a journalist, too. Think not? Read on.

The myth of journalistic accountability
There is a Code of Ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists that offers some admirable ideals. Here is 100 percent of what it says the accountability of journalists is (check for your self):

Be Accountable

Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

Journalists should:
Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

That's all. What the code means is that accountability is nothing but an agreement by journalists, whatever they actually are, to follow these rules. There is no sanction for not doing so. I presume that the SPJ could revoke your membership in it for failing to follow the code, but you can still be a journalist if you want. Lawyers can be debarred, physicians can be de-licensed, and then neither can practice, but no such sanctions of any kind exist for journalists.

Nor should it. The only good answer to free speech with which you don't agree is more free speech. The First Amendment does not privilege "reporters." The First Amendment protects equally everyone's right to publish. News media outlets have no First Amendment rights that you and I or Joe Doaks do not have, nor do they have those rights more urgently.

There is only one real standard of journalistic accountability: the marketplace of ideas. People read or view or listen to sources that they deem reliable and credible (or entertaining, but we were talking about news and commentary). Glenn Reynolds gets 75,000 discrete page hits per day because people trust his record. My blog's readership has grown from a few dozen to a couple thousand for the same reason, I presume. Lord knows, I don't try to be entertaining

It’s just not true that journalists are "accountable" and bloggers are not. In fact, bloggers are blessedly free from the very real constraint that tends to inhibit traditional media from pursuing stories: commercial pressures. Matt Welch wrote that America's newspapers are catering almost exclusively to the well-to-do in search of advertising dollars, skewing their news coverage in order to achieve reader demographics that attract high-dollar advertisers. As the result,

"Daily newspapers have effectively dropped [coverage of] the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population," wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw.

Where is the accountability here? In the United States, media operations are commercial business ventures and that fact overwhelms almost everything else about them. I remember well a Time magazine reporter covering Operation Golden Pheasant in 1988. The reporter asked an 82d Airborne Division Spec. 4 some questions, but the trooper declined to answer. The reporter said he should give the interview. "I represent the American people," the reporter said. The Spec. 4 snorted, "No you represent Time-Life, Inc, a publicly held megabusiness." When even a 20-year-old trooper knows where a reporter's highest loyalty lies, it's time for some honesty from the reportage trade.

The only real legal accountability for journalists are libel laws, but those laws apply to bloggers just as much as traditional media.

The myth that journalism is a distinctive profession
Mediachannel.org asked the question, "What is a journalist?" and answered thus:

Most mainstream journalists don't acknowledge how their own ideologies (or the pressures of their employers) guide their work. Yet they are considered "real journalists" because of their insider status and where they stand in the pecking order of some media combine. However, note that in a world of so many diverse publications, multimedia outlets and Web sites, more and more people are defining themselves as journalists and in some instances even reinventing aspects of journalism, as with the Indy Media Centers. Outsiders have always fought to be recognized and validated. The late I. F. Stone, for one, virtually alone, went after the U.S. government's Vietnam polices with a small newsletter. History now considers him a media hero. A new Indian website is battling corruption by exposing it. "Private Eye," a satirical magazine in London, has long been an outlet for unsourced, anonymous insider dish 'n' dirt on the media business. It's not traditional "balanced" reporting but most journalists read it and love it. There are many more such examples.

Is Glenn Reynolds a journalist? I think so, but others may not, and there is no one out there who has the right to say either of us are wrong. Some states have attempted to define what a journalist is by law, but such efforts have very serious problems, not least of which is that the Supreme Court has always held that no citizen enjoys greater First Amendment protections than another. First Amendment protections and rights belong to individuals, not corporations. (See this story, also cited below, which points out, "The First Amendment, said the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, 'does not relieve a newspaper reporter of the obligation that all citizens have to respond to a grand jury subpoena and answer questions relevant to a criminal investigation.'").

The Vanessa Leggett case is so confounding precisely because there is no accepted social or legal definition of what a journalist is. Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote of the Leggett case,

How, for example, could we define membership in the special group without starting down a slippery slope leading first to the licensing of journalists and ultimately to censorship? . . . One of Leggett's contributions could be a definition of a journalist as anyone who declares his or her intent to be one.

So there you have it, folks. I am a journalist just as much as you. Breathe easy.

And start a blog!

by Donald Sensing, 9/13/2003 12:34:49 PM. Permalink |

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