Two disparate pieces of annual news–Poynter’s list of the year’s media errors, and Gallup’s “honesty in professions” report–come together this week for a journalism ethics lesson, on a Poynter page with links to both stories but no connection.
Poynter’s Craig Silverman released his yearly list of funny, scary, awful and goofy media errors for 2013, with two huge mistakes atop the list.
The biggest was 60 Minutes’ report on the Benghazi attacks, for its unblinking belief in a liar who was the star of the report, for not telling viewers that the liar was peddling a book published by a CBS subsidiary, and for its ham-handed response (including a “we-stand-by-the-story” defense) to the news that its report was thoroughly wrong. Second was the New York Post’s screaming “BAG MEN” headline, which pretty much everyone but The Post understood to mean that the guys in the picture were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing and not the innocent guys now suing the paper.
Meanwhile, the Gallup Poll released its yearly Ethics in Professions poll, in which the public is asked to rate the honesty and ethical standards of a couple dozen professions. Gallup’s key finding was that, for the first time, fewer than half of respondents say clergy have high or very high standards. (Health professionals tend to rank tops; lobbyists, Congress and car salesmen tend to rank butt-naked last.)
For Poynter, the news is that ratings for “high or very high” ethical standards remain low for folks in the news media. A PDF of trend data show:
- Newspaper reporters rated 21 percent, actually a percentage point higher than the 1998 study and just a percentage point lower than the all-time high.
- TV reporters were at 20 percent, down from an all-time high of 23%.
- The high-falutin’ term “journalist” leads to higher trust ratings–24% in 2012, always a few percentage points higher than TV or newspaper “reporter.”
It’s hard to know where ethics fits into this because, in many cases, mistakes are just that. I’ve always sighed at people who believe mass media is a singular entity of organizations who team up to present a world that doesn’t reinforce their confirmation bias. The better explanation is from Robert Heinlein’s The Green Hills of Earth: “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” Or, in the case of non-mendacious journalism, conditions that result from bad sources, too little time, bad or no editing, the tug of PR’s spin, etc.
We don’t have insight into the hearts, minds, and thinking of folks who made these mistakes, so we cannot parse the ethical thought went into their decision-making. The result is that journalism ethics are sometimes incorrectly inferred from journalistic performance. Moreover, most duty-based ethicists would tell us that it’s wrong to judge based on a decision’s outcome, as long as we’re thorough in our thinking, our work, and in our willingness to stand behind our decision-making.
On one hand, continuing to make mistakes–big or small, made with full-speed integrity or while tripping ethics mines–will forever leave journalism in a credibility slump.
On the other hand, as students of our textbook are reminded: Credibility is what people think you are. Ethics is what you really are.