Ethics in a Digital Age

Kelly McBride, senior faculty at Poynter, is widely interviewed as an expert on ethics in media, and she and Tom Rosenstiel compiled an anthology I'd like to read: The New Ethics of Journalism. It proposes a new code for ethical journalists.
   She predicts that journalism ethics will change in this age of [insert your favorite cliche about the wild west of digital communications].
   In the past, the pillars of ethics for our business were basically Truth, Independence, Minimize Harm. We needed independence so we could create a mass audience, for our business model. Being independent meant people could trust us. And we vigorously guarded "the essential stewardship role a free press plays in our society." (That's from her handout, which I'll duplicate for you.)
   But today, independence means almost nothing because our audience has seen totally too much failure from too many information providers. Totally.

   Independence is an old value. Transparency is the new value.
   We need to be transparent so people understand why they should trust us.

  Trust still translates into revenue. What has changed is the quality that translates into trust. With so many sources of information coming at them from all sides, readers are no longer persuaded that we are independent and therefore trustworthy. They've seen us fail.
   But when we are transparent we generate trust.

  She sites as evidence of how the world has changed a photo shot by Chris Sweda for the Chicago Tribune during a lightning storm in 2010. The photo caught a simultaneous strike on the Sears and Trump towers. It was perceived as faked even though it was real.
   These days, she says you have to show the audience why they should believe it.
And she thinks Storify is a good tool for that. Link to your sources. Lay them all out so the reader can follow your research.

   Her talk was much too brief for me, but she did touch several topics. For instance, do we misread unreliable Internet sites and in our haste repeat false information from them because they seem to confirm our bad assumptions about our communities?

   For instance, apparently, that Americans include a bunch of racists.

This is a screen grab
from comments on cnn.com

   After the selection of Miss America, BuzzFeed printed some shockingly racist reactions from social media. In reality, only a teeny part of the responses on social media to the selection of an ethnically Indian woman as Miss America were ugly racist rants. But BuzzFeed highlighted a few nasty racist remarks about her, and 5 million people shared that item in a week — because they were appalled.
News media picked up the BuzzFeed angle, the one presuming racism. And by and large those media outlets didn't say where they got the idea that a bunch of racists were all over the Internet badmouthing Miss America. They were not transparent.
   If they had been, their communities might have been able to put the bad information into proper perspective. Because users know that BuzzFeed does not aspire to truth. It aspires to be bizarre and entertaining. Truth is not part of the contract it makes with the audience.

   BuzzFeed also is not transparent. 

   I hope I am doing a good job boiling down what McBride said.

   If you want the audience to trust you, she says, don't trust an aggregator like Buzzfeed. If you want to talk about the social media on the Internet, look at the actual social media on the Internet.



After her talk I noticed a small display of transparency in the ladies room, one that instantly inspired trust:

Don't be annoyed by the vulgarity! This is really and truly a great application of authority amplified by transparency. Usually the stalls order us to behave this way. They almost never explain why.