Occupational Hazard, 3 of 4

Journalistic ethics always made good business sense

In “A Pirate Looks at Forty” Jimmy Buffett describes the dilemma of one for whom the cannon don’t thunder: “My occupational hazard being my occupation's just not around.” He could be describing journalists as well.

Journalism and piracy aren’t the only occupations disappearing, of course. The Chronicle of Higher Education and other pricey academic newsletters report regularly that universities are turning out more English and history doctorates than there are jobs to accommodate them. The magazine isn’t as worried about the loss of journalism jobs, possibly because journalists aren’t their audience. A site search of the Chronicle turns up 59 mentions of “journalism major,” mostly in job listings, and 268 mentions of “English major”, including this one:

“Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being. We're sorry. Something went wrong.”

I’m allowing for the possibility the search engine’s comments may be involved in that response. Still, something has gone wrong. The Daily News-Record is running stories about the Warren County sheriff to fill space with seemingly local stories. Six Virginia dailies will soon publish only three days a week, and by mail. The kid that started out delivering papers and wound up as a reporter will have to go back to the lemonade stand for spending money.

The disappearance of the jobs is only part of the stories. The other half of the problem is the remaining jobs being wasted. The ADF lawsuit against the city schools is a good example. All due respect to the plaintiffs’ toxic mix of umbrage and self-pity, it’s a bullshit story. A religious group with too much money is peppering local school systems with legalistic jeremiads to force the group’s views on their neighbors, but it’s being treated as a legitimate legal effort to defend the rights of the aggrieved. Granted, it’s supposed to be treated that way so long as it’s happening in a room where technology is banned and the man in charge wears a dress and waves a hammer, but I have to wonder about the overkill in covering it. The Citizen, the Breeze, the DNR, and WHSV had stories on one of the hearings. Without challenging the importance each placed on the story, there was not enough variety among the stories to warrant the work of at least four people.

First off, that’s three other stories that didn’t get written that day. Second, that would have been a good story for the city’s publicist or someone quite like him to report. The court system, which at least no longer requires wigs, could have provided real-time transcripts with free technology (google docs, if you’re wondering), but instead some number of writers with legal pads spent their afternoon listening to legal absurdities. (Asking a teacher to use a student’s preferred pronouns is like ordering the teacher to call a student “comrade,” an attorney argued with a straight face.) But because each hearing and ruling was covered as a daily story and not as part of a trend, there were that many reporters writing that many stories without mentioning that the suit was part of a forty-year effort by the Christian right to dominate, manipulate, and exploit the nation’s courts and legislatures to force their religious views on their neighbors.

The same fantasy, so-called objectivity, kept national reporters from calling Trump a liar until it was too late, and keeps local reporters from fully covering the religious lawsuits. That’s an issue covered in depth by Jim Fallows and Dan Froomkin on their blogs, and they both do it better than I do.

https://presswatchers.org/

Both also write extensively about both-sidesism, the flawed concept that there are two sides to every perversion of the political and legal systems. Reporters have for decades let that concept give them a false sense of completeness so long as both sides are quoted. Sometimes that means a single quote or a “couldn’t be reached” disclaimer for one side, before they dash off to pin the “controversy” tail on another ass of a story. The process, the habit, protects liars. The journalistic responsibility to find out what is true becomes secondary.

The most cynical take on that so-called fairness and objectivity at the local level is that it’s another part of the business model. If a city councilman or a car dealer was arrested for DUI, the paper had to cover the story to maintain its credibility while giving the driver’s side of the story so other prominent folk in the business or political community would feel safer. The general rule was that if a person might ever be in the paper for another reason, he or she, usually he, got the opportunity to explain his actions. If the arrest was the only thing newsworthy about a person, he’d get his day in court but not his moment in the paper.

The double standard wasn’t for ethical reasons. The idea was to let advertisers know they’d be treated “fairly” if they ever got in trouble. The other half of that cynical equation was editors and managers more a part of the business than the journalism community who used the ethics of the profession as an excuse to run stories they knew would be popular with readers but not advertisers.

Granted, in Petersburg and Harrisonburg I worked with small, ethically challenged newspapers. There were papers in Virginia large enough on their own or part of large enough chains to maintain higher ethical standards. But the idea that newspapers approached ethical behavior as a matter of principle was never as abstract as it was painted. Newspapers were selling credibility and ad space. You could lose advertising revenue and still be believed, but credibility had to be maintained to sell papers to put ads in. It was always a business decision.