Category: Feature articles

For centuries, the town of Vishakhapatnam in Southern India, or Vizag as it was known until recently, was a quaint little place on the Bay of Bengal, with a beautiful ocean view and an active port. The old town was comprised of Hindu temples dedicated to the goddess Kali and surrounded by the famous Chintapalli forests and Eastern Ghat Mountains.

Today Vishakhapatnam is a bustling city of two million with a large naval ship yard and a steel plant; it is also home to Andhra University, named after the state of Andhra Pradesh where the city is located. Established in 1926, Andhra University is one of the oldest universities in India, It has 70 departments and five campus colleges and an enrollment of 10,000 students. It is best known for its second vice chancellor, world-renowned philosopher, Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan, who went on to become the president of post-independent India.

Amid the shady coconut groves and old colonial structures of the university stands a modest three story, rain-stained building which houses the department of journalism with three full-time faculty members and about 60 students.

Students in the department come mostly from nearby small towns and villages like Vijaywada, Vijaynagara, Salure, Srikakalum, Narshipatnam, and Rajamundry. The department of journalism is one of the newest departments on campus, started in 1984. Professor Ramakrishna Challa has been teaching journalism here for the past 14 years. He has recently developed a course on journalism ethics which, he says, has become necessary part of the curriculum given the changing nature of global media and its impact on even a place like Vishakhapatnam.

Challa uses examples from his own life, which also gives us a microcosm of the larger changes taking place in media in the Indian subcontinent. He grew up in a tiny, thickly-forested tribal hamlet of Rajupakalu, about 50 kilometers or 25 miles from Vishakhapatnam’s town center. Families in his hamlet survived on subsistence farming, with no electricity, no schools, and no newspapers. Challa studied under a lantern and did not go to school until he was in sixth grade.

“I did not see a newspaper until I was thirteen and then I started reading newspapers regularly to expose myself to different languages,” he says.

Today, Challa says, Rajupakalu has 10 television sets and access to all major satellite channels – including channels in Telegu, the local language of the region, English, and Hindi.   Electricity has arrived, and ten copies of local newspapers are delivered every day. The government has built an elementary school four kilometers from the village, resulting in a dramatic rise in literacy.

“What is most important,” Challa says, is the rise in the kind of literacy where audiences now understand media content, which is “different from when I was growing up where literacy meant people could sign their names.”

In mofussils (small communities) like Rajupakalu, media has become more powerful than schools, government administration, and police. “People now look to media to give them both information and to provide redress to their problems,” says Challa. “People willingly go to media to seek information and to ask them to focus on their problems.”

For example, during a recent outbreak  of H1 N1 flu in India,  people in even small towns like Rajupakalu and Vishakhapatnam regularly sought information about the flu from newspapers and television, rather than depending on word-of-mouth.

Information “from the skies”

Changes in the past 15 years have been dramatic, says Challa, who worked for more than ten years as a journalist with a local newspaper, Deccan Herald, before starting his Ph.D. program at Andhra University.

“When I started my career as a journalist in 1985, there were four newspapers in Vishakhapatnam, both English and Telegu, and now we have four English newspapers, seven Telegu dailies, six local TV channels news, ten television news channels from Hyderabad, the capital of the state, who have reporters in Vishakhapatnam,” says Challa.

In 1985 there were no more than ten journalists working in Vishakhapatnam; in 2009 there are more than 500 print and electronic journalists living and working in the city for various newspapers and news channels, including the major Telegu, English, and Hindi cable news networks.

Like the rest of the economy, Indian media has been transformed by the rapid liberalization and deregulation that began in the early 1990s. While a vibrant and healthy democracy for 60 years, Indian economy had socialist leanings. However, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the Indian government of then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, faced a fiscal crisis and was forced to make policy changes which relaxed restrictions on multinationals.

Some of those companies then expanded and invested in the Indian market. It was the ‘onslaught from the skies’ that radically changed Indian media with the introduction of international satellite-distributed television. International television arrived with CNN’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Between 1991 and 1995, several Indian satellite-based television services, prominently among them Zee TV and Sony TV, were launched.

Consequently, the Indian media economy changed considerably. Foreign channels like CNN and BBC World, and domestic channels like Zee TV, NDTV, and Sun TV, suddenly and explosively increased the demand for cable.

Before 1991, Indian viewers had received only two channels, but by 2008 they were receiving more than 100 channels. Before the policy reforms, Indian audiences had depended solely on a state-owned public broadcasting entity called Doordarshan to provide news; after reforms, Indian audiences could choose among several 24-hour news channels. Today, India is the third largest cable TV viewing nation in the world — after China and the US — with more than 110 million cable and TV households at the end of 2008.

Newspapers on the Rise

Unlike in the West where there has been a drop in newspaper circulation, India has witnessed an explosive growth in the print industry. With a sale of 107 million newspapers daily, India is the biggest newspaper market in the world and accounts for over 60% of world newspaper sales. And the competition among newspapers has drastically changed; major newspaper publishers and media companies have expanded into geographic regions (to competing cities and smaller markets like Vishakhapatnam), initiating price wars and strategically marketing campaigns to specific readerships.

The biggest beneficiaries of the 1990s economic reforms have been the vernacular press and regional language TV channels. In metropolitan cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, cable packages can include up to 20 regional language channels, catering to a linguistically vast and diverse audience. Regional and vernacular media continue to garner the largest circulations.

In Vishakapatnam alone, there are three city-run cable news stations — Cable Vision, SDTV, and Media Vision — which cover local politics, events, weather, and human interest stories. Then there are HMTV, ETV, Eanadu TV, Maha TV, NTV, TV-9, TV-1, TV-5, Gemini TV, Teja TV, Zee News Telegu, and Sakshi TV, which all broadcast from Hyderabad, the state’s capital, and have reporters around Andhra Pradesh.

Also available to readers are several newspapers in Telegu: Andhra Jyoti, Vaarta, Andhra Bhoomi, Andhra Prabha, Vishal Andhra, Praja Sakti, and Tehse. The major English newspapers are The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle and Bay News, in addition to several smaller weeklies. (Consider trimming this to a “head count” of stations & papers, since the names won’t mean much to most readers.)

Ethics for a new generation of journalists

The expansion and saturation of media has made it imperative for academics to teach journalism in different ways. “At Andhra University we decided to organize a board of studies, comprised of academics and journalists, to help us develop a course in journalism ethics,” notes Challa. “When there were ten journalists in the city, there were no immediate pressures of discussing ethics, but with 500 journalists, ethics has become one of the most important topics of discussion.”

The Journalism department at Andhra University now has more than 200 alumni who are employed in various news channels and newspapers. “They tell us that no professional training of journalists is complete without training them in ethics,” says Challa.

The most pressing issue for educators, Challa explains, is that the rapid growth in media industry has not meant better quality journalism. “There can be a lot of coverage about one topic but it is done in a shoddy manner and stories are routinely sensationalized to the point that it can no longer be considered news.”

Professor Challa gave an example of a recent story by a Telegu news channel. A television reporter followed a man who had left his home in a village at the age of six, boarded a train and travelled to Delhi, India’s capital, 800 miles away. He reappeared 20 years later and asked the local news channel to track his parents. The reporter located his parents and siblings — now residing in an adjacent village – but they refused to be part of the news story.

To many viewers, the reporter has appeared to be harassing the family by following them around on-camera. “At one point [the reporter] asked the father if he would be willing to take a DNA test to prove or disprove his paternity. Such meaningless but bizarre stories have become common,” says Challa.

The department at Andhra University currently has 19 doctoral students and some of them are conducting research in journalism ethics on topics such as credibility, accountability, and independence in local newspapers and sensationalism of news.

“It is difficult to do research on journalism in India,” says Challa, “Unlike in other countries, we don’t have easy availability of archival materials, and while discussions of journalism ethics had always existed in newsrooms, researching and teaching has been a challenge.” In the main university library there are limited collections of books on journalism, no research journals on media and communication, and only two books on journalism ethics.

“Resources are limited,” says Challa enthusiastically. “But we must keep up with the changing times and make teaching journalism ethics a priority.”

SHAKUNTATO RAO is Professor of Communication at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, USA. She was a visiting lecturer at Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and at La Universidad del Zulia in Maracaibo in November 2008.

Media law expert Robert Drechsel reviews the controversial decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a federal law that prohibited corporations from spending general treasury funds to advocate the election or defeat of political candidates. His own “rather strong libertarian tendencies notwithstanding,” Drechsel sides with dissenting members of the Supreme Court. He argues that the ruling reveals the limits of libertarianism on political speech issues.

When the U.S. Supreme Court uses the power of judicial review to strike down a major federal statute and in the process overrules two of its own recent precedents, it’s significant news.

When every justice who votes to do so was appointed by Republican presidents critical of judicial activism and advocating a limited role for the judiciary, it’s bigger news.

When the decision gives major First Amendment rights to business corporations — themselves entities created by government — it’s even bigger news.

And when the decision explicitly grants those corporations the right to spend as much corporate money as they please on communication designed to get certain candidates elected or defeated, it’s a blockbuster.

This, of course, is precisely what happened on Jan. 21 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission when the Court by a 5-4 margin struck down a federal law (and by logical extension any similar state laws) that prohibited corporations from spending general treasury funds to advocate the election or defeat of political candidates. In doing so, the Court overruled a 20-year-old precedent to the contrary and a seven-year-old precedent that had explicitly upheld the constitutionality of the very law now being struck down.

Eight justices, however, upheld a separate provision requiring those same corporations to disclose the sources of the funds they use to pay for their advocacy communication, and to identify themselves in any such communication.

Citizens United, an ideological advocacy group, produced an attack documentary movie designed to help defeat Hillary Clinton in primary elections for the Democratic presidential nomination on 2008. Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation. Therefore, spending corporate money to buy broadcast and cable advertising for the movie trailer might have run afoul the campaign finance law’s prohibition on using corporate treasury funds for “electioneering communication” before a primary election, or at least required Citizens United to disclose the sources of its funding.

Fearing possible legal action by the Federal Election Commission, Citizens United sued to prevent any FEC action on grounds that the law would be unconstitutional as applied if used against the group. Citizens United lost, but appealed to the Supreme Court.

Five opinions

The Supreme Court decision is composed of five separate opinions — the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy (joined in its entirety by Justices Roberts, Scalia and Alito and in all but one respect by Justice Thomas); concurring opinions written by Roberts and Scalia; an opinion by Thomas which would have gone farther than the majority opinion by also striking down the disclosure requirements; and an opinion by Justice Stevens (joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Ginsburg) agreeing with the disclosure holding but vehemently dissenting from all other aspects of the majority decision.

The five opinions lay bare some of the most fundamental issues surrounding freedom of expression.  Among them:

•   should we be primarily concerned about protecting speech itself regardless of who is speaking?

•   or should we take into account who is speaking? More specifically, should it matter whether the speaker is a human being or a corporation?

•   or should we focus primarily on the needs and protection of the audience, and not hesitate to adopt restrictions and regulations that maximize what are perceived to be the best interests of an informed citizenry?

•   should we embrace libertarianism and be guided first and foremost by the principle that speakers must be protected from government because that is the best way to guarantee a robust marketplace of ideas and avoid paternalistic treatment of the audience?

•   or, if we decide to act in the audience’s best interest, who should we trust to decide what that interest is, what action is needed, and what expectations of social responsibility should be placed on communicators?

Protect speech — from any source The majority built its argument largely around the idea that it is most important to protect speech, regardless of its source. It was thus a short step to concluding that Congress could not single out speakers for special regulation simply because they were corporate or because of fears that audience members and society at large would be ill served by the substance and dominance of the views showered on them by corporate speakers pursuing corporate agendas.

Thus the majority combined its solicitude for speech per se with its rejection of speaker-based rationales for regulation, and assumed that viewers and readers have the intelligence and rationality to make sound decisions in their own best interests regardless of what corporate speakers might want to manipulate them into doing or believing.

In other words, the majority took a libertarian position, blind to the enormous advantage in resources many corporate speakers enjoy, unpersuaded by the obvious fact that corporations are not human beings, and unwilling even to differentiate between purely business corporations and corporations formed either to pursue specific ideological goals or function as “press.”

And the majority was willing to equate spending money with speech. (The law in question, it should be noted, did not regulate either speech or any media directly; it regulated corporations’ freedom to buy public access for their speech regarding candidates for public office.  But to the Court, this was of no importance.)

The dissenting justices saw things dramatically differently both in factual and theoretical terms. They correctly noted, for example, that the law did not flatly prohibit all corporate speech related to elections, but left corporations free to form separately-funded political action committees (PACs), which were then free to spend money on precisely the kind of “electioneering communication” that could not be funded with general corporate resources.

They bludgeoned the majority for its all-or-nothing approach to the campaign finance law and its failure to distinguish among types of corporations.

Corruption concerns legitimate

Above all, the dissenters accepted the argument that regulation of corporate political spending was justified by concerns over corruption or the appearance of corruption that corporate spending for or against candidates could create, the potential distortion of political debate resulting from many corporations’ superior resources, and the diminution of the role of citizens and even political parties and candidates themselves in the electoral process that could result from free corporate spending.

In other words, important First Amendment interests for citizens and society could legitimately trump any supposed First Amendment rights enjoyed by corporations.

Yet eight justices agreed that the government can impose disclosure requirements on corporate speakers in the interest of helping citizens assess the validity of and possible bias in information flowing to them. Such a position nicely accorded with the dissenters’ audience- and society-based concerns.

But four of the justices in the majority relaxed their libertarian stance when it came to disclosure, which they upheld partially by acknowledging disclosure’s helpfulness to listeners and viewers, partially by seeing disclosure as less speech-restrictive than the spending restrictions (even though the law specifically compelled speech), and partially by noting that even disclosure requirements could be unconstitutional when applied in some circumstances but not to Citizens United.

Only Justice Thomas stood on his libertarian principles and objected to the disclosure requirements.

Limits of Libertarianism Who is correct in this monumental struggle? My own rather strong libertarian tendencies notwithstanding, I side with the dissent from both legal and ethical standpoints.

Setting aside the question of whether spending money and speaking should be equated, we are talking here about corporate speech by ALL corporations, even those whose general purpose is purely commercial and non-ideological, and whose only plausible reason for supporting or opposing specific candidates has to do with pursuing the very business and commercial interests they were created to pursue.

Here in particular, simple libertarianism fails us with its blindness to the resource advantage such corporations have as they enter electoral politics, and the inherently selfish (I don’t necessarily mean this in a negative sense) interests they pursue — resources amassed thanks in part to advantages of the corporate form granted them by the state.

The Court has now in effect elevated the rights of corporations over those of individuals.  The majority, for example, dismissed the argument that letting corporations spend general treasury money on electioneering speech would harm shareholders who object.

The result is that the corporation itself enjoys First Amendment protection for its campaign communication spending, but if shareholders objected on ideological grounds, courts would likely see no First Amendment issue precisely because the corporation is a private entity.  Only government is limited by the First Amendment.

Many corporations — Citizens United among them — have been formed specifically to pursue ideological missions. Further, the press itself generally takes corporate form, and, in today’s media world the “press” may be increasingly difficult to define as a discrete corporate entity.

This point was not lost on the Court’s majority. Indeed, the majority strenuously asserted that were it to uphold the law, the press itself would be vulnerable to restriction of its political speech. This is not necessarily an idle concern. It is reflected in an amicus brief filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in support of Citizens United.

But the Reporters Committee urged the Court to distinguish among types of corporate speakers, not to dismantle the campaign finance law. That argument was to no avail.  The majority insisted it must be an all or nothing proposition — either ALL corporations get protection, or none.

Ludicrous implication

Such a conclusion is neither logically, legally (as the dissenters demonstrate) nor ethically compelled.  Indeed, one of the case’s ironies is that at the very moment the activist majority overturned major precedent in the name of the First Amendment, it seemed to imply that any other decision would leave it helpless to respond if Congress decided to expand the campaign finance law to cover the news media themselves. Surely that is ludicrous.  Nor were most of the justices in the majority concerned that leaving the disclosure requirements in place could harm the press.

There are, of course, positives. One might hope that the decision will mean the end of patently phony issue advertisements used by corporate entities to circumvent the now defunct law. Perhaps the decision will lead corporations to be more honest and candid in their campaign communication. In this sense, the decision may place greater pressure on corporations to behave ethically since they no longer need fear punishment.

I, for one, remain skeptical.

Likewise, we can expect more legal struggle over precisely how much disclosure can be constitutionally required of corporations. The Citizens United court, however, was truly united in its support for disclosure. So plausible challenges to disclosure of donors should arise only where there is clear evidence that donors will be subject to serious harassment and danger if their identities are disclosed, which would be a legitimate concern.

Ironically, only a week before it handed down Citizens United, the Court barred televising — even from one courtroom to another — of the Proposition 8 trial held before a federal judge in San Francisco.

The 5-4 vote to do so followed precisely the same split among justices as Citizens United. The majority accepted the argument that failure to prevent televising the trial would cause witnesses irreparable harm; the dissenters persuasively objected that the majority had no basis for such a conclusion and noted that no witness had even objected to the courtroom-to-courtroom television.

Would it be overly cynical to suggest that what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander?

Or is the libertarian majority happy to trust the audience to behave rationally when hearing corporate electioneering, but not when even a handful of individuals might actually be able to watch a civil trial regarding an extraordinarily important public issue?

ROBERT E. DRECHSEL is professor of mass communication law in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1983. He holds a B.A. in journalism and an M.A. and Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota. He served as director of the School from 1991 to 1998. In 1999-2000, he was director of the behavioral science and law major on campus, and director of the criminal justice certificate program. Drechsel has been an affiliated professor of law since 2000. His research has focused on tort law and constitutional law affecting mass communication, and on reporter-source interaction in state trial courts.

The Haitian earthquake coverage raises many issues of media coverage – its quality, limitations, the graphic images, the attempt to report amid chaos.

It also raises another issue: What is the place of God in the coverage?

Why God? Because with every disaster, too many journalists, aware of their religiously inclined viewers, fall over themselves to agree with, and to repeat, clichés about the need for prayer; or they report how God performed miracles in allowing some people to emerge unscathed from the rubble.

Such “miracle stories” conflict conspicuously with the horror and tragedy around them. God only knows why impoverished areas of the world are burdened further by horrific disasters, like Haiti. So why do journalists think they can read God’s mind, or invoke his help?

Easy piety

Recently, I watched uncomfortably as an overtly sympathetic CNN anchor listened to, and agreed with, a spokesman for a religious humanitarian agency who stressed the need for belief in God and prayer to help the Haitians.

This is only one example.

Across American television, a supposedly secular news media goes soft whenever anyone mentions religion in connection to a tragedy. Reporters, anchors, talk-show hosts – most adopt a pious look and speak in hushed tones when God and prayer are invoked.

Why? Isn’t it possible to express compassion for disaster victims without sentimentality or without supporting particular religious beliefs about how God acts in the world?

Why didn’t the CNN anchor pursue the discussion of religion by asking: If praying to God means God can intervene in the world, why didn’t God intervene to prevent this disaster?

Why don’t journalists ask pious religious spokespersons:  If God spared some people through miracles, why these people? What does that say about the dead folks? Isn’t this winnowing of survivors arbitrary?

Journalists tend to analyze any and every interpretation of major events, so why not specific religious interpretations? Often the interpretation is a very simplistic view, which depicts God as a deity who goes about picking winners and losers among the rubble.

If people want to bring religion into the media’s discussion of disaster, fine. But let’s bring in many theological viewpoints and treat the topic critically and intelligently. Let’s probe the difficult question that always arises whenever terrible events happen: How can such events be squared with a religious or theological approach to the world?

I am not arguing against coverage of the religious dimension of a disaster story. I am not saying reporters should callously challenge distraught victims when they speak devoutly of God. If citizens gather at churches to pray for divine help, reporters should cover such events. My perspective is not based on a denial of the existence of God. I believe my point is valid, whether of not one believes in God or in the power of prayer.

I am questioning journalistic acquiescence in an easy piety and a superficial religious sentimentality that is far from reality. At times, this religious piety is just another case of the media’s manipulation of emotions to sell the news, or to ingratiate themselves with audiences. I want journalists to maintain their critical and independent approach to stories, even during tragedies that tug on their emotions.

No one wants to take away the belief in God from desperate people in a disaster. That’s not the point. The point is that the journalist’s job is not to join the pious.

The journalist’s job is to report the facts of the story, the human pain and struggle, and what can be done about it, here on earth.

In a provocative essay, Sue Steinberg, an experienced network executive and producer who helped found MTV, questions whether the media today is still committed to advancing women’s rights and questioning stereotypes. She asks: Does the press not have an ethical responsibility to depict young women with respect? Shouldn’t the press focus on the political qualifications of women in public life – not their physical features?

In the early 1970s I came to Madison, Wisconsin where sexual politics were taken as seriously as ending the war in Vietnam. It was a tumultuous time in thinking, writing and acting.  Those times and issues rocked our world.

During this wave of feminism, writers and heroes – like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan (author of The Feminist Mystique) and New York senator Bella Abzug – were moving forward in the quest for equality of the sexes both at home and in the workplace. The key element was raising consciousness. The girls on campus, with whom I studied, played and spent four very special years, believed whole-heartedly that we would become fully realized women. Whether we wanted to be wives, mothers, or professionals, the choice was ours to make.

How much of this decades-long quest, and its results, still matters today for our press?  Is it the press’s responsibility to both report the facts and to break harmful stereotypes of women that encourage them to accept submissive and/or dangerous roles? Should the press perpetuate the myth of the “perfect woman,” a myth that still colors the self-esteem of women, young and old?

Some journalists do a fair job of representing the real world of the modern American female.  They report, and their opinion and editorial sections are clearly delineated.  However, these balanced media outlets are unfortunately few and far between.  And, they have their own agendas as well.

It is not the responsibility of the “celebrity press” to politicize the portrayal of women. While much has been written and broadcast about the unconscionable messages sent to women and young girls regarding the standards of beauty and popularity, there remains a larger issue of moral and social responsibility.  I believe that our media does a good job of presenting both sides in editorializing and publishing studies and articles written by authorities.  However, I seriously doubt that the findings really make their way into mainstream journalism in a meaningful way.

Unrealistic standards

In viewing the popular fashion magazines currently on the stands, it is painfully obvious that young women are held to unrealistic standards as perpetuated by both advertising and the media. The gold standard is for girls to be very thin and extraordinarily beautiful. Add to that, the praise heaped on girls who are both athletic and academically relentless in their pursuit of approval and praise. I recently listened to a report on a study including interviews with adolescent girls who admitted that they had sex because they saw a lot of sexual content and/or innuendo on TV shows such as “Gossip Girl” and “Melrose Place.”

There is a great deal of money to be made in hawking the wares of fashion, relationships, the comings and goings of celebrities, and of course consumerism.  Teenage spending power contributes a lot to the bottom line of clothing manufacturers, cosmetic companies, and hawkers of health products, including pharmaceuticals. Both print and electronic media follow the money.  So where does ethics fit in?

Perhaps the big question is, as it relates to young women, how much of a “village” does it take?  Is it right to represent our children with respect and yet practice freedom of speech?  I think that there could be a case made for both sides of the coin, but when the scales tip, are we outraged enough to “call out” the media for poor reporting or poor judgment?  With respect to middle-aged or elderly women, what again is the obligation of the press to represent women factually and fairly?

These are all rhetorical questions that give us pause and food for thought. Doesn’t every society have some ethical obligation to protect its youngest members?

Covering Clinton

Let’s look at recent history for a different age group: the middle-aged.  When you think about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, what comes to mind? Is it acceptable to portray one very intelligent, well-informed, and talented middle-aged woman as unfit to be our president because she wears pantsuits?  Is it cause enough to portray the other as a fit candidate because she is attractive and wears her skirts and high leather boots with such aplomb? And, most importantly, why does the media allow itself to make such an issue of each woman’s physical assets and liabilities?

I’m not sure that this is ethical or even fair practice.

When Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball” tells us that Hillary cried, and demeans her for her personal behavior (which had no foreseeable impact on real politics), viewers voiced their dismay.  In fact, Matthews apologized to Clinton on the air.  This apology feels like responsible journalism to me and was the ethical thing to do, and Matthews’ audience was quick to let him know.  After all, by some opinions, Clinton’s actions helped her win the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 2008.  And in reporting on the polls, her supporters included a majority of women “of a certain age.” Is it possible, and therefore ethical, to simply report the facts and not attribute this voting group as “the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit”?

Hillary Clinton was shown to be a vulnerable woman. Was it fair reporting or ethical oversight to make vulnerability such a crucial measure of political competence? Was Clinton being mocked  for her display of emotion?  If this is much of what you remember, then the answer would be yes. The stories of Clinton’s tears were simply editorial comments dressed in factual clothes.  I vividly recall specific newscasters, print journalists, and pundits all but punishing her for her seemingly authentic reactions to the events at hand.

And again, Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball” came under fire when he said: “Let’s not forget, and I’ll be brutal here, the reason she’s a US senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner, is that her husband messed around.” Matthews was not alone in making such comments.

The response to his statement was almost as loud as the campaign itself.  Women’s groups, both national and local, drew attention to Matthew’s comments and he apologized on air. He was clearly responsible for sexist remarks and tried to make it right, but perhaps the greater issue of ethical conduct is that the network itself did not alter its editorial policies.

“Good legs and hair”

Does the press aid us in fairly evaluating intelligent, knowledgeable, skilled and savvy negotiators in public affairs? Or does the press unfairly represent each woman based on qualities that have little to do with these capabilities, or with being the leader of the United States?

It seems to me that the press spends too much time on pantsuits, good legs and hair. How much do those physical qualities really matter?  How much does the press owe us in reporting the facts, and how ethical is it to place such importance on superfluous measures? What does the press owe us in terms of presenting facts without editorializing?

Much of the above may seem basic. To some, it may sound like a song on a “golden oldies” radio station. Yet I think that it is incumbent upon the press to raise the ethics bar for commentary or punditry.

I was struck by a media comment several weeks ago when Secretary of State Clinton was visiting a Muslim country and dressed appropriately for a Muslim funeral. I heard Matthew’s comment on a photograph of her looking “beautiful and respectful.”  Indeed she did, dressed in blue with matching hair cover, with a solemn and respectful expression on her face.  Why should I be struck by that? Yes, it was Matthews’ opinion. But it was also refreshing and, to my personal way of thinking, factual.

Equally important, Clinton is rarely referred to as beautiful. She is criticized for being dowdy and old when, in truth, she might also be described as brilliant, fully capable, and experienced in the ways of government.  She has withstood public and private humiliation with a good measure of grace.  She has raised an intelligent, beautiful and successful child.  Is that not enough to make one beautiful?

Mixed report card

I think that the press gets a mixed report card on the ethics of writing about and the representation of women and girls.

Women and girls are able to do much more and reach much higher than they have been in our history.  I am struck by how much more acceptable and easier it is for this generation of women to succeed in business and to require more equality in personal relationships.  Many of us are seeing an upward spiral in the treatment and respect due to women of all ages.  We are finally teaching our girls not to tolerate abuse at the hands of men in relationships as well as in the office (wherever that “office” may be).

We are “calling out” journalists and publications for unethical approaches to women’s issues, which is as much about the equality of men.

To quote CBS anchor Katie Couric on the subject of coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “Like her or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued, and accepted, role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media.”

As we thoughtfully consider the ethics of journalism, let’s keep “calling out” those who would seek to undermine our society.

Sue Steinberg is an experienced television Network Executive and Producer and has worked in the television and marketing businesses for 25 years.  She is a co-founder of MTV, the biggest and most highly successful entertainment brands ever created.  She also served its Executive Producer for all original programming.

Prior to that, she spearheaded the growth of NICKOLODEON through the addition of acquired programming which allowed the network to cablecast an extended programming day.

Later, having relocated to Los Angeles, she joined the production company Guber-Peter Productions, which was responsible for producing many award winning films such as “Batman”, “Rainman”, “Gorilla’s In The Mist” among others.  The company was later acquired by Sony where she became Vice President, Television Movies and Miniseries.  
During her tenure at Sony Television, she was responsible for developing and producing over 14 hours of TV programming.

Steinberg later developed and executive produced a primetime program for Fox Network called “The Ultimate Challenge” in addition to creating other pilots for the network.  

Having moved back to New York, she is working on the production of “Olenna”, the award winning play written by the celebrated playwright David Mamet.

She is a foundation member of the esteemed art museum Dia and contributes to a variety of cultural institutions and programs.

Sue Steinberg began her career at Seventeen Magazine as the ‘dear abby’ of the monthly under the pseudonym “Abigail Wood”.  There, at the seasoned age of 24, she dispensed advice to teenagers.  A long-term study on effect of those words has yet to be conducted.  She is always happy to regale friends and acquaintances with choice vignettes of those days. Names are always withheld to protect the innocent.

As I write this, there’s about a week left in the federal election campaign and it looks like the biggest challenge facing news media outlets in the coming days will be remembering they can’t announce the winner until the evening of January 23.

As with so many previous elections in Canada and elsewhere, public opinion polling is driving a common media storyline that almost makes voting day seem irrelevant.

It’s ironic, but at a time when the reliability of public opinion polls is being questioned as never before, polls have dominated coverage of this campaign to an unprecedented extent. In particular, the “daily tracking poll” produced by The Strategic Counsel company for CTV and the Globe and Mail has provided reporters and editors from all media outlets with an irresistible touchstone around which to build their election narrative from day to day.

That’s particularly true now with election day so close and the polls seemingly showing the Conservatives building a lead that – should they be an accurate foreshadowing of election day – would give Stephen Harper and his party an opportunity to form a government. Of course, the same thing happened in 2004 and a lot of journalists looked silly when the Liberals emerged with a minority government. You’d think the media this time would avoid giving in to the temptation to proclaim a winner before election day, but apparently the lessons of history are not as compelling as today’s polling results. Political journalists are often accused of running in packs, with some justification, and pack journalism tends to be most obvious during election campaigns.

Even if there were no polls, journalists working together on election campaigns would likely share a consensus impression of what was happening. Polls, especially when a number of surveys produce comparable results, make that tendency virtually irresistible. After all, journalists are storytellers as well as reporters and they look for narrative structure. Most news reports are like short stories, with a storyline that begins and ends with that day’s report. But an election campaign is more like a novel. As a novel opens, anything is possible. But with every passing chapter, the story and its characters experience events and challenges that shape them and push them toward an inevitable fate.

In this campaign, the storyline as it now stands sees the Liberals paying the price for past mistakes and the Conservatives flowering into a governing party. (The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois are minor characters whose role in the main story is important only insofar as it impacts the star players.) Check out the tracking poll graphic being published every day in the front section of the Globe and Mail for a nice visual depiction of this storyline. Of course, there’s only one poll that counts and that’s the one that takes place when Canadians vote. We know voters don’t always act as polls predict.

Nevertheless, as we build to this story’s climax, most reporters and editors will be tempted – consciously or not – to make storytelling choices that reflect and reinforce this poll-driven narrative. The urge will be strong for reporters directly covering the campaign but could be even stronger for the head-office editors who make the critical decisions about assignments, visuals and story placement. When a storyline is already in play at the start of each day, content decisions come easily.

So far in this campaign, media coverage has had its ups and downs. To their credit, most media outlets recognized election coverage must go beyond the leaders’ campaigns. They’ve published independent examinations into issues and spent some time and money examining the thoughts and concerns of ordinary voters – though after several weeks of “Reality Checks,” earnest interviews with undecided and sometimes uninformed voters, and segments with actors portraying anonymous “campaign insiders” (CBC News, you’ve got some explaining to do), a cynic might dismiss much of this effort as gimmickry rather than sound journalism.

Still, from the beginning of the election to the first week of January, the dominant shared storyline permitted some variation in the storytelling because the polling companies had the two main parties running neck-and-neck or, in poll-speak, within the margin of statistical error. Now the polls show some clear separation, so there’s a much more exciting story to tell, a real race with leaders and losers. Until the final week of the campaign, the story was like a mystery novel that goes on for too many pages before the first murder is committed. At last, political blood is spilled and the real action begins.

I’m not suggesting public opinion surveys should be ignored in the waning days of the election. I’m not advocating banning election polls. Personally, I find polls that claim to show what’s going on in people’s minds to be quite fascinating. But I would urge news decision-makers, especially in the final days of the campaign, to consciously resist the urge to over-hype their poll results.

Here’s why. We know most people interact with news media intermittently and for short periods of time. They scan a front page now and then and catch a bit of a newscast whenever they can. Their knowledge of the campaign so far is likely forged by a haphazard series of impressions from front-page headlines and photographs, radio and TV news clips, and the opinions of friends and family.

However, many people who intend to vote will devote more time and pay more systematic attention to the news media as election day draws closer. The news media needs to serve the interests of this important new audience. That’s why (other than risking egg on its face) the news media has a special responsibility during the last days of the campaign to avoid letting a dominant storyline determine the tenor of its election coverage.

A few suggestions:

In covering the leaders’ campaigns, editors must fight the inclination to select only photographs in which Stephen Harper looks prime ministerial and Paul Martin looks frazzled and defeated. They must strive to ensure that every campaign story isn’t built on a plot foundation of Liberal desperation or Tory glee.

In fact, in the final days of the campaign, I’d like to see the news media consciously take a step back from emphasizing the day-after-day staging of the leaders’ tours on their front pages and put more emphasis on providing content and perspective specifically designed to help inform voters who have not been following the campaign every day.

How to do that? Obviously, there should be summaries of important issues and party policies and an effort made to estimate the price of each party’s commitments. After being published in print, they should be posted to the web but pointers to those web pages should be printed every day.

Thoughtful reviews and perspectives on the campaigns and the important events that influenced them should also be published. It would also be useful to see some analysis of what Liberal and Conservative governments would look like – who would be contenders for cabinet positions and what interest groups could be expected to have influence over the government and its backbenchers?

Let’s also see some analysis into the options facing each party should it form a minority government. How would a Liberal or Conservative minority achieve stability? (This is where the NDP and Bloc come back into the dominant narrative.) What would the price of stability be? We already have some sense of how the Liberals would act in a minority situation but the Conservatives should not get a free pass on this issue. In particular, the potential impact of a Conservative minority government that depends on Bloc Quebecois support should be explored.

Not all of this should be written by journalists. Let’s find out what other community leaders – partisan and non-partisan – have to say about the potential consequences of the choices facing Canadians on election day.

News outlets should also review their coverage to date and work to clarify issues or events that may not have been explained as thoroughly or fairly as possible.

A good example would be the RCMP’s mid-campaign announcement it was investigating allegations that someone in the finance ministry may have leaked information about an investment tax policy change to some investors.

If Harper does win the election, this will likely be seen as a turning point in the campaign. In many people’s minds, the dramatic news of this investigation confirmed opposition party accusations that the Martin government was just as corrupt as Chretien’s. It certainly cut Martin off at the knees.

Yet one of the first things cub reporters learn is that police investigations in themselves mean nothing. Investigators first have to determine if a crime has actually been committed and then they work to identify the innocent as well as the guilty.

I’m not convinced the reporting of this particular investigation has made that point clear enough to be fair to the Liberals.

Last, but not least, all news outlets should be sure to provide lots of information about the local candidates whose names will actually appear on their readers’ or viewers’ ballots.

And wouldn’t it be nice to see broadcast outlets acknowledge their news formats simply can’t match newspapers for depth and breadth of coverage and urge voters to spend a few days before the election reading newspapers and web sites? This even gives CTV and Global a legitimate reason to promote their print partners.

Let’s hope, in these final days of the campaign, that Canadian journalists make a real effort to give Josephine Q. Citizen the information and insight she needs so that as she marks her ballot she feels confident the immediate future of the country is truly in her hands and not already pre-determined by polls and media storylines.

ALAN BASS is Chair of Journalism at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C.

His professional experience includes covering national political, economic and social issues as a reporter in Ottawa for the United Press and Canadian Press news agencies; working as a reporter and editor at the London Free Press; and editing a magazine and doing corporate communications work at the University of Western Ontario.

Interests include the impact of the Internet on journalism and communication, political journalism and professionalism in journalism.

Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting, University of Illinois

As newspapers and other journalism institutions falter, networks of investigative and alternative newsrooms are rising up, sharing resources and finding ways to more widely distribute their work.

Whether they come from mainstream or nonprofit centers or Web start-up newsrooms, traditionally competitive journalists are collaborating and cooperating. The result is they are working on stories ranging from homeland security to campus assaults to human trafficking.

This past summer about 20 U.S. non-profit groups formed the Investigative News Network with the intention of not only collaborating on stories, but also of centralizing some administrative and online tasks to save money and create more efficiently run organizations.

Since then the network has received $175,000 in start-up grant money from the Open Society Institute and the McCormick Foundation begun the paperwork to incorporate and attain 501(c) 3 nonprofit status, and created a budget and goals for the year 2010. At the same time, the network is putting the finishing touches on the job description for an entrepreneurial executive director and making plans for a dynamic Web site and a vibrant presence in the social media. The network hopes to raise a total of more than $500,000 by January.

The network also has developed membership criteria for other groups wanting to join. The basic definition for membership is that an applicant must be a non-profit journalism organization that produces non-partisan stories. The network members realize that in the new world of journalism the definition will have to be applied thoughtfully and that questions on funding and supporters will come up. Because of that, the network has established a permanent membership and standards committee to deal with those issues and any other ethical concerns.

New collaborations, many angles

Editorially, the various state and regional centers are already collaborating with the larger more established groups such as the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), and ProPublica. CIR has distributed data on homeland security spending and contracts to the state groups as a part of its work on a story monitoring the expenditures. It found that those documents showed that California and some other states had missing paperwork and violated purchasing rules. CPI has released a story on campus assaults across the nation.  State groups can use the information to focus on local universities. Also, ProPublica is distributing reports and data on the federal stimulus package.

Discussions also are underway among the state and regional groups on collaborations on national and regional stories on the health and safety, particularly focusing on Medicaid and airport safety. The idea of journalists creating a network of organizations is not new.  After all, the Associated Press and National Public Radio are networks of their members. But in the digital world the number and possibilities of networks and sub-networks has increased significantly – as has the potential for advocacy journalism.

For example, another relatively recent network is the progressive Media Consortium, which lists 47 organizations as members. It formed after a gathering of journalists in 2005 and says it “is a network of the country’s leading, progressive, independent media outlets. Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones.”

Among the members are Mother Jones, The Nation magazine and The American Prospect. The Web site acts as a networking tool and highlights the members’ work and blogs about national issues and media industry issues.

The Media Consortium membership qualifications include, “a journalism-driven mission, staff and organizational capacity to participate in projects that benefit the organization and the Consortium, the commitment of senior leadership to personally participate in Media Consortium activities, projects, and meetings, and a mission that promotes progressive ideals.”

From a more conservative direction comes the Sam Adams Alliance and Foundation, whose home page is simply a fundraising page. The Alliance is creating a network of state journalism groups under the guidance of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.  One state group, the Illinois Statehouse News, just launched and is expected to be a template for other efforts.

The Franklin Center states on its Web site that is “is a non-profit group dedicated to providing investigative reporters and non-profit organizations at the state and local level with the training, expertise and technical support necessary to pursue journalistic endeavors.”

It adds that, “At the heart of the Franklin Center’s mission is a belief that new technology can advance the cause of transparency in government.”

Unlike the Investigative News Network, it does not intend to be transparent about its donors and states emphatically, “The Franklin Center protects the identification of its generous donors and ensures anonymity of all contributions.” Because of that stance, the Illinois State News has been denied a spot in the Illinois capitol press bureau and is regarded with skepticism by the press.

International Network

In 2003, about two dozen nonprofit investigative organizations formed the Global Investigative Journalism Network. That network has held five international conferences with another one planned for the spring 2010.

The network collaborated with African journalists this fall to have its first ever regional conference. More than 200 investigative journalists, students and educators from 17 African nations gathered for a three day-day conference at Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The so-called “power reporting” conference featured panels on sports, business and investigative methodologies, hands-on training in computer-assisted reporting, and networking among the African journalists and speakers that included practitioners from the United Kingdom and the United States.

By 2007, when the Network held its fourth conference in Toronto (the third was in Amsterdam), the number of organizations had increased to nearly 40. Since then it held a conference in Lillehammer, Norway of more than 500 journalists from more than 80 countries and final preparations are being made for the sixth conference in Geneva, Switzerland in April 2010 and in Kiev, Ukraine in 2011.

The global network is increasing in number despite the many threats investigative journalists outside the U.S. face. In each of the conferences and in discussions online, journalists share the risks they take, ranging from aggressive censorship to imprisonment to assaults or death. They also talk about the lack of access to documents, data and officials. And they talk about the ethical dilemmas they must confront, especially when their pay is so low and bribes are routine.

For example, Nigerian journalists say they must deal with the tradition of “the brown envelope.” In that tradition, they it is common after a press conference for government or business officials to hand out brown envelopes containing money to journalists in exchange for assurances that a story will be written. Many investigative journalists throughout the world say they must also deal with corrupt media owners in their own countries.

The conferences and the contacts maintained on the network’s Web site (which is a work in progress) have been the catalysts for the proliferation of the investigative journalism centers as has one of the founding organizations, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). The Web also has allowed journalism organizations with little funding to exist because the overhead costs are so low. In addition, being Web-based makes it more difficult for governments or organized crime to stop the journalists from publishing stories.

Cross-training and social media

A further benefit of the Web and now social media is that they permit wide collaborations and cross-training among the centers and investigative reporters.

David Kaplan, a veteran international journalist who currently is the editorial director for one of the member organizations – The Center for Public Integrity in Washington D.C. – wrote an extensive report about the state of global investigative journalism in 2007 before joining the Center. Kaplan surveyed the work of 37 of the investigative centers in 26 countries and conducted extensive interviews with international investigative journalists.

His report, “Global Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Support,” was commissioned by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), a project of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Kaplan, who was previously the chief investigative correspondent at U.S. News & World Report, said in his report that better networking among the investigative centers can substantially increase their access to reporting, databases, training materials, and other resources.  It could also increase cross-border collaboration among them. He said the Global Investigative Journalism Network has the potential to become an international secretariat, with a central Web site, listserv, and resource center.

Currently, the Network is revamping its Web site, has established a Facebook page, and is beginning to assemble more resources to help international investigative reporters. Information about the global network, including names of member organizations and the conferences and workshops the members’ hold can be found on its Web site.

Collaborations have already been spawned by the global network, with stories on European Union farm subsidies going to the rich and wealthy corporations, and human trafficking and corruption in the Balkans.

Meanwhile, many national and global foundations have answered the call to support the global network and conferences. The Open Society Institute has been a constant supporter, providing money for fellowships both to the global conferences and to the recent African conference. In the U.S., the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation has funded the revision and development of the Network Website.

Because of their influence and increasing visibility, investigative reporting networks should represent the highest professional standards in reporting, editing and ethical conduct. Periodic reviews of the networks and their members, and ethics training by experienced investigative journalists, could help encourage the best work possible. It could also ensure that high standards are met and prevent the kind of public distrust of the media that has increased over the past decade.

Brant Houston currently chairs the network’s steering committee and assists many of the state and regional investigative journalism centers that are forming.

BRANT HOUSTON is a professor and the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois and also is a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Library Information and Sciences. From 1997 to 2007, Houston was executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 4,000 member association, and taught at the Missouri School of Journalism. Before that, Houston was an award-winning investigative reporter for 17 years and was part of the newsroom staff at The Kansas City Star that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of a hotel building collapse. He is co-author of “The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook” (Fifth Edition) and author of “Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide”. Houston also is a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and chair of the steering committee of the Investigative News Network in the U.S.

Suicides are often more than newsworthy, writes Stephen J.A. Ward, they challenge journalists to explore economic and social issues in their community. “Minimize harm” is the proper principle, not “do no harm.”

Reporters and their news organizations are frequently accused of exploiting people who are vulnerable, or in the grip of personal tragedy.

The journalist is portrayed as a vulture swooping down to feast on the afflicted. Author Janet Malcolm once compared the journalist to “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Complaints of exploitation arise regularly — with every media frenzy, with every tragedy, with every callous act by a reporter.

Recently, there was controversy in Toronto when the news media reported that David Dewees, a high school teacher, committed suicide after being charged with using the Internet to attempt to lure two boys into sexual touching. The news media also has been criticized for reporting on the grief of families who have lost a child to the H1N1 virus.

In both cases, members of the public complained that the news media used the tragedies to sell the news. Commentators called on the media to stop reporting such events, and follow the principle of “do no harm.” Reviewing the H1N1 coverage, one person asked the media to stop broadcasting images of the “sobbing parents.” The commentator concluded: “This is exploitation.”

The pain of publicity is real. But it would be a mistake to conclude that journalists should not cover these personal tragedies. Also, it is a mistake to see reporting on these tragedies as, unavoidably, exploitation. Whether it is exploitation depends on how the event is covered.

Take the case of suicides. To be blunt, suicides are frequently newsworthy – a public official in trouble commits suicide, a distraught military hero takes his life. But these cases are frequently more than newsworthy. They challenge journalists to explore the economic and social factors that may help to induce suicidal behavior. When we witness a string of suicides at a school or in an aboriginal community, suicide is no longer personal but social. It is the responsibility of journalists to explore the reasons for these disturbing patterns in the fabric of society.

Even when suicides are not part of a pattern, there are reasons for reporting them. Journalists should maintain a daily record of events so that uncomfortable topics are discussed publicly. In this way, suicides and the death of children to disease — and many other problems — are not hidden behind closed doors, leaving public discussion to feast on rumour and speculation.

Unfortunately, the glare of publicity must be endured.

When do we exploit?

Covering tragedies is not an act of exploitation.

Journalists can exploit people for dramatic interviews and emotional images. Any professional in whom some measure of trust has been placed can betray that confidence.

What counts as exploitation? To exploit is to unfairly use people in a less powerful position to achieve your own ends — without a thought to their needs and interests. As Kant famously said, the basic principle of all ethics is: Do not treat other people only as a means to your ends.

The word “only” is crucial. It acknowledges that we often legitimately use other people as a means to our goals. I use the garage mechanic as a means to fixing my car so I can drive to work, but I do not exploit him. I do not exploit people who work for me if I show them respect. That is, I do not harm their interests, and I adequately pay them for their work. In this way I treat people as both a means and an end-in-themselves.

In journalism, Kant’s principle works like this: In reporting on a person’s tragedy I am, on one level, treating this event as a means to my end of getting the story. But on another level, I am not exploiting the situation if I treat the persons in question with respect and attempt to minimize harm.

If I report on the death of a child in an accident, Kant’s principle requires that my approach to the family should be compassionate. I request a family comment or interview but I back off if they firmly express a desire to be left alone. If I obtain an interview, I follow well-known guidelines for dealing with traumatized people, such as the guidelines from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma.

For suicides, the initial reports should stay close to the known facts. Reporters should avoid speculating about reasons for the suicide and avoid fantasizing about what may have been in the mind of the person at the time. Journalists should investigate whether there are economic, social, or other factors that prompted the suicide: for example, the bullying of a homosexual student at school.

To avoid copycat behavior, reporters should avoid sensationalizing a suicide. They should avoid treating suicide as an unexplainable, personal decision that lacks causes and cannot be prevented. The reports should tell people where they can find help. Journalists should bring the community together to openly face a suicide problem. Journalists can avoid exploiting suicides if they follow basic guidelines, such as those provided by The Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.

Note that the principle behind such coverage is not “do no harm.” The principle is “minimize harm.” Minimizing harm is the proper principle since journalists do some harm to someone with almost every story. A negative book review harms the book sales for the author; reporting that Mary appeared in court harms Mary’s reputation. Such harms are justified because they are part of journalism’s social role to inform the public and comment freely.

The issue of exploitation is not whether journalists benefit from getting a good story by covering death or destruction. The issue is how journalists approach and actually report on these difficult situations.

Are journalists necessarily exploiters? No. They do not need to be. Malcolm was wrong.

Ethical journalists still “get the story” but they do so in responsible ways that avoid callous harassment and crude exploitation.

Unethical journalists can be exploiters. But the same can be said of every other profession.

Walking down the old port in Dubai, one still sees remnants of the former Emirates: a slice of the Arabian Gulf coast, a sleepy settlement of palm-fronted wind-towered houses, and Bedouin encampments – its few thousand inhabitants mostly subsisting on fishing and the pearl-diving trade. But since the 1980s, Dubai has morphed into a modern capital of hotels and high rises, fulfilling the economic vision of UAE’s (United Arab Emirates) ambitious late founding president, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan.

The UAE is a loose federation of seven city-states, or Emirates, each run semi-autonomously by its own ruling family. Dubai is the flashiest of all seven Emirates, well-known to be culturally and politically progressive when compared to its Middle Eastern neighbors. Today, Dubai boasts the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai (which remains under construction), is home to the world’s largest man-made island which houses hotels, resorts, and theme parks, and a place where major media and financial companies come to do business with the region.

The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Makhtoun, inherited what he considered was a fairly boring place and since has focused on transforming it into an international hub – a Hong Kong or New York on the Arabian Gulf – so that even without the oil fields like its cousin Abu Dhabi next door, Dubai can be one of the world’s great cities.

Some dismiss the Xanadu-style changes as a mere tourist development in which art, history, and regional identity are reduced to marketing commodities. But those who view it as an exercise in global branding or a feel-good story about an Arab country willing to embrace the values of Western modernity are missing the point. Underneath the veneer, there is a quiet revolution taking place.

James Piecowye opens the door to the radio station, DubaiEye 103.8 FM, part of Arabian Radio Network — which is also one of the largest media conglomerates in the Middle East and owned by the ruling family of Dubai. The station appears to be a sleek but modest operation. His show, “Nightline,” broadcast nightly, is creating a benchmark in this part of the world.

Piecowye, who is Canadian and has a doctorate in Communication from the University of Montreal, arrived in UAE ten years back to teach at Zayed University, an all-women’s college for Emirati women.

“I got into radio by chance and tenacity,” he says when we meet for coffee the day after I appear on his show to discuss journalism ethics. “When I first started listening to English radio here, it was a wasteland. Except for the usual, classic rock, pop, and top 40 music, there was nothing else on air.” Piecowye, who grew up listening to CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, which has a rich history of independent news and programming, wanted to try the CBC experiment in Dubai. “What I wanted to try was a current events show, in between music or the news of the day, from a more intellectual perspective,” says Piecowye.

Piecowye, who did not have any experience in radio before arriving in Dubai and acknowledges that he received “on the job training on how to host a talk show”, has been hosting Nightline for three years; his selection of guests and topics have been broad: ministers, scholars, and professors, discussing sanitation, traffic, environmental problems, education, and migration.

Radio and, in particular Talk Radio, is a new format in Dubai. Prior to 1971, there was no locally operated radio in the region; residents had to depend on programming from BBC, Radio America, and signals from nearby Lebanon and Jordan. Because of the newness of the format, a lot of the style and content is imported; stations also lack reliable methods of collecting ratings and demographic information about listeners.

“There is an education process going on here, as more people like me get on radio, there is more exposure to how radio can foster a dialogue,” says Piecowye. By its very nature, being highly interactive, talk radio is changing people’s perceptions. Unlike in the West, talk shows in Dubai don’t have a seven seconds delay, people instantly appear on-air and they can use SMS (instant messaging), cell phones, and email to contact hosts and guests. 

But, as elsewhere in the Middle East, changes in UAE, and in Dubai, are slow to come. While one hears incessant economic success stories, from cab-drivers to residents, Dubai has historically never welcomed the sort of journalism that one finds in the West and other democratic countries. It’s a thirty-seven-year-old absolute monarchy with a dismal record on human rights. In 2008, Reporters Without Borders ranked UAE sixty-ninth in the world when it comes to press freedom. In principle, the UAE’s constitution guarantees a free press. However, the National Media Law, which is currently under revision, restricts journalists from crossing a number of poorly-defined red lines, the most important being that the reputation of the country cannot be tarnished. There is no criticism of the government, the ruling families of any of the emirates, and the governments of neighboring Arab countries.

The government exerts considerable influence over media and telecommunication services including telephone and internet; incoming internet sites are closely monitored by the service providers and sites which are pornographic or discuss homosexuality are excluded. Voice-over-internet protocol telephone services such as Skype are illegal, newspapers are federally licensed and there is virtually no news broadcast on radio and one nightly news broadcast, Emirates News, on Dubai One TV.

“There is a definite resistance from the government and the bureaucracy to use the medium of radio,” says Piecowye. It is a new experience for people in UAE to have the kind of open ended discussions that listeners and guests are accustomed to in United States and in Canada. Sometimes Piecowye has been asked to submit questions beforehand, especially if the guest is a high government official. “There is no media culture here that one can ambush or attack guests on the show,” Piecowye observes.  

While topics like drugs, prostitution, dating, abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and religion are often off-limits, Piecowye has found a unique way of addressing them. “All these exist in UAE but instead of stating, for instance, that there is a drug problem, the more subtle way of approaching the subject would be to invite to the show the head of the narcotics department, as I have done, and let him talk freely about what the government is doing about drugs,” says Piecowye.

More than 80% residents of Dubai are non-Emirati citizens from countries of South Asia and Africa. For years, UAE has been able to build so much so quickly by luring hundreds of thousands of South-Asian workers, many of whom pay large amounts of money to middle-men for arranging jobs, with the promise of good wages. 

However, when the workers arrive, they find the reality of their situation quite different from what they were led to believe. Many are forced to toil in the desert heat for long hours. They’re housed in squalid camps and paid a fraction of the wages they were promised. The plight of these workers became an international news story in 2006 when Human Rights Watch issued a report alleging the death of hundreds of migrant laborers every year in UAE.

The National, based in Abu Dhabi and considered one of the most reliable English newspaper and independent voice in UAE, has done series of news reports about the conditions in labor camps and about labor laws. These stories have been both lauded and criticized.

“We just can’t cover labor camps like The National can,” says Piecowye. “The reality is that, at the end of the day, you have to buy the newspaper, whereas you can just turn on the radio. It is much more accessible as a medium. There is still a belief that the spoken word has the ability to influence people and a lot more responsibility is placed on us.” 

Besides English talk radio, there is the parallel development of Arabic talk radio. The sister stations of Arabian Radio Network, Al Arabiya and Al Khaleejiya, broadcast several Arabic talk shows. It appears that the Arabic media has more leeway when it comes to questioning ministers and governments since their primary listeners are citizens of UAE, whereas the English media mostly cater to the expatriate community.

Radio in UAE continues to be commercially centralized and primarily based in Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi. Piewcowye believes true change will come with the establishment of local community radio, mostly in AM, to link the other Emirates like Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, and Fujairah and make it possible for UAE to develop a defined national identity.

“Change is coming,” says Piecowye. “All of what makes for democracy, all elements of democratic institutions are in place. There is a President, a Prime Minister, a Senate, with more radio, TV, and now internet. Changes will happen but it will be a slow process and it will take time.”

SHAKUNTATO RAO is Professor of Communication at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, USA. She was a visiting lecturer at Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and at La Universidad del Zulia in Maracaibo in November 2008. In June 2009, she presented a paper titled, “Understanding Local and Global in Global Media Ethics” at the Global Studies Conference held at Zayed University in Dubai, June 2009. She also appeared on “Dubai’s Nightlight” radio program to discuss global journalism ethics.

The way news is collected and transmitted is undergoing fundamental change in an era of social media where the values of immediacy and speed dominate. Basen argues that a turning point has been reached. Newsgathering has become a collective pursuit of many types of communicators, and many types of journalism. The result is not only a more complicated news process but new and difficult editorial and ethical issues.

For more than a century the tools of journalistic production — the ability to report, photograph and videotape events, and distribute that material to a mass audience — have resided in the hands of a small group of people who, by convention and by law, have been called journalists.

But in the early years of the twenty -first century, the tools of production now belong to just about everyone.  Thanks to “Web 2.0” technology — blogs, wikis, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and video sharing sites like YouTube — billions of people can transmit text, photos, and video instantly to a worldwide audience at virtually no cost.  Journalism in a 2.0 world is no longer the exclusive preserve of professional journalists.

There is much to celebrate about News 2.0 and the potential democratization of the media that it portends. A.J. Liebling once famously declared that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”  Well, now everyone can be their own press.  Mainstream journalism is no longer the only game in town, and the new players aren’t playing by the same rulebook.  They have created their own standards and ethical guidelines, and have left many traditional journalists trying to cope with the changing realities.

Take, for example, the critical question of verification.  In their classic textbook, The Elements of Journalism, authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write that “in the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. Journalism alone is focused first on getting what happened down right.”

Now, there’s no question that in mainstream journalism the “discipline of verification” often breaks down, and has sometimes been rather undisciplined.  The New York Times recently acknowledged that an obituary of CBS newsman Walter Cronkite contained no fewer than seven factual errors, despite it having been reviewed by five different editors.   Journalism is also a very competitive business, and in the race to beat the other guy to the “scoop,” it is not unusual for reporters and editors to skip a step or two on the road to verification.  Still, the notion that “it is better to be right than first” is one of the central tenants of mainstream journalism.

But in News 2.0, being right often takes a backseat to being first. Take the case of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The notoriously secretive Jobs has been the subject of several erroneous Internet stories about his health. The most recent example occurred on the morning of October 3, 2008.  iReport, the unfiltered, unedited citizen journalism site run by CNN (the most trusted name in news), published a story by a correspondent named johntw claiming that Jobs had been rushed to hospital suffering from a massive heart attack.

“My source has opted to remain anonymous,” the post read, “but he is quite reliable.  I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start.”

That iReport story was immediately re-posted and re-tweeted around the world.  Shares of Apple went into freefall, losing nearly $5 billion in value in just twelve minutes. Moments later, an Apple spokesperson declared there was absolutely no truth to the story, and iReport pulled “johntw’s” post off the Web site. Apple shares rebounded as quickly as they had fallen.  Security regulators immediately began an investigation to determine if someone had planted the story in order to profit from the fluctuation in the stock price.  It later turned out that “johntw” was an eighteen year old who did it just for the fun of it.

But “johntw” had unwittingly exposed one of the great fault lines between News 1.0 and 2.0.  For journalists in a 1.0 world, this story is about as bad as it gets.  Any reporter or editor who would publish an unverified tip from an anonymous source on an economically sensitive story would almost certainly be looking for a new job that same day.

But within the world of news 2.0, the Steve Jobs heart attack story is seen not as a failure, but as a triumph.  The self-correcting mechanism of the Web, the ability for readers to identify and correct errors quickly, had worked precisely as it was supposed to.  The story was born and died in less than half an hour.

Mathew Ingram, who writes on technology for The Globe and Mail in Torontoand is also one of Canada’s leading tech bloggers, was one of the people who re-tweeted the story that morning.  He originally saw it while checking his Twitter feed on the commuter train he was riding to work.  “I saw what appeared to be a credible report,” he recalls.  “So I posted it and said ‘There’s a report,’ just as simple as that.  I can’t say really whether I believed it or not. I mean it was literally just a sentence and I thought “this is interesting.”  It’s interesting if it’s true, it’s arguably interesting even if it’s not true”

In hindsight, Ingram says he feels badly about misleading his readers, even for a few minutes, but if he had to do it over again, he would probably make the same choice again.  “It sort of highlights a whole pile of issues in that gray area,” he points out, “what is journalism? What is newsworthy? When should you report things?  I can’t possibly check everything, especially when I’m sitting on the train. So does that mean I shouldn’t re-post things? To me there’s a benefit to being even just a distribution mechanism for interesting things. I can’t possibly verify them all. So then the choice becomes either don’t post any of these things until I can verify them, or rely on people to make their own judgments and research.”

What Ingram and other News 2.0 proponents are talking about is journalism as a process, rather than a product.  In a News 1.0 world, reporters and editors try to make their stories as good and as accurate as possible, because once their product has been delivered, it is not likely to change.  Not only is it physically difficult to make changes to print and broadcast stories, but mainstream media is notoriously, and often infuriatingly, reluctant to admit to making errors.

Verification by Readers But that’s not how it works in a 2.0 world.  “In professional journalism, we look at mistakes and corrections as a mark of shame,” asserts Jeff Jarvis, who teaches at New York University and publishes the influential blog Buzz Machine.  “In the blog world we look at mistakes and corrections as a mark of honesty.  In fact, a correction will enhance your credibility, not tear it down.”

Jarvis believes the key is simply admitting that the information upon which the story is based is incomplete and imperfect, rather than attempting to claim infallibility. “If you recognize that a story is a process, that it never begins and it never ends, then it can always be corrected, and it can always be better.”

So if you look at the Steve Jobs story from that perspective, you can argue that “johntw’s” post was never really meant to be taken as true.  It was always intended to be the first step in the process of determining the story’s accuracy. “I have no further information,” he wrote, “so I thought this would be a good place to start.” And when readers quickly concluded there was nothing to the story, it died the death it so richly deserved.  Getting it out there was more important than getting it right, because in a 2.0 world, without an editorial gatekeeper, getting it out there, and turning the job of verification over to the readers, was the only way of eventually getting it right.

Proponents of these kinds of “open systems” argue that they represent a different path to verification, and that while they may initially result in a higher number of errors than traditional “closed systems,” readers are more likely to see those errors corrected quickly, and with less hassle, than in mainstream media. But only if readers notice. News 2.0 shifts the burden for authenticating information away from people who are trained and paid to do so, and places it squarely on the not-always-reliable shoulders of the “wisdom of the crowd.”

That’s not a concern for Mathew Ingram, who finds himself in a unique confluence of the 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. Ingram say s he doesn’t think of himself as a journalist when he posts on Twitter, but acknowledges that people who read him in the Globe and Mail, sometimes have difficulty understanding where the journalist ends and the Twitterer begins.

In the Globe, he follows the traditional standards of verification. But on Twitter, “people say that they actually see me as a human being as well, not just a journalist, and in some cases the things I post are just me talking or noticing something and thinking ‘this is interesting’….I think it’s important to recognize that we’re all trying to find a happy medium between the old traditional world of media where roles were strictly defined and the way you communicated with readers or interacted with readers was very rigidly defined, and we’re trying to experiment with new ways of reaching readers but allowing readers to reach us with information that’s important.”

The “happy medium” that Mathew Ingram is looking for is one that many mainstream journalists will struggle with as they cross the digital divide between a 1.0 and 2.0 world.  Who am I when I post on my blog or on Twitter? Can two sets of standards co-exist within the same person?

But that’s not the only place where social media poses a challenge to the mainstream on the issue of verification.  On big breaking news stories – terrorist bombings, plane crashes, nasty weather etc. – the first people on the scene will now almost certainly not be professional journalists, but amateurs who can use their mobile devices to post text, video, and pictures to the Web.

But what do mainstream media outlets do with that material?  The “discipline of verification” demands that some effort is made to determine the authenticity of the material, to investigate its provenance, to try to establish its context.  But that can be hard to do when the text or picture may come from an anonymous source and may already be in wide circulation around the Web.

Free-form reporting

In the case of johntw’s post on iReport, the decision was fairly simple.  No mainstream outlet would have published that without some attempt at verification. But the Twitter feeds and YouTube videos coming off the streets of Tehran last June presented a much more complicated decision.
The Iranian election clearly was not unfolding as the regime had expected it would.  The “winner” had been declared, and yet thousands of demonstrators continued to protest the results.  In an effort to control the story the world would be seeing, the Iranian regime kicked the foreign press out of the country.

But they could not control the Iranian people, who were taking pictures and shooting videos and texting messages right from the front lines of the protests, and then uploading them to the world on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.  Some videos showed a young woman lying in a pool of her own blood.  She had been shot dead by Iranian security forces.

This free-form reporting left broadcasters around the world in a quandary.  Here was an international story of potentially enormous significance.  An authoritarian regime had gambled that by restricting press access, they could shoot at their own people with impunity.  The only thing that stood in their way were anonymous Twitter messages, blog postings and unverified videos.  What to do?

At CBC Newsworld, the cable news outlet of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, there was a lot of discussion about whether to air the videos. David Millan, who was the senior producer that Saturday in June when the video of the girl first appeared, recalls, “We knew that some kind of turning point was being reached. This was no longer an abstract discussion.”

But Newsworld chose not to run the video that night.   “We didn’t know enough about it to put it on air,” Millan explains.  “We couldn’t confirm or verify it and we were using our normal journalistic standards.  We were trying to be fairly cautious, but we knew something was changing, and our thinking about how we were going to use pictures like those was evolving.”

The big American cable networks chose a different route.  They acknowledged on air that the videos and text messages were unverified, but broadcast them anyway, as quickly as they came in.  In this case, the power of the images, the importance of the story, and the obvious competitive pressures all combined to overwhelm the “normal
journalistic standards,” and the protesters in Iran were undoubtedly happy they did.

The CBC’s David Millan was right.  A turning point had indeed been reached. On CNN, anchor Rick Sanchez declared that “newsgathering is becoming a collective pursuit, and we welcome that.”  The journalistic landscape has become much more crowded, and he decision making process for those who work in the mainstream has become a lot more complicated.

IRA BASEN began his career at CBC Radio in 1984. He has created and produced several network programs and special series, including Spin Cycles, an award winning, six part look at PR and the media, that was broadcast on CBC Radio One in January/February 2007 (). He also created and produced News 2.0, a two- part examination of the future of news in an age of social media broadcast in June 2009.

Ira has written for Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and the Canadian Journal of Communication. He is also a columnist for www.cbc.ca. He has won numerous awards, including the Canadian Science Writers Association Award, the Canadian Nurses Association Award, the Gabriel Award, and the New York Radio Festival Award.  He has developed several training programs for CBC journalists, including courses on short-form documentary making, spin, ethics, and user generated content.

He has a BA from Carleton University and an MA and ABD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He currently teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto, and the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. He is the co-author of the Canadian edition of The Book of Lists (Knopf Canada, 2005).

But the tigers come at night With their voices soft as thunder As they tear your hope apart And they turn your dream to shame.
– I Dreamed a Dream, Les Miserables

The media have described Susan Boyle as frumpy, dumpy, hirsute, homely, plain, a virgin, a spinster, and a church volunteer who lives alone with her cat and has never been kissed. Her intelligence and her mental health have been the subject of intense speculation. Some of the descriptions come from Boyle herself, who made the joke about never being kissed. Many have been coined and repeated by media commentators of all stripes, from mainstream daily news to tabloids, cable TV, and blogs.

In a media culture obsessed with glamour and fame, the Scottish woman who bowled over judges and audience alike with her remarkable voice and rendition of I Dreamed a Dream on the television series Britain’s Got Talent was an anomaly. Why? Because she looks ordinary. She is someone we might see at the supermarket or the football game; she is middle aged and unglamorous. She is not considered beautiful or stylish or sexy by the standards of a celebrity culture that maintains a strict model of physical beauty and decorum. And Boyle did not act with the practised poise typical of fame-seeking contestants on reality TV shows. She spontaneously gave a saucy shimmy of her hips during her first performance on the show, a move that became something of a trademark. She seemed guileless and without affectation, a blank slate. Of course the story turned out to be more complicated.

It is a daily challenge for the news media to negotiate the ethics of representation. How should journalists paint the picture of Boyle given the reality of the media’s power to generate, reinforce and break down stereotypes? What responsibility do the media have to the audience, to the public sphere generally, and to people like Boyle who enter the spotlight or find themselves caught in its glare? Where do human dignity and personal feelings enter the picture? No easy answers, but the point is to at least raise the questions about how journalism – and all forms of mass-mediated communication – helps shape our social world.

One of the tropes of mainstream news is that journalists simply report what they see, or tell us “what people are talking about.” This is part of the lore of journalistic objectivity that sees reporters and editors as having a bead on issues, ideas and information that are inherently “newsworthy.” News, in this view, is pre-ordained and journalists are trained to recognize it and channel it to the audience. If we accept this notion then people who covered Boyle were simply telescoping a newsworthy event to a curious public. But most journalists know it is not that simple, that they in fact construct news. Like the rest of us they are marinating in cultural norms. They try to discern what the public will find interesting, entertaining, and important to our conversation.

Today’s members of the mainstream media also practise their craft amid new realities of corporate ownership and the rapidly shifting political economy of news. That means cuts to newsrooms and editorial content, accelerating deadline pressures, newspaper closures, a decline in radio, an explosion of celebrity and entertainment media, and the conundrum of the internet. In fact it was via YouTube that Boyle went “viral.” Such external pressures can make it difficult for journalists to give thoughtful consideration to the impact of their work. Speed is of the essence with alerts being beamed to mobile devices, tweeting on Twitter, and information available 24/7 on multiple platforms. But with the intense competition and deadline pressures, representation may be one of the few areas where journalists have power. Their coverage influences societal norms. Just as investigative journalism can be a positive influence on laws and public policy, the news media’s portrayal of people and issues can be an equally powerful, if more subtle, force for status quo or change in the ways we relate to each other.

How, in this perfect storm of media technologies and economics washing over the news business, might journalists realistically cover a story like Boyle’s? News today can be more like improvisational theatre than a three-act Shakespearean stage play. It must be written on the fly, and writers and editors need a well-developed ethical compass to assess how words and images represent people. This is an individual matter for journalists to be sure. But it also has to do with the culture of news. Journalists are influenced by many factors beyond the economic and political. They are shaped – some media watchers would say constrained – by well-established institutional norms. These are reinforced in journalism schools and newsrooms, and professional culture strongly influences choices about what to cover and how to cover it. There are generally agreed definitions of news, the complex idea of objectivity, given writing styles, and acceptable standards for research and sourcing of information. It is by placing a greater focus on the constructed nature of these practices that journalists can cultivate a more proactive ethical stance for covering people in the news.

We’re not talking about leaning more left or more right. It is about recognizing that we live in a diverse, wired world where the media’s ethics of representation are open for discussion and critique. The mainstream media are under intense scrutiny, which makes it even more important that they attend to representations of race, gender, sexuality and the like. This is not something that journalists can turn on and off as needed; there’s no quick fix. We’re talking about an evolutionary shift in the institutional culture of news – in schools and newsrooms – where representation becomes a prominent aspect of professional news norms.

Would Susan Boyle’s story even matter if it weren’t for her unpolished appearance? If she’d been done up to the nines or if she’d been closer to present-day ideas of beauty, would millions of people know her name and her story? It’s likely that her rags-to-riches, ugly-duckling tale is the reason her talent is seen as remarkable. That’s a reality of our media-celebrity environment. There is no prescription for how the media should portray people. But the strongest journalists are mindful of challenging, rather than reinforcing, stereotypes and hurtful epithets. Journalists can and will disagree on whether the constant references to Boyle’s appearance are fair, and will no doubt argue that some representations are valid in a world where entertainers are so often seen as glamorous. In that view, Boyle’s appearance is part of her story. What about repeated references to Boyle as a virgin or spinster? Many women today are certainly single, but gratuitous comments about virgins and spinsters are no longer common. In Boyle’s case she made that throwaway remark about never having been kissed. We don’t know if it’s true but it spawned routine descriptions that paint her as asexual. Piers Morgan, a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, called her a “little old lady.” She is 48. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/britains-got-talent/5383571/Almost-14-million-people-watch-Susan-Boyle-reach-Britains-Got-Talent-Final.html.

In this case, those descriptions added to a media portrait of Boyle as unglamorous, dowdy and decidedly not cool. It became an important part of the narrative: her talent is all the more shocking because of her average appearance and her life as a single woman in a small town. Then there are the constant references to her mental capabilities. She was apparently deprived of oxygen at birth and has learning disabilities, though those details were seldom sourced in stories. Boyle, the bookmakers’ favourite to win the show’s final, checked in to a clinic reportedly with stress and exhaustion after she came in second to a dance troupe. We learned only at this point, after the final contest, that she’d reportedly lashed out at photographers and bystanders. It is curious that the incident was undocumented in photo or video at a time when her every move was being watched and recorded. Judge Morgan shared that she was being seen by “armies of psychiatrists” and that she was in tears and threatening to pack her bags.

While the tabloids came up with descriptions such as “SuBo” and “the Hairy Angel,” the broader media parroted these terms while routinely blaming them on the tabs. Larry King introduced his segment featuring Boyle and Morgan by saying she “looked like she might be a producer’s idea of comic relief”. Morgan himself apologized to her on King’s show for the derision she endured from judges and audience before her first audition performance. “I have never heard a more surprising, unexpected voice coming out of somebody so unexpected,” he told her. In other words she didn’t LOOK like she could sing, whatever that means.

We can see from these examples that the emphasis on Boyle’s appearance and personal travails do not come just from the news; they’re everywhere. Some journalists writing about the Boyle story have perpetuated this absurd stereotype that equates appearance with talent, while others have drawn attention to it, mocked it and challenged the assumptions fed by the media and the public. In Britain, The Guardian’s Tanya Gold wrote a scathing piece about the media culture and how Boyle became “the wrong kind of victim”. She turned out not to be a pitiable blank slate upon whom a myth of redemption could be etched. She fouled up her assigned role as grateful simpleton and turned out to be a real person with real emotions. “It was like realising that Cinderella didn’t have an orgasm on her wedding night – or that Snow White actually hated the dwarves,” Gold wrote. “Once we learned that she was ambivalent about the gift we wanted to give her, it was over.”

The Boyle story has proven a minefield for journalists. Rosie Dimanno of the Toronto Star attempted a similar, possibly ironic, rant, but with unfortunate results. Many of her readers online took her seriously when she repeated all the painful physical descriptions of Boyle and threw in that she “resembles a female impersonator.”  The critique backfired. Gold herself wrote a fascinating piece that at once admonished us all for our collective reaction to Boyle and the sexism of the coverage, a piece that also upheld stereotypes about female physical beauty.

Some reporters covered the story straight-faced and without hyperbole. Gregory Katz of The Associated Press covered news of Boyle’s treatment for exhaustion as a regular news development, mentioning her meteoric rise and “snide remarks about her looks.” In one report about her recovery he called her the “Scottish songbird”). His journalism seemed a notable effort to turn down the volume.

So is there even a news story without the references to Boyle as plain, simple, unstable, and strange? Journalism draws on myths, as those who study the media have chronicled. And that is not a bad thing; we need narratives. Jack Lule, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, has argued that the media basically adhere to seven recurring myths, which are part of the storytelling tradition that is important to news, and to a human need to understand our social world. They include the victim, scapegoat, hero, good mother, trickster, an “other world” theme, and the calamity. The hero story hinges on several common themes: humble beginnings, a quest or journey, difficult trials and then victory. But in contemporary society, and in the 24-hour news cycle, Lule points out that there is a constant churn of heroes. They rise and fall, and this is where Boyle’s case comes in. As some writers have pointed out, including The AP’s Katz, the show and the judges helped write her narrative within the scathing atmosphere that characterizes this genre of television. She was an unexpected hero, unpretentious, with a humble life and with enormous untapped talent. But she did not fit neatly into the hero slot or into the victim cubbyhole, as Gold pointed out. It would seem that such cases present the most difficult challenges for the media in terms of representation.

Boyle’s case is a media play without a script. This is where it becomes essential that journalists, both individually and as an institution, become more self-reflexive about the ethics of representation. Based on this case, it would seem that many of the players in today’s media cast are not ready for improv.

KATHERINE BELL is a former journalist and currently a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She had a career with The Canadian Press news agency as a reporter, editor and news manager, most recently as bureau chief for British Columbia. Her research interests include celebrity “activism” and philanthropy, and the ways in which celebrity is a site for producing contemporary notions of social/political engagement. She is concerned with how celebrities use their capital to engage in social issues and how celebrity power can reinscribe or challenge hegemonic discourses in the mass media.