Monday, December 04, 2006 Editorial: We the people
MEDIA credibility concerns the people.
The Capitol-Leo Lastimosa issue is opportune for the public to educate itself on the workings of the media, including the standards by which the profession should be evaluated.
A media-literate community can independently decide if a journalist is fulfilling or overstepping his or her obligation to report and comment on matters of consequence to the public.
The realm of media ethics is after all not in a public duel of opinions or the polemics of character assassination.
To paraphrase Johan Retief, media ethics should never be an exercise limited to the elites, whether they be public officials or news managers.
Ethics, as the basis for making decisions between the bad and the good or choosing the lesser evil, must guide news readers, listeners and viewers because they, too, shape media, governance and society.
Separating chaff
In his paper “Why ethics matter,” uploaded in The Poynter Institute website (www.poynter.org), George Claassen quotes Thomas Jefferson’s advice to an editor seeking to improve his paper: learn how to distinguish between “truths, probabilities, possibilities, and lies.”
It is sound advice for news consumers to heed, too.
Claassen notes that the news media made a qualitative leap during the second part of the 20th century when reporters and editors made the crucial link between merely excellent journalism and its ethical practice.
It was during this period that the American news media set milestones. The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage in the 1970s defined investigative journalism and the media’s watchdog function.
But the profession also had its lows: fabrication of news (The Washington Post’s Janet Cooke returned her 1980 Pulitzer prize after she admitted inventing a news source; The New Republic’s Stephen Glass was fired in 2003 after he manufactured many cover stories ran by the prestigious 90-year-old publication) and plagiarism (The New York Times’ Jayson Blair and two top editors resigned in 2003 after Blair admitted manufacturing news and claiming other writers’ works as his own, stories all published by the 152-year-old newspaper; USA Today’s Jack Kelley and a top editor resigned in 2004 after Kelley was found guilty of filing plagiarized foreign news dispatches).
According to Claassen, the highs and lows of modern journalism point out that the “besetting sin of big-time journalism is arrogance-the belief in our own omniscience, that we know so much we don’t have to listen to criticism.”
Monitoring the monitors
Claassen argues though that it is not censorship or state regulation but media itself-its in-built mechanisms of transparency and accountability to its public-that can protect the public from its own excesses or oversights.
From Cooke to Kelley, newsroom colleagues and industry peers were the ones to detect and investigate the lies peddled by pseudo-journalists.
But legitimate newsrooms and media bodies like The Poynter Institute (a “school for journalists that also practices journalism”), the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (www.cmfr.org.ph) and the Cebu Citizens-Press Council (www.cebucitizens presscouncil.org) advocate widening media monitoring to include ordinary citizens, people’s organizations and other institutions like the academe and religious groups.
Media vigilance should begin with media education. This can cover the basics of distinguishing between a verifiable report and a commentary attributable to its opinion-maker, as well as orienting oneself to the standards and practices of news coverage and interpretation.
But an informed public is also a responsible public. In the age of cyberspace, this may require acquiring the Internet literacy to read and participate in discussions on media ethics posted in www.poynter.org or undertake free online journalism courses in www.newsu.org.
But it can also just require the minimum effort expended to change channels to sample newscasts or compare and contrast the coverage of broadsheets and tabloids found in a school, public or newsroom library.
These efforts to teach oneself how media works may not be as easy or entertaining as oggling a streamer denouncing a broadcaster. But the results should be more illuminating and fruitful.
