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Author: Steven Potter

Rethinking objectivity in progressive communities: A Q&A with Sue Robinson

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Sue Robinson

Sue Robinson has navigated media ethics in a couple of different ways.

First, as a reporter for more than a decade and now as a UW-Madison journalism professor researching how journalists use new communication technologies to report on public affairs, she’s encountered quite a few unique ethical issues. And now, she’s working to find solutions.

To that end, her first book, “Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power & Privilege Shape Progressive Communities” will be released Oct. 30 (available for pre-order here). The book examines how digital platforms enable and constrain citizens – especially those in marginalized communities – who produce and share information in the public sphere about racial achievement disparities in the K-12 education system.

More specifically, her years-long research for the book includes “drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities” to examine “the institutional, cultural, and other problematic realities of amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.”

 Robinson sat down to talk about media ethics and the book:

 

Q: What comes to mind when you consider journalism ethics?

I spend a lot of time thinking about objectivity. When you talk about objectivity, you’re talking about a main pillar of ethics. So, I spend a lot of time deconstructing what that means. [UW-Madison Prof.] Katy Culver and I wrote a piece (“When White reporters cover race: News media, objectivity and community (dis)trust”) that came out recently [that] was basically suggesting that we re-approach what we mean by ‘objectivity’ and re-think the ethical parameters of we put in place in newsrooms.

[For instance,] the whole idea that you treat everyone the same [and] as coming from the same background and having the same understandings of how information exchange happens in public spaces is unethical. So, when I talk about journalism ethics, I try to problematize that – I think about how we’ve thought about it traditionally and how is that problematic in real life.

One of the things [journalists] talk about is holding people accountable for the things they say by using their name. And so, when people don’t give their name, they can’t be credible. So, [the journalist] may use that person’s information as background, but their voice doesn’t get heard because they’re not willing to put themselves out there [by providing their name]. My argument is that not everyone can put themselves out there in the same way [because] there are power dynamics that are happening that are very real for these people, even if it means that it’s not necessarily life-threatening or freedom-threatening. There are some very real cultural, political and economical repercussions for whole groups of people and that we might reconsider how we document those voices.

[For instance], if you’re talking to the mayor – an older white man who’s used to talking to the press – there are standards to that. If he tells us something, we’re going to use his name, we’re going to put him in the paper. But, let’s say we find out about a family whose teenage son is having problems with a school district because he’s a special needs kid and he’s trying to transition to the halfway program that they have but there are a lot of problems with that program. [His parents] want to talk about those problems in hopes of making people aware that there’s an issue here in the school district, but they don’t want to go on the record because they’re afraid that people will consider that [the parents] have been problems. So, their kid is going to suffer for that [and] there may be ramifications there. They’re afraid as people of color, so that automatically adds an additional layer of complication to their lives. So, I’m suggesting that it’s an ethical obligation to differentiate between that older white male and person in power who’s used to talking to the press and someone who’s not and may have other, very real cultural reasons for not wanting to have their name in the newspaper.

 

Q: Do you have a name for this reconsideration of objectivity? And, how do you put it into practice?

We call it ‘active objectivity.’ The term “active objectivity”  comes from the scholarship that we are adopting. It’s an understanding of the way a journalist traditionally practices objectivity in a very passive way. [For instance, the journalist says] ‘You don’t want to give us your name? Fine, but we’re not going to necessarily be proactive about getting those voices into the newspaper if you’re not going to abide by our traditional tenets.’ Rather, we’re suggesting that the very premise of objectivity is to be balanced and fair in a way that appreciates all of the context that’s happening within that dialogue that we’re trying to get started.

Particularly when we’re talking about marginalized groups. One of my suggestions is that we talk to them about how we might amplify that voice in a way that gets the issues out there that works for them. Having those more collaborative, grassroots conversations.

 

Q: Your first book is coming out soon. What’s it about?

It’s called “Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities.” I originally wanted to document how a local community’s information ecology was being reconstituted by social media. I was particularly interested in how power dynamics affected that reconstitution, like whose voices were getting heard and whose voices were not getting heard even though we have these wonderful social media platforms that are supposed to amplify all voices.

So, that’s where we started in 2010, documenting all the media [reports] in Madison on the K-12 racial achievement racial disparities [in education] because it was a big topic in Madison and there was a lot of news around it and it was going to let me get at those power dynamics within an information ecology.

Right around that time, Madison Prep, the charter school that the Urban League of Greater Madison had proposed that was supposed to educate black boys and girls was [being considered].

So, I started documenting that conversation and started collecting actual data in September 2011 until September 2012 because that allowed me to get at the heart of the dialogue of the Madison Prep debate, Then the vote [on the creation of the school by the school board] was December 2011 and it also allowed me to get all of the post[-vote] reaction.

 It happened in a lot of different phases. Four phases, which included capturing everything about that topic on social media and the news to understand how that conversation was happening, by whom and where – the public conversation. We did a bunch of network analyses around looking at who were the top influencers in that conversation and who were they talking to, who they were citing and how did information flow. So, that’s the first part of the book.

 

Q: What’s the next part?

Then, we interviewed people – about 65 people in Madison who were involved in that conversation, asking them about the challenges of that conversation, what were some of the strategies for how [they] overcame those challenges in public talk.

We then added four other cities [Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois. and Chapel Hill, North Carolina] that were the same size as Madison and had the same K-12 racial achievement disparities. All of these cities had these huge civil-rights histories and these progressive ideologies that were steamrolling the conversations. I started realizing that it was about this progressive ideology and these long histories that these cities had that made these information flows act in the way that they were.

So, we interviewed people there and analyzed content and it all came out looking at how progressive ideology was really hijacking these conversations in a way that shut down real, true dialogue. [Residents of these cities] were all very loquacious about these issues. There were a lot of forums. There was a lot of media and a lot of blogs and a lot of Facebook posts about the various [educational] achievement disparities and the different proposals they were trying do or racial incidents in the schools.

 

Q: Who is the book for?

It’s for white progressives. And I say that in the book. Because I’m a white progressive and the book ended up being as much of a personal journey as it was a detached, research journey. I started having to do all of this social justice training myself to understand what I was looking at. In the course of that, I realized how many times I was stumbling, how many assumptions I was making, both in my position as a researcher and as someone in the power hierarchy and just as a citizen. 

I started realizing, ‘Oh, I have a lot of work to do myself and my own racial journey to go on’ that I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ‘my race,’ in terms of a racial journey. That, I felt like, was a metaphor for what I thought these progressive cities, which were dominated by several white power hierarchies needed to go through as well. It’s sort of like a ‘Here’s how we can do that and here’s what to expect on that path.’

The last chapter is really dedicated to recommendations. I interviewed 10 international experts on how to have these conversations, how to have these conversations with yourself. But also how to interact in these communities with those conversations. Thinking about your progressive identity. Because the minute you start talking about [kindergarten] through 12th [grade] school systems we built to be equitable in a progressive understanding – all of these cities [we studied] have always been progressive and they have built these systems with the idea that they would be reformed from what the rest of the country would be like. We were supposed to have solved these problems and yet these are the places that have had the worst disparities in the country.

So, how do we have that conversation when you’re really talking about your progressive identity?

 

Q: Where do you see this book having the most value?

The biggest part of all of this for me was turning all of the findings into actionable white papers. It’s all centered around community dialogue and how can we talk about this in a productive way that doesn’t keep us just going around in circles.

 

Q: What were the big ethical hurdles?

It’s about public communication so journalism is a huge part of that, but it’s all the systems, all the institutions, the institution of education and politics, particularly progressive politics.

So, whenever you’re talking about institutions like those that have long histories of oppression, you’re going to be dealing with trying to work to change [and] to disrupt, [which] means coming up against ethical policies that have been enacted for long decades.

These are policies that have been deliberated upon for decades and decades. So, what I’m suggesting is that maybe those ethical principles are not being as aware or as accommodating to groups of people who have been oppressed within those systems.

Four members join advisory board

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MADISON, Wisconsin – Four members, three alumni from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, have joined the advisory board of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics. Since its founding nine years ago, the board has contributed to the direction and growth of the Center while giving it direct connections to news and media industries.

 

The new board members are:

  • James Causey

    James E. Causey. Causey is an award-winning editorial columnist, special projects reporter and contributing editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist since becoming  at age 15 the first African-American high school intern at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism and an MBA from Cardinal Stritch University. In 2008, Causey received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. During his time there, he studied the effects of hip-hop music on urban youth. After returning from his fellowship at Harvard, Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope-MICAH, recognized his work on the mass incarceration crisis affecting black men. Causey also received a National Association of Black Journalists award in 2014 for his business piece, Buying Black. Causey is an active member of NABJ, former president of the Wisconsin Black Media Association, and member of Phi Beta Sigma Inc. He was also awarded the 2013 Morse-Marshall High School alumni of the year. Causey was a Scripps Howard Award finalist in 2013.

 

Katie Harbath

Katie Harbath (BA 2003). Harbath leads the politics and government outreach and economic growth policy teams at Facebook as a global programs director. She was the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She previously led digital strategy in positions at DCI Group, the Rudy Giuliani for President campaign and the Republican National Committee. In 2014 Politico named Katie one of the top 50 people to watch and in 2009 she was named a Rising Star by Campaigns and Elections magazine.

 

  • Phil Haslanger

    Phil Haslanger (BA 1971 & MA 1973). Haslanger worked at The Capital Times from 1973 to 2008 as a reporter, city editor, editorial page editor and managing editor. He was part of the team that launched madison.com in 1995. During his time on the editorial page, he served as president in 2002 of what was then the National Conference of Editorial Writers. More recently, he was on the board of the Religion News Service and served as president in 2016. During the 2000s, he began exploring a career in ministry and was ordained in 2007 as a minister in the United Church of Christ. He served as a pastor at Memorial UCC in Fitchburg until retiring earlier this year.

     

  • Carrie Johnson

    Carrie Johnson (MA 1996). Johnson is a  justice correspondent for the Washington desk of National Public Radio. She covers a wide variety of stories about justice issues, law enforcement and legal affairs for NPR’s flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Prior to NPR, Johnson worked at the Washington Post for 10 years, when she closely observed the FBI, the Justice Department and criminal trials of the former leaders of Enron, HealthSouth and Tyco. Earlier in her career, she wrote about courts for the weekly publication Legal Times. Her work has been honored with awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She has been a finalist for the Loeb award for financial journalism and for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for team coverage of the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.

 

The new board members will join returning board members Kathy Bissen, Jim Burgess, Rick Fetherston, Peter Fox, Ellen Foley, Jill Giesler, Marty Kaiser, Carol Toussaint, Owen Ullmann and Dave Zweifel.

 

The board will convene this month with Jack Mitchell, a longtime board member and a professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, in his first year the Center’s board chair.

 

The Center also sends deep thanks to board members Tom Bier, Scott Cohn, John Smalley and Rich Vitkus, who wrapped up their terms of service. These four members contributed many years of service to the Center, seeing it through the transitions of two new directors and significant growth.

 

The Center for Journalism Ethics, housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides an international hub for the examination of the role of professional and personal ethics in the pursuit of fair, accurate and principled journalism. Founded in 2008, the Center offers resources for journalists, educators, students and the public, including internationally recognized annual conferences exploring key issues in journalism.

 

For information, contact Megan Duncan, project assistant, at megan.duncan [at] wisc.edu.

Stop scrambling for ‘why,’ and stop calling them ‘shooters’

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Katherine Reed

Another week, another mass shooting in America. In addition to being heartsick, angry and frustrated, I am, as usual, distressed by the way mass shootings are reported in the breaking news cycle. I think of the survivors and the loved ones of victims of Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, The Pulse and all the others, knowing in addition to the pain they’re feeling as they’re forced to relive their own personal horror, they’re watching journalists make the same mistakes over and over.

First, there is something desperately wrong with the scramble to answer the question “why” by reporting random facts about the killer in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. If ever there were a case for “slow journalism,” it is right after some maniac opens fire and kills a bunch of people. It produces some of the most useless, speculative and perhaps even reckless reporting news organizations do.

Here’s what we learned about the killer in Las Vegas in the first 24 hours after the massacre: He owned real estate. He liked to gamble. He was divorced some time ago. He was wealthy. The top contender for most useless tidbit: One source offered the unlikely observation that he didn’t think the killer had ever before fired a weapon.

In previous mass shootings, stories included that the killer had “a funny walk.” Or was recently dumped by his girlfriend. Or had a terrible temper. I can’t count the number of times news organizations have reported with a straight face that the killer “kept to himself.”

Somewhere along the way, the “who” and the “why” are conflated. The random facts satisfy readers’ impotent curiosity for details and probably provide some salve for our unconscious fear that we or someone we love could be the next victim. If we fixate on some aspect of the killer or the situation that is unusual — the telling detail — we can persuade ourselves that there is surely a “type” of person who is capable of doing something like this and, improbably, that we can avoid contact with this type. Or keep this type of person out of our country, if he happens to be Middle Eastern. Or keep this person locked away, if they’ve been described as having a mental illness.

In doing so, we arm ourselves with mental shields against the randomness of deaths by real weapons. They allow us to sleep, to go out in public, to send our kids to college, to go see a movie in a theater or an open-air concert, or to spend an evening at church Bible study. It’s a kind of inversion of the psychological mechanism that causes us to blame the victim. If we can simplify, stereotype, reduce the details into a kind of diagram of propensity, we might be safe.

For the families of the murdered, this kind of reporting stirs particular outrage because it focuses so much energy and attention on the killer. Highlighting his apparent normalcy (“He was the nicest guy in the world”) is a denial of the grim facts these families live with for the rest of their lives: This “average Joe” armed himself to the teeth with the intent to kill as many people as quickly as possible, evaded any suspicion, and then opened fire on a crowd out for an evening of fun and music. Imagine one of those strangers was someone you love.

Another important part of the problem is that this kind of reporting feeds into the 15-minutes-of-fame theory. We make celebrities of killers by reporting endlessly and exhaustively on the minutiae of their lives, plans and “manifestos,” and by publishing humanizing photographs or videos of them. Doing so, we inspire the next killer and the one after that. The bereaved families who launched the “No Notoriety” campaign make this argument persuasively and cite anecdotal evidence that suggests some mass killers have been inspired by those that came before them, especially the two young men who killed 13 people at Columbine High School. Though social scientists are just beginning to study the “contagion effect” of mass shootings, the best evidence to date suggests a slight uptick in mass killings after a major event lasting for up to two weeks. “No Notoriety” makes enough sense to have gained ground with big news organizations like CNN.

Some reporting is jaw-dropping in its thoughtlessness. Winner of the “Bottom of the Barrel” award in this category is The New York Times, which published a photograph of the inside of the killer’s hotel room complete with annotations showing the positions of weapons arranged to maximize convenience and destruction. The other graphics in the package explained the logistics. It’s a pretty complete how-to for a copycat, but it doesn’t do anything to further journalism’s central mission to serve the public.

Perhaps, though, there is a why. Law enforcement agencies are responsible for answering that question, with the help of the public. Last week there were numerous stories about investigators seeking anyone with information about what was on the killer’s mind. They waited for his girlfriend to get back from the Philippines, hoping in vain she might shed some light on the why. It could be that some of the information they uncover will help law enforcement agencies and us, the deeply uneasy public, prevent future mass shootings.

But what if there’s only the act and what it signifies: a grandiose act of violent destruction and, usually, self-destruction. There’s a growing theory that mass shootings are a specific act of suicide. Maybe the guy in Las Vegas, whose name is meaningless, just wanted to top the scoreboard with the largest body count. CBS News’ story about the number of dead in the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history — they’re increasing, by the way — shows a fairly steady uptick in the number of victims. In Las Vegas, the man with the guns killed 58 people (and wounded more than 500 – CBS’ reporting leaves out the number of those left with catastrophic injuries, and that’s a serious omission). The Orlando shooting ended the lives of 49 people.

We’re not helping by referring to the killer as “the shooter.” The term has operational value for police and others during a shooting as they look for the source of gunfire and to bring an end to it. But, now headline writers and reporters have adopted its use, and that’s unfortunate because it carries a tinge of glamor. It euphemizes the results of the person’s acts, which are agonizing and terrible deaths. Calling a mass killer a “shooter” is like calling a shooting victim a “target.” It has the ring of the video game world. It makes me wonder if we’re too desensitized to the true human cost of violence. The proliferation of guns and murder narratives in entertainment media adds to this numbing and is creeping into the way we write about actual violence.

Dave Cullen, in his masterful and instructive “Columbine,” brought us closer to an understanding of what would make someone decide to kill a large number of people against whom they have no particular grudge. His book is over 400 pages long, and the research took him about nine years. And yet in the end, the answer to the why for those two young men was simultaneously terribly complicated and terribly mundane.

What one can learn from Cullen’s book doesn’t apply to all the other killers that have come after them, or even emulated them. There are no universal themes, no single “type,” it seems, against whom we can gird ourselves. His reporting, though, provides solid evidence that mass shootings present us with an opportunity to get it all wrong very quickly and with lasting results. There was no “trench coat Mafia.” The boys weren’t bullied. They didn’t pick out the jocks and the Christians to kill. And yet the myths about that event persist because the news media created them in that frantic search for an easy answer to the question “why?”.

Maybe the answer to the question “why” is just “because.” Because they can. The means are available to anyone who wants to play what has begun to sound, chillingly, like a game. It’s far easier for us in the news media to make it all about the killers and the “mystery” of them and their derangement or their obsessions, looking for that one thing that lets us off the hook for confronting the terrifying reality of access to guns in this country. We talk around gun violence as a public health threat because it’s not a safe subject in the U.S. for reasons too numerous to explore here.

The people who commit these terrible crimes seem to be pretty ordinary guys (yes, guys), and they want attention. And they get it. From us. Reporting on the victims still lags far behind the reporting on the perpetrators of these crimes. It’s out there, and news organizations are committing more resources to memorializing the people who died, as in this piece from the L.A. Times that ran on the paper’s front page on Saturday.

Sadly, it’s unlikely to stop the next one.

What we should be doing is thinking carefully about the language we use in the stories we write and broadcast, especially in headlines and visuals. We should be deeply thinking about the purpose of our journalism. If a possible answer to the question why begins to emerge in the weeks after a mass shooting, we should report on it as we continue to follow up on the aftermath for the survivors.

I have a little laminated card on my desk that I hand to my students sometimes when they get lost in a story. On it is a list of questions, and the first one is, “What is the point of my story?” Editors and producers, anchors and reporters, photojournalists and graphic artists should be challenging themselves and their newsrooms to justify the content they’re shoveling onto their sites and into their broadcasts after a mass murder (yes, it was a mass murder, though the killer didn’t stick around to stand trial).

We should be doing what we can to reduce the possibility that we’ve been a party to creating a risk analogous to suicide contagion. Most news organizations have had their consciousness raised about the risks of reporting on suicide as having a single cause, on how exactly people take their lives, and how we characterize them afterward. The World Health Organization offers guidelines on reporting suicide in ways that minimize the risk for contagion. ­­It’s past time we applied similar caution to reporting on mass shootings and the people who do the killing.

Katherine Reed is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism who teaches reporting and a course on covering traumatic events. She is a former fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and has trained educators and investigative reporters on trauma at professional conferences.

Kim’s research might shine the light into the “dark” political advertisements

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Young Mie Kim, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, founded Project DATA to study how political campaigns use digital media and data to reach an audience.

 

Before Facebook, Twitter and Google fell under scrutiny from congressional committees about the ways Russians may have used the platforms to target voters with news and advertisements before the 2016 Election, Kim started studying the way campaigns use data and digital media to reach out to people and its new aspects and implications for the functioning of democracy.

 

 

Q: What is Project DATA?

 

Kim: DATA is an acronym for Digital Advertising Tracking and Analysis, and we define advertising really broadly as any messages that are designed for political purpose anticipated by a digital platform. A lot of digital advertising is not just based on sponsored ads, which are conventional, but you can also just create native advertising that looks like a regular news feed. It’s sort of like propaganda, but I almost don’t want to use that term because it has a negative connotation, so that’s why we use advertising. I do want to emphasize how broadly we’re defining advertising in order to better understand digital media campaigns because with a lot of digital media, there’s a blurred distinction between paid advertisements and non-paid, PR type advertisements.

 

Q: So what are the different steps that have gone into the project?

 

Kim: The major research question that we have is “How do campaigns use data?” We’ve learned that what campaigns have been doing is microtargeting. Microtargeting is targeting people at the very individual level. For example, let’s compare digital advertising to TV advertising. With TV advertising, you usually buy TV time based on the TV market. First, you specify the market, then buy the TV time, then customize messages to the market. Now with digital media, you can actually target individuals. Now we have data and we have data analytics techniques so we can combine public data with commercial marketing data, augment it all and predict who is likely or unlikely to vote for a specific candidate. Now, at this point, campaigns are able to target each and every individual in the United States. It’s really amazing.

 

So, the project is designed to see to what extent political campaigns are involved in these practices and what the means are for people forming attitudes toward candidates and their engagement in politics. Microtargeting means the advertisement is designed for you only, and you’re the only one that is exposed to a specific message. It’s really hard for researchers to track digital advertisements. So, that’s one thing we wanted to know, and we realized there’s really no good way to observe that.

 

So, we developed an app that automatically tracked your ad exposure. If we did surveys, for example, people won’t necessarily remember all of the ads they watched. So as a participant, you just install this program and it runs in the background and captures all of the ad messages during your participation. Then, we analyze the data, ask participants about demographics, political leaning and political engagement levels and track people’s candidate preferences over time. Later, we’ll link survey responses with exposure so we know what kind of messages are sent to what kind of people, and to what extent messages are customized. We also track the sources of the advertisements. You can lie about who you are at the source, or you can refuse to reveal your identity, but we track the links and track it back to the sources.

 

Q: When did you begin this project?

 

Kim: We collected the data during the 2016 primary elections, but that was small scale to test to see if it works. For the general election study, we had 10,000 volunteers that completed a baseline survey and used the app for about four weeks. 1200 people also filled out weekly follow-up surveys. We did it up until Election Day and compared it to their ad exposure patterns.

 

The same campaign can promise two different things to two different people. You can’t do that in public, but you can do it online.

Q: What does this project mean for the ethics of journalism? Are there ethical concerns that have come up or might come up?

 

Kim: There are so many ethical implications. Where to start? One thing is misinformation like fake news or Russian collusion with the campaign. These are all issues that can happen online.

Digital advertisements happen at an individual level so no one else but you knows what people are doing behind the scenes. The same campaign can promise two different things to two different people. You can’t do that in public, but you can do it online. Unless people share what they received with researchers, journalists can’t monitor this process. We’ve found specific organizations are just lying about the other candidates.

 

We have found three important things so far.

 

  1. Campaigns are an important source of political information because you can compare candidates. But since campaigns only target certain types of people, some aren’t getting any info from political campaigns at all. Some think certain segments of the population aren’t as important as others.
  2. Data campaigns use data biases. Younger voters and minority voters are not getting political information as much as their counterparts because some of the data that campaigns use is voter registration. New immigrants have a short history, and so do younger voters. Since these campaigns don’t have a lot of data, they have poor predictive models and these people are not getting enough information.
  3. Voters themselves have a responsibility, so people that don’t seek out political information won’t get any. That means campaigns won’t get any data, which creates a vicious cycle and only reinforces existing gaps in terms of political information. The gap continues to widen. Some that get political information aren’t even necessarily getting the right information either.

 

Hispanics and Asians are spending as much time online as white people, but aren’t getting as many politicized ads since campaigns have a lot of data about white people. In past campaigns, they also aren’t seen as important as white people. [President Donald] Trump heavily criticized minority voters and knew they weren’t going to vote for him anyway. Some people are considered to be important. Usually these are the swing voters that are interested in politics but aren’t as satisfied with their political candidates or parties.

 

For example, white, rural, blue-collar people may be interested in politics but have low trust in the government. Campaigns can send them a lot of negative information about the other candidate. Many campaigns now are targeting the opposing party for voters that don’t like their candidate, and send out negative attack ads. Like Democrats who didn’t like Hillary [Clinton].

 

People who don’t have access to digital media or mobile phones or people who [are lower] income are going to be excluded in every aspect of life because everything will be based on data. Misrepresentation and unintended data discrimination is going to be a huge issue…

Q: What are the next steps for the project?

 

K: Good question. It has a lot of policy implications, so do we need to put more regulations on it? These aren’t easy issues, but if we pin down what exactly causes these problems with misinformation and discrimination and privacy issues, we can make a specific policy. Another thing is expanding this project. If you think about prevalence of data in the future, it will determine a lot of things. We can use the same data for other decision-making like marketing. People who don’t have access to digital media or mobile phones or people who [are lower] income are going to be excluded in every aspect of life because everything will be based on data. Misrepresentation and unintended data discrimination is going to be a huge issue, so that’s something we’re trying to investigate more. We want to discuss the implications beyond the election, but to do that we need to have a better understanding of this and microtargeting practices in a political context.

The ethical decisions behind telling the story of heroin

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The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Seven Days project took an immersive dive into the heroin epidemic and increasing toll of overdoes. The sometimes graphic and often gripping reporting captured the national attention. Because the stories it told got up close with videos, images, families with children and deeply personal moments, the series involved a lot of ethical decision making.

 

Editor Peter Bhatia explained why the issue warranted a 20-page special section and 30-minute video. The paper assigned more than four dozen reporters and photographers across the metro area to document the heavy burden of heroin.

 

Dan Horn, one of two reporters who assembled the feeds of the reports, said the most challenging aspect of the story was balancing the need to show the reality of the epidemic without inflicting more pain on the people who are already suffering.

 

Horn addressed some of those ethical decisions.

 

Q: Can you tell me how you went about getting consent from victims and those under the influence to be interviewed and recorded? What types of decisions did you make before hitting the streets about how you would approach victims of addiction to be in the story? What was the process of editing like as you tried balanced the rights of people to privacy about a medical issue with having the impact the story does?

 

Horn: One of the most challenging aspects of this story was balancing the need to show this epidemic as it really is with the desire to not inflict more pain on people who already are suffering. We talked a great deal about this. My colleague, Terry DeMio, wrote the story with me and has covered the heroin epidemic for years. When we spoke to the staff before reporting began, she spoke at length about the need to respect the people we’re covering. She urged everyone not to refer to them as “addicts” and not to assume the worst about them even though we may be seeing them at their worst. It was important for everyone to understand that these are people – mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, parents. They aren’t just addicts. This was a message we also tried to reinforce throughout the story whenever possible. It’s also true, however, that you can’t accurately cover this epidemic without being honest with readers and viewers about what’s happening every day in the community. That was the point of the project, to show people what the heroin epidemic does, every day, every hour. To that end, we knew we’d have to show some ugly things. People who appeared in court or had overdosed on the street or had been arrested typically required no formal consent, though we did our best to follow up through records or interviews. Some people agreed to speak to us after we observed them in public spaces. Others did not. Some who we approached outside of courts or police ride-alongs agreed to speak to us and to even be photographed, but only if we used their first names. Others gave us full access without conditions. Hospitals, treatment centers and the like required the same type of consent we would need for any other story.

 

This was supposed to be a scene that gave readers some hope and a break from the rough stuff they’d been seeing in most of the other scenes. But 10 days after we interviewed and photographed her, the young mom relapsed and died of a heroin overdose.

 

Q: How was the editing process handled? What ethical dilemmas were the hardest decisions? Did the story go through approval by lawyers?

 

Horn: The editing process followed a similar path. We dug into all the raw reporting, photos and video and tried to make decisions that would help us tell the story without being gratuitous. Obviously, we had to make some tough calls. At times, we did consult with our lawyers. As for the hardest decisions, one that comes to mind is the handling of the story about the young mother we profiled at Children’s Hospital. She had been drug-free for a year and was living in a treatment center with her infant daughter. This was supposed to be a scene that gave readers some hope and a break from the rough stuff they’d been seeing in most of the other scenes. But 10 days after we interviewed and photographed her, the young mom relapsed and died of a heroin overdose. The reporter and photographer who had met with her were heartbroken. They reached out to the woman’s family a few days later and talked about what happened. They also talked about how we might handle this scene in the story. Should we drop it? Or keep it with a short epilogue acknowledging what had happened? We all agreed we couldn’t publish as is in our real-time narrative with no acknowledgment of her death. The family made the decision easier. They said we should include the scene. They thought it might help people better understand the tragedy of the epidemic.

 

Q: How did you make the decision to show the faces of children who were born addicted to heroin or to homes with those living with addiction? What principles did you consider?

 

Horn: Names and faces of children were only used with the consent of their parents or other legal guardians. We felt it was important to include the stories of children because the heroin epidemic has taken such a toll on them. In just the week we covered, dozens of children’s services cases were opened because of heroin-related issues.

 

Q: What ethical dilemmas did reporters and photographers face when they went into situations like homes and hospitals? How did reporters and photographers approach victims for consent?

 

Horn: We talked a lot about this before reporters launched on their assignments, but ultimately we all were guided by the common sense and decency we try to bring to any story we cover. The goal was to be fair and to treat people with respect. At the same time, we knew we would be covering some people on their worst days – heroin is destroying their lives, after all – and that we’d need to include material showing what those days are like. That’s the balancing act this story required. We tried our best to get it right.

Avoid simple solutions to mass shootings

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The most difficult task that journalists and journalism educators face in the days ahead may be to recognize their own biases about guns and challenge their notions with facts.

 

In the days ahead, politicians and the groups that sway them will stake their ground for and against stronger gun control laws. They will argue for and against Second Amendment freedoms and for and against stronger registration laws.  But they won’t touch the complexities that lie beneath the surface including mental illness.

 

I train journalists around the country how to cover issues involving guns, ammunition and gun violence. I have taken hundreds of journalists to gun ranges to allow them to fire weapons and learn how guns work.  I am not a gun advocate. I am a journalism advocate. And, I am no longer surprised to learn how little journalists know about this subject that they cover so often.

 

USA Today estimated there is a mass killing about every two weeks in the U.S. Most are not public events like the shooting in Las Vegas.  Most are domestic killings or violence in the workplace. Most victims know their killer and – despite what family members and neighbors tell reporters in the hours after a shooting – most mass killers leave a long trail of clues prior to the shooting.

 

Mass killings attract blanket coverage from media, as they should.  But mass killings like the one unfolding in Las Vegas represent a fraction of the annual death toll in the United States. Look at this map, updated constantly by Gunviolence.org, a non-profit group that has been tracking gun deaths for years.  This is the map as of mid-afternoon Monday, Oct. 1.

 

Avoid simple solutions

There is no single solution to stemming gun deaths in America.  Some gun violence is linked to mental illness, but the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of crime.

 

Researcher Heather Stuart wrote that the public commonly consumes a media diet that includes the narrative of the crazed killer who snaps.  She writes, “These experiences are mostly vicarious, through movie depictions of crazed killers or real life dramas played out with disturbing frequency on the nightly news. Indeed, the global reach of news ensures that the viewing public will have a steady diet of real-life violence linked to mental illness. The public most fears violence that is random, senseless, and unpredictable and they associate this with mental illness. Indeed, they are more reassured to know that someone was stabbed to death in a robbery, than stabbed to death by a psychotic man.”

 

In fact, the widely cited MacArthur Violent Risk Assessment study found, “the prevalence of violence among those with a major mental disorder who did not abuse substances was indistinguishable from their non-substance abusing neighborhood controls. A concurrent substance abuse disorder doubled the risk of violence. Those with schizophrenia had the lowest occurrence of violence over the course of the year (14.8%), compared to those with a bipolar disorder (22.0%) or major depression (28.5%).”

 

Even more disturbing than the familiar relationship between killer and victim, even more disturbing the trends in demographics of the killer, even more disturbing than the trail of clues criminals leave about their growing violent tendencies, the people around the killer ignore or fail to recognize the issues.

 

The Los Angeles Times reported late Monday that the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had a family link to violent crime. His father was, for a time, on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for bank robbery.  While it is an interesting factoid, it may or may not have any relationship to this mass shooting.  The same is true for Paddock’s penchant for gambling.  Police say he frequented Vegas casinos playing $100-a-hand poker. The details fill out his biography without supplying any clarity about a motive for the shooting.

 

Get it Right

For journalists and educators to find a respected voice in the current conversation, they have to sound as if they know what they are talking about. The first clue that you are clueless is when you interchange the phrases automatic and semi-automatic in describing weapons. In this Las Vegas case, the difference is magnified because it may turn out that the shooter was firing a fully automatic rifle.  If so, it would be highly unusual. Most killers use semi-automatic weapons which are far less difficult to buy and do not require special licensing and permitting as fully auto machines do.

 

Some experts speculate that the Vegas shooter may have been using a “trigger crank,” which is an attachment that a shooter could use on a legal AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that would allow a shooter to fire more rapidly.  If that is true, no doubt a movement to ban such devices, which are already rarely used, will gather. That is the sort of “quick solution” that will make headlines and do next to nothing to lower the murder rate.

 

Journalists should be literate about calibers. The caliber measures the bullet at the base.  The bullet is the projectile that comes out the barrel of the weapon. The casing is the brass device that ejects from the weapon when a weapon fires a round. I heard a CNN reporter say Vegas police were documenting the casings on the ground, when I suppose what he meant was bullet fragments on the ground.  The casings would all be inside the hotel room a long way away.

 

In another instance, I heard one “expert” tell a cable news anchor that the police will begin tracking the history of the weapons that authorities found in that hotel room. He made it sound like it would be as easy as tracking a car license.  It isn’t.  There is no national gun database. That is by design. What there is is a huge warehouse complex full of paper records. As Business Insider explained it is easier to track a bag of infected lettuce than it is to track a gun in America.

 

Congress set up the toothless lion known as the Federal Firearms License System that applies to retail gun sellers but not to private sellers.  And the retailers hold on to the sales records, not send them to a central database.

 

The rush to legislate

Within hours of the shooting,  everyone from celebrities to lawmakers were calling for new restrictions on gun ownership. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut demanded that Congress “Get off its ass and do something.”

 

But if this case mirrors past incidents, including the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, the American response will be to buy more guns.  Gun sales skyrocketed before the 2016 election and since Trump was elected, the sales slowed down after he assured the public he would protect their gun ownership rights.

 

Gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right in the United States.  The Supreme Court has spoken to this issue many times and never flinched in its leaning.  The Court has said Second Amendment rights, like First Amendment rights, may be reasonably restricted.  But, Americans disagree on what is reasonable. The foundational belief that gun ownership is a basic right was underscored Monday when, stock prices for companies that make guns rose sharply hours after the shooting in Las Vegas as investors anticipated a public call for gun restrictions, which historically means a hike in gun sales.

New drone journalism ethics policy emerges from Poynter workshops

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This year, Poynter organized four workshops that trained more than 325 journalists and journalism educators how to safely and ethically fly drones. Almost a third of our graduates have passed the Federal Aviation Administration Part 107 drone pilot license exam.

In addition to exam prep and hands-on drone flight training, our partners and I vowed to produce a “code of drone journalism ethics” that would take into account journalism and photojournalism ethics policies but add the legal considerations for flying in government-controlled airspace and safety concerns that come with remote controlled flight.

Drone journalism code of ethics

Drone journalists should adhere to federal, state and local laws with safety concerns and the ethical decision-making embodied in the codes of ethics adopted by the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio and Television Digital News Association.

Drone Journalism ethics should be even more stringent than other journalism ethics. It is one form of journalism that is legally regulated by government authorities who control airspace.

Consider these guidelines:

 

Safety is the first concern. Do not endanger people, animals or property.
Drone pilots who are operating as commercial operators have an obligation to seek their FAA Part 107 license. The pilot should obtain adequate insurance coverage for property damage and injury that could result from drone flights. Journalists who are generating content for their newsroom should not claim that they are recreational pilots in order to avoid licensure requirements.

 

Newsrooms should not encourage others to fly illegally.
Newsrooms should discourage drone flights that violate FAA regulations by declining to publish, broadcast or post still images or video which, although legally obtained by the news organization from a third party, may contain evidence of those violations (i.e. flights over people, night flights). Not rewarding unauthorized drone use with public recognition may help to discourage similar violations by others. If the images or video that have been captured through improper means are of such high news value that the journalists deem them newsworthy, the journalist or news organization should clearly explain why those images are newsworthy despite the techniques utilized to capture them.

 

Would you “do that” if you were capturing the image while on the ground?
If you would not peer over a fence, look into a window or enter private property, how would you justify capturing the same image because you are airborne?

 

Respect privacy.
The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics says, “Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. The pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.” What is your journalist purpose? How is this tool helping you to tell a more complete story?

Respect the integrity of the photographic moment.
Drones have the potential to interrupt events, especially when hovering low. While photographing subjects, drone journalists should not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.

 

Do not improperly enhance.
Music has the potential to set an editorial tone. How does that editorial tone affect the truth you are conveying?Journalists should not add natural sound to drone video unless the sound was captured at the same time and place as the drone video was captured. Carefully consider how slow motion or speeding up effects might affect the editorial integrity of the video. Slow motion can appear dramatic and change the context of a news story. Video that has been sped up may add false urgency.

 

Newsrooms should recognize that the pilot in command makes the decision about whether a flight can be accomplished safely.
Newsrooms should not ask or pressure a drone pilot to fly in a way that the pilot in command considers to be unsafe or legally questionable.

 

Drone journalism pilots in command should not be expected to report or perform other duties while commanding an aircraft.
Safe drone flight should be the pilot’s main concern while operating a drone or overseeing performing pre-flight checks.

 

Drone journalists have an obligation to hone their flight skills and “stay sharp.”
Practice flying in various atmospheric conditions. FAA sectional maps change and the FAA is constantly updating flight and airspace restrictions. Pilots should stay current on changes to the evolving legal landscape regarding drone operations.

 

Drone journalists have an obligation to be certain their aircraft and gear are in good repair.
Pre-flight and post-flight safety inspection checks are a must. Pilots should inspect props, motors, batteries and the aircraft body. Do not allow cost-cutting to compromise safe flight. If you cannot afford to fly safely, you cannot afford to fly.

 

Coach others.
The public’s perception of drone flights depends on how professionally pilots operate in these early days of this emerging technology. If the public sees that drones are needlessly invading privacy and putting people at risk, there is no doubt that voters will pressure public officials to clamp down on drone operations. It is in your interest and it is in the public’s interest for you to coach other operators, especially other journalists, when you see them flying unsafely, illegally or unethically.

 

These guidelines were developed by:

• Al Tompkins/Poynter

• Mickey Osterreicher/General Counsel for the National Press Photographers Association

• Matt Waite/Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Dr. Kathleen Culver/Assistant Professor and Director, Center for Journalism Ethics, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication

• Jon Resnick, DJI

The guidelines were the product of training powered by funding from the Google News Lab.

This is re-posted here through an agreement with The Poynter Institute. You can find the original post here. At poynter.org, you can find an array of ethics resources and training opportunities. 

Weekly press must help extricate readers from ‘silos of ideology’

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This column appeared April newsletter of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.

If you haven’t read Melissa Hale-Spencer’s article in the spring issue of Grassroots Editor, take a look at it, especially the last two complete paragraphs in the first column. In those two paragraphs, Melissa prevented my usual rant when only the first part of Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote about newspapers and government is mentioned. She also raised two extremely significant issues when she quoted the often-ignored final sentence of Jefferson’s 1787 comment: “But I should mean that every man should receive these papers and be capable of reading them.”

 

Hale-Spencer then added her 2017 comment that, 230 years later, “we still need a literate public that reads many and competing news sources. It’s hard work but that’s how the truth comes out.”

 

I’ll suggest that we need a public that’s more than just “literate” in the literal sense. It also needs to be media literate to the point where it understands how news stories are put together and why journalists make certain choices about what to include and exclude, and how to display a story. It needs to know what to expect from the news media, and what not to expect.

 

Jefferson’s second point, about the need to read competing news sources, is equally important. Hale-Spencer is right on target when she notes both the difficulty and the need for this. It is, indeed, “how the truth comes out” when people are enticed from the “news silos” in which they’ve taken refuge and encounter new perspectives about their world.

 

Both media literacy and the problems posed by “silos” and “echo chambers” came up at a March 31 conference on “Truth, Trust & the Future of Journalism” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. No one had suggestions for how larger media outlets might deal with either issue, and only a few people seemed receptive when I mentioned during the course of the day that community weeklies were in an entirely different position and might be able to act effectively.

 

For example: Several speakers said that media literacy is especially needed now because of the current contentious relationship between the press and the president. There were suggestions that media literacy education should start in middle schools or even earlier…something that community weekly editors could certainly champion with their local school boards, not to mention offering themselves or staff members as classroom resources.

 

No one had an answer to the question of how to connect with “moderate” Trump supporters who get their national news only from outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, which echo what they already believe. But none of the panelists mentioned the role that community weeklies might play in getting people out of those “echo chambers” by providing more coverage of how national news developments impact those local readers – thereby offering a perspective that differs from the “echo chambers.”

 

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post and formerly the public editor of The New York Times, noted that the level of trust in the media is greater for the outlets that people use than it is for “the media” in general. Others noted that with trust comes credibility, which puts community newspapers in position to offer material that just might make people think about ideas they haven’t considered previously.

 

Marty Kaiser, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editor from 1997 to 2015 and now a senior fellow for the Democracy Fund, said he was most scared in the current climate by people who fail to understand why stories – and ideas – they disagree with are even in the paper. That brings me back to news media transparency and efforts to educate the audience and, in that process, help people think about new ideas.

 

The New York Times’ occasional series entitled “Why’d You Do That,” in which the paper’s public editor asks staffers to explain a significant newsroom project or development, is one possible approach. So is a regular “Letter from the Editor” and any number of other ways of telling your readers what you’re doing and why. Or even one rather wild suggestion that reporters might annotate their stories online as they’re working on them and, in essence, try to open-source them. Inevitably, the discussion raised questions about coverage of President Trump and what (not whether) new approaches to presidential coverage are needed. These were among the responses:

  • Ken Vogel, chief investigative reporter for POLITICO: the news media have to cover what the president says, but shouldn’t call any of it “a lie”– rather, their reports need to show the audience why it’s a lie.
  • Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT: fact-checking is crucial, a point that was underscored by the presence on a later panel of Michelle Lee, one of two Washington Post reporters who write “The Fact Checker” weekly column.
  • Lucas Graves, an assistant professor in UW-Madison’s J-School and author of a 2016 book, Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism: reality and accuracy don’t always lend themselves to “balanced” reporting but, while there’s no easy way to deal with this, journalists have to find a way to be fair.
  • Stephen Ward, a distinguished lecturer in ethics at the University of British Columbia and a media ethicist and author with an international reputation: reporters’ attitudes and impressions – and, perhaps, biases – are a greater concern than factual errors.
  • Joanne Miller, associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota: reporters need to avoid reporting their preconceived notions that “fit the narrative.”
  • Charles Sykes, who stepped down last December after 23 years as one of Wisconsin’s top-rated and influential conservative talk show hosts (and an outspoken critic of the Trump Administration): President Trump’s strategy is not just to get people to believe in him but, rather, to “annihilate the capacity to reason,” and it’s the political/ ideological Right that will have to take the lead in opposing this.
  • Ward, again: there is a need to develop norms that can be applied to analytical pieces, and a need to teach more about how to do good ones.

And, finally, two comments on what’s necessary regardless of the obstacles erected by the Trump Administration: journalists must “speak Truth to Power” from both sides of the political spectrum (Sykes); and, journalism’s purpose must remain to hold powerful people and powerful institutions accountable (Kaiser).

 

Amen to all of that (well, maybe not to the online annotation of stories as they’re being written)…with the hope that ISWNE members in particular, and the weekly press in general, will somehow find the time, the space and the will to assume a leadership role that desperately needs to be filled in regard both to media literacy and efforts to extricate people from their “silos of ideology.”

 

This column was reprinted with permission of Dave Gordon,  2016-17 president of ISWNE (SJMC Class of 1972, Ph.D. ). Information about the organization is available at www.iswne.org, where the spring issue of Grassroots Editor is also posted.