On Disclosure, Transparency and Ethics

We started out talking about cell phones, and somehow have ended up at the foundations of right and wrong. NetworkWorld’s Paul McNamara writes about Sprint’s promotion originally discussed here.

McNamara:“Sprint didn’t ask me to be an ambassador. Perhaps that’s because my blog is new. Or maybe the company is savvy enough to realize that professional journalist-bloggers operate under ethical restrictions that generally preclude accepting freebies. (Or maybe it’s the fact that my blog is, ahem, relatively undiscovered.)
Whatever the reason, it was never going to be.

But reading the posts written by Carfi and Dowdell did get me to thinking: Might it be time to rethink those ethical restrictions that would have forced me to decline the invitation Sprint never offered? I mean Carfi demonstrated quite emphatically that a credible voice cannot be bought for the price of a free cell phone.

Shouldn’t professional journalists be afforded the same benefit of the doubt by their bosses and readers?

The mere suggestion will be considered heresy by many a journalist — and they’ll have a good case. After all, credibility is everything in this business and we have enough challenges maintaining it without adding on another.”

Here’s my disclosure: I strongly feel that, ultimately, these issues fall to the individual. A typical code of ethics (here’s a snippet from the New York Times) states:

“Staff members and those on assignment for us may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or for avoiding unfavorable coverage. They may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts, reimbursements or other benefits from individuals or organizations covered (or likely to be covered) by their newsroom. Gifts should be returned with a polite explanation; perishable gifts may instead be given to charity, also with a note to the donor. In either case the objective of the note is, in all politeness, to discourage future gifts.”

The Times assumes that neutrality can’t be maintained. Or, perhaps more correctly, it feels that readers may assume that any good words (or the lack of bad words) are a result of a perquisite, and not the true feelings of the writer.

Perhaps it is time for this thinking to evolve a bit. We all have printing presses now, and every one of us has a point of view that is colored by our experiences. That is a fact. In some cases, those experiences are geographic and cultural; they are the experiences of the environments in which we live. In other cases, those experiences are interpersonal; they are the results of shared time with friends and colleagues, or perhaps a debate with someone with whom we disagree. What if, instead of trying to achieve objectivity (which is a fool’s errand), we instead disclose the items that we realize are forming the bases of our opinions?

Jay Rosen writes:

“I used to teach that the ethics of journalism, American-style, could be found in the codes, practices and rule-governed behavior that our press lived by. Now I think you have to start further back, with beliefs way more fundamental than: “avoid conflicts of interest in reporting the news.” If you teach journalism ethics too near the surface of the practice, you end up with superficial journalists.

The ethics of journalism begin with propositions like: the world is basically intelligible if we have accurate reports about it; public opinion exists and ought to be listened to; through the observation of events we can grasp patterns and causes underneath them; the circle of people who know how things work should be enlarged; there is something called “the public record” and news adds itself meaningfully to it; more information is good for it leads to greater awareness, which is also good; stories about strangers have morals and we need to hear them, and so on. These are the ethics I would teach first.”

and David Weinberger expounds:

“Is there something we can meaningfully refer to as “the public record,” as Jay says?

The Public Record (caps, singular and definite article) has become A Record Filtered by the Incumbents. We now also have a public space that is self-documenting. Now that there are also public records — plural, lower case and indefinite — The Public Record has become less authoritative, and, we hope, less authoritarian.”

It is now trivially easy for anyone — journalist, blogger, customer, neighbor — to document their experiences in words, pictures and video. There are public records and The Public Record (which can be self-correcting).

So the question: Do disclosure and transparency and personal reputation make up the foundations of a set of “new ethics” that are coming into being?

[Update: Elizabeth Albrycht is poking at a different side of this today as well, in Transparency and Possibility. And John T. Unger pushes things way ahead in the comments below.]