I grew up with Bruce Jenner in my cabinet. Just 10 when he became known to many as the “greatest athlete in the world,” I knew him as the face and the form on my Wheaties box. He was strong, he was handsome, he was likable.
I had rounded the corner past 40 when my niece pointed me toward something called “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” an alleged reality show. There was Bruce again. Older, a bit bumbling, but still entirely likable.
And today I sit with trepidation as Bruce will appear again tonight, this time in an extended interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. The show has been endlessly questioned, hyped, teased and imagined. ABC’s ads proclaim in Bruce’s voice, “My whole life has been getting me ready for this.” He may — or may not — discuss a transition from male to female.
My fear stems from whether journalists, commentators and the public at large are ready to get this right. This is a moment for us as a society to begin respecting transgender people, understanding experiences we don’t live, and moving forward on serious social injustices this community faces. Media coverage and conversation will be a major part of that moment.
Make no mistake about it, we’ve gotten this wrong before. Piers Morgan on CNN. Katie Couric on her syndicated show. News stories presuming to establish whether a child is “really” a boy or a girl. We do this largely because we are trying to map a binary view of gender onto a spectrum of gender expression. Although the National Review would have some believe actress Laverne Cox is or is not a woman, the reality just isn’t that simple. We want to assign some kind of biological A/B certainty to gender, but scholar Katherine Bell encourages journalists to recognize instead that all gender expression is a “deeply held notion of self.” Cox’s self is a woman. And to misunderstand that is to get the story of her wrong.
The Reality of Disparity
Getting it wrong has consequences. In focusing on appearance (as Morgan did) or genitals (as Couric did), media miss the larger — and often tragic — realities for trans people. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, respondents reported:
vastly higher rates of attempted suicide (41% among transgender respondents vs. 1.6% among the U.S. population)
housing discrimination and living in extreme poverty at a rate four times that of others
double the rate of unemployment, with 90% of respondents reporting some measure of harassment, mistreatment or discrimination at work
All of these measures saw increases among respondents of color
These effects are felt by the approximately 700,000 Americans who identify as transgender. For Christina Kahrl, a trans woman who covers Major League Baseball for ESPN, Jenner’s interview is about Jenner’s own experience. But it also presents a moment to awaken people to the trans experience and the disparities people face.
“What can you as a journalist teach people about the trans experience using this moment in time?” she says. “It’s a rare experience. And you have an obligation to talk about it well, with an eye to all those issues – health care, employment, safety, sex education.”
Respecting Experiences You Do Not Live
I called Kahrl before writing this piece for a specific reason: I was terrified of getting it wrong myself. I was born female and have always felt like and lived as a woman. So can I truly understand how another person born female could feel like a man and live as a woman? Or as a man? How might I feel as someone who doesn’t feel a strong gender leaning?
I’m white and can’t know what it really means to be Asian in our society. I’m middle-class and don’t pretend to grasp the true grip of poverty. I’m straight and can’t walk in the shoes of a lesbian. But as a journalist — and someone who teaches a whole bunch of aspiring journalists — I am ethically bound to respect that which I do not know and work to responsibly and sensitively report on the range of experiences of all people.
So in this moment — this “rare experience,” as Kahrl termed it — what should we do in covering the Jenner interview and transgender people overall?
Study up: When you’re trying to understand something you haven’t experienced, you surround yourself with background information and perspective. Three excellent places to start:
GLAAD, an organization that works with media on LGBT issues, has outstanding reference guides. Their summary on transgender coverage clarifies issues as narrow as specific language and as broad as agendas for reporting.
Open up: Closed-mindedness is a particularly deadly trait for anyone engaging in public conversation, including journalists. The essential element of telling stories about experiences you haven’t had is an openness to that very idea. It’s recognizing that you don’t know. It’s in this element that we see the stunning difference between the missteps by Piers Morgan and Katie Couric. Where Couric recognized where she had erred and brought Laverne Cox back to her show for a “teachable moment,” Morgan brought Janet Mock back to his show to reprimand her for “vilifying” him.
Listen up: When Sawyer interviews Jenner, people will watch. I’d love to think we could live in a world where someone’s gender transition is no big deal. But we don’t. Plenty of people will be talking. The most important thing is how much we will be listening. By engaging with trans communities on social media and opening ourselves to trans people living in our communities, we can find and tell the stories that don’t get the ratings grab Jenner-Sawyer will.
“The key here is what this conversation creates as a moment for all people to talk about trans people,” Kahrl said. “To demonstrate our capacity to accept that people are different and will go through different challenges in life. If Jenner is able to do this, hopefully it will engender some greater measure of acceptance for trans people, to treat trans people with greater dignity.”
Responsibility for All
It is that dignity that concerns me when we expand ethical questions beyond journalists and commentators and out to the wider public. I’ve become increasingly concerned about how quickly our ability to publish in an instant has increased and how far behind our conception of the responsible use of that freedom lags. Whether with GamerGate or non-consensual porn, we see a gulf between access to technology and the thoughtful use of it.
Bruce Jenner has already walked the tabloid and social media gauntlet and more is sure to come. Yet Jenner has fame, money, power and privilege that may serve to insulate him from demeaning tweets, hateful posts and nasty memes. But the trans kid in the high school down the road doesn’t. He already faces the disparities detailed above and the consequences of trying to survive in a society that doesn’t accept him. Transgender is not his “choice” or his “lifestyle.” It is who he is, and that alone is worthy of respect.
As I thought through that and what it meant, I sat down with a remarkable young student of mine. At just 20 years old, Lanni Solochek has spent significant time trying to learn about and understand how to cover and write about transgender people. As we talked, I thought about how mature she was and how much further down the road toward understanding she was — and at less than half my age.
“As a journalist and a human being,” she said, “I’m focused on people. On their lived experience.”
What a tremendous amount we could all learn from people like her, people who learn about what they haven’t lived.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ted Eytan and used here under Creative Commons license.
How does a society deal with what it considers to be unethical use of the freedom to publish?
Dictators imprison journalists. Democracies use a mix of legal and non-legal mechanisms, from libel laws to press councils.
In the United States, journalists have long countered calls for greater legal regulation by appealing to an ethical ideal — the “self-regulation” of the press.
The idea, on the face of it, is simple. Like other professions, journalists would follow and enforce their own norms of conduct, rather than place it in the hands of government agencies.
For those who hope that self-regulation is still a valid idea, I have bad news from the expanding frontiers of today’s digital journalism.
Self-regulation is no longer a clear and coherent ethical ideal. The problem is not the old objection that self-regulation struggles in practice. Yes, too many news outlets ignore ethical standards with little consequence.
The problem is deeper. The very idea of self-regulation by professional journalists no longer makes sense in an era of digital, global media. At best, self-regulation applies only to the diminishing domain of mainstream professional journalists.
As a free press supporter, I worry about this decline in the ideal.
It leaves room for demagogues to argue that, if self-regulation is a myth, the only alternative is greater legal and social regulation of the news media.
Therefore, I propose that we get to work to construct a new idea for supporting standards. We need a society-wide notion of media responsibility. Moreover, we need new public structures that allow society as a whole to discuss, monitor and criticize the ethics of journalism practice.
I call for the creation of what I call the National Coalition for Media Standards.
The coalition would be a new way of “doing” journalism ethics in the public sphere, adjusted to new media. It would include the public as an important part of the ethics process.
Let me explain, starting with why self-regulation is an idea collapsing from within.
Why self-regulation?
Journalism self-regulation and ethics were born together, as ethical twins, in the early 1900s, as journalists created professional associations with codes of ethics. For the first time, journalists espoused a collective responsibility for the practice and sought common standards.
Journalists made a group commitment to serve the public good. They articulated that responsibility in terms of the now familiar principles of truth-telling, objectivity, separation of news and opinion, and editorial independence.
They also talked about their professionalism and their codes of ethics as sufficient to regulate their conduct. Who watches the watchdog? The watchdog itself.
It is no accident that professional ethics and self-regulation were linked so closely.
Both developments were a response to a rising public worry about the power of the new mass commercial press. Like today, the public accused journalists of being sensational, inaccurate and biased, and advancing their own interests first.
This public decline in confidence, combined with wartime calls for censorship, prompted governments of the era to threaten legal restrictions on professional media practitioners, including film producers and advertisers.
Self-regulation was journalism’s rhetorical response to threats against its freedom and lagging public support. In practice, the idea proved to be imperfect. Many news outlets ignored codes of ethics or rejected group mechanisms such as press councils. Public confidence declined as media scandals mounted and the influence of power and business on media grew.
Self-regulation’s fatal blow
The idea of self-regulation entails the following three conditions: (1) an ability to clearly recognize who is a journalist, i.e., who is a member of the profession; (2) a willingness among group members to self-regulate; (3) and substantial agreement on principles for critiquing conduct.
By the turn of this century, the technology-driven media revolution, with its democratization of media, began to undermine all three conditions.
First, the revolution created many forms of nonprofessional, nonmainstream journalism, muddying the water as to who is a journalist. Self-regulation was meant to apply only to mainstream professional journalists. But does self-regulation apply to nonprofessionals? To whom does the ideal apply?
Second, presume that we can find a way to define “journalist” to include most professional and nonprofessional practitioners. Would sufficient numbers of this amorphous group be willing to come together to practice self-regulation? Is the idea of “collective responsibility” viable in today’s chaotic media universe?
Third, we lack widespread agreement on the norms that would guide self-regulation across multiple media platforms. What code should be adopted? Almost every principle of professional self-regulation, from objectivity to impartiality, is in question.
Meanwhile, glaring failures of self-regulation, such as the phone hacking scandal in Britain, undermine the legitimacy of self-regulation. People who contend that the media can self-regulate are laughed out of the court of public opinion.
So we face two large questions for self-regulation: The self-regulation of whom – which journalists? And the self-regulation of what – what norms?
Society-wide responsibility
I suggest we start by formulating a new idea to replace self-regulation.
First, we eliminate the term “regulation.” The term is misleading because it suggests that we have legal mechanisms in mind. Second, we eliminate the “self” in “self-regulation” which refers to professional journalists and replace it with a process that includes citizens.
Self-regulation in journalism has been a closed, inward-looking approach to ethics. It presumes that ethics belongs to journalists. They create the codes; they enforce them.
But the responsibility for good journalism is a collective responsibility of all of society. Citizens, social groups and citizen journalists should be an intrinsic part of the nationwide process for supporting media standards.
Journalism ethics starts with asking what sorts of media our democracy needs. When it comes to this question, we all have a deep interest.
A national coalition
So the question becomes: How do we create an open process? What public institutions might realize this ideal?
I propose that movers and shakers in the media world form a National Coalition for Media Standards. The coalition would unite journalists and nonjournalists in analyzing and supporting standards across all forms of journalism.
I see the coalition as the hub of a wheel where the spokes link to media agencies, societies and individuals that care about democratic media. It would not replace existing agencies. It would be a “meta” organization that coordinates activity and partners with groups.
The coalition would have an office at a center for ethics, say at a university. It would be funded by major foundations, partners, journalism associations and philanthropic individuals.
The coalition would be led by a director and a large board. Forty percent of the board would be journalists from all forms of media; 15 percent would be people who study and teach journalism and its ethics; 20 percent would come from groups that are substantially affected by media coverage, e.g. minority groups; 10 percent would be people with experience in press regulation, e.g., ombudsmen, standards editors; and 15 percent would be citizens from various walks of life.
What would be the main activities of the coalition?
First, study the health of the media system at large and trends in media ethics, culminating in annual high-profile reports on the state of media ethics.
Second, investigate and publicly comment on individual cases of bad practice. Support standards by widespread public discussion and criticism. Praise and support good journalism.
Third, assist in reconstructing ethics for digital news media. Among the first projects would be addressing the questions raised above – who is a journalist and what common standards might unite journalists across platforms?
Fourth, take on a public education mission. Convene workshops and conferences, publish guidelines and teaching modules, and engage the public in addressing issues.
All of us can think of obstacles to the creation of this coalition, or a similar agency. I am acutely aware of these lurking complexities. Yet we have to start fundamental reform of journalism ethics from somewhere.
What is important is that people who care about responsible journalism imagine – and then create – a new way to deal with the difficult and new ethical issues of communication in a media-lined world.
Self-regulation within a profession is dead. Long live society-wide engagement.
Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist, author and educator. He is Distinguished Lecturer of Ethics at the University of British Columbia, Courtesy Professor at the University of Oregon, and founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin.
[Image credit: Cartoon by William Barritt, first published in “Vim”, v. 1, no. 2, 29 June 1898. Via Library of Congress website; public domain]
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, I and other journalists in Western democracies deplored the violence and defended freedom of expression against terrorism.
A common defense of the satirical magazine’s barbed cartoons was “the right to offend.” Some commentators made the principle absolute, and then concluded the following: If news media did not republish offending material, their editors were moral cowards.
Legally, this response has its heart in the right place. But, ethically, it comes up short in three places:
THE ‘RIGHT TO OFFEND’
First, the issue is inadequately framed as mainly a legal question of the right to offend, and the main complaint is that the cartoons offend a religious group.
For example, reports of a “Nous Sommes Tous Charlie” symposium at the Missouri School of Journalism focused on the legal aspect of free speech, and what constitutes hate speech.
Such discussions are important, but the Hebdo case is much more than that. It is a question of ethics, journalistic duties, tensions within plural societies and the role of media.
DEFENDING WITHOUT ABSOLUTES
Second, the right to publish is not absolute. Such a view trivializes legitimate questions about using media to offend deeply held beliefs and to create hostile environments. We can defend offensive speech without absolutes or trivialization.
Photo by Valentina Calà, and reused here with Creative Commons license.
We need to reframe the debate to avoid absolutes and to discuss the social duties of journalists — not just their rights. Overall, the Hebdo debate failed to discuss sufficiently the role of news media in amplifying or reducing the tensions between immigrants, Muslims and other groups in France and the rest of Europe.
We need to reframe the debate to avoid absolutes and to discuss the social duties of journalists — not just their rights. Overall, the Hebdo debate failed to discuss sufficiently the role of news media in amplifying or reducing the tensions between immigrants, Muslims and other groups in France and the rest of Europe.
These tensions, enhanced by global media, form the background for the issue of offensive journalism today. We should ask: What sorts of journalism are needed in such an era? Is the satire of Charlie Hebdo helpful or harmful?
NAME CALLING GETS US NOWHERE
Third, there is (or was) no duty to republish all or some of the cartoons. There was a range of ethically permissible options. Calling people cowards is just name calling.
My ethical position is summed up by two slogans:
Journalism is restrained not by causing offense, but by causing harm to interests.
Journalism is restrained not by causing offense, but by causing harm to interests.
A right to offend is balanced by a duty to mend.
HARM TO INTERESTS
Stout defenders of the right to offend get a couple of things right. First, there is (or should be) a legal right to publish — even if it offends — as long as the material respects reasonable restrictions on free speech, such as libel or inciting violence against a group. The stout defenders also are right to reject “being offended” as a fundamental, stand-alone reason to restrict journalism in a democracy.
Why?
Because “being offended” is too restrictive, too trivial or too “wide” a concept. It is too restrictive because it would make robust debate all but impossible. It is too trivial because people can be offended by relatively unimportant things. Does the smell of a person on a bus offend you? Does an overweight person disgust you? It is too wide because it applies to many areas that involve the rights of others, such as the public display of affection (e.g., kissing) among gays.
People can feel offended about almost anything.
Image by Brian Turner and used here with Creative Commons license.
However, it could be objected that we are only considering the easy cases. What about
actions and publications that deeply (not trivially) offend? I hold a neo-Nazis march through a Jewish community. Or, perhaps I claim the following: Pornography reinforces harmful social attitudes towards women, publishing hate speech against gays in a red-neck town creates fear and supports discrimination, university students participating in a Facebook page that ridicules black students as inferior creates a harmful environment on campus.
Doesn’t “being offended” mean something in such cases?
The answer is that the main reason to object is not that they offend — which they do — but that they cause, or are likely to cause, serious harm to individuals or groups. And not just any old harm. Such actions create social environments that are hostile and harmful to individuals and groups. What such environments do, through speech and communication, is thwart, endanger or set back the interests of people.
Words can hurt since humans form beliefs and attitudes through language and communication.
Consider this example: I am director of a journalism school. In the corridors, I express to students my strong and intolerant views about women and black students. Have I the right to offend, absolutely, in this situation? Of course, not. But why not?
Because, apart from being offended, female and black students have a good reason to worry that my attitudes might affect their progress in the school, given my power as director. Further, I am creating a negative environment where certain members of the school do not feel safe and wonder whether they will be able to pursue school opportunities on an equal footing with other students.
Therefore, my offensive communications is wrong and can be restrained, mainly because they cause harm to interests.
For controversial media and speech, looking at possible harms to interests in social contexts is superior to a citizen complaining that they have been offended or a journalist claiming an absolute right to offend. This absolute approach easily becomes a tool of discrimination, by ignoring how speech must be evaluated in terms of social role, institutional setting, and power. If we appeal to an absolute freedom to publish we cannot even discuss such issues. Debate is brought to a halt.
My suggestion, applied to media, is that we evaluate any complaint about a report (or form of journalism) being offensive not in terms of hurt feelings but actual or potential harms to people’s interests, communication environments and the aim of a plural and just society. Of course, we need to evaluate each case on its merits and not presume in advance that a complaint means an actual, serious harm has been done. But what is important is to switch our criteria of evaluation from causing offense to causing harm.
Redefining the issue allows us to more coherently evaluate Charlie Hebdo, hate speech, and insulting material in terms of potential or actual harm to interests.
DUTY TO MEND
Photo by Josh Janssen via Flickr Creative Commons.
My second slogan, the duty to mend, is an extension of the first slogan.
If we restrain journalism by harms to interests, including the impact on social climates, then we imply that journalists have “positive” duties to do socially helpful reporting.
When we talk about environments and the interactions of groups, we expand our ethical vision to the social role of journalism. Journalism ethics becomes more than just a list of negative rules about what not to do in specific situations, such as do not distort the facts. It becomes a form of social action with a set of aims to promote and values to honor.
In my view, journalism’s social duties include promoting the values and goals of democratic society, as defined by the era in question.
Today, the positive duties revolve around constructing a society where people of different conceptions of life can feel safe and equally able to pursue their goods in supportive environments. Journalists should act as bridges of understanding and respectful communication among conflicting groups and traditions. This journalism of dialogue across traditions and borders is crucial for an ethics of global media.
In my view, this role of cultural “translation” is more important than satirical cartoons that deliberately ridicule religions and pay little attention to the need to mend differences.
The key questions in Hebdo-like cases, now and in the future, will be ethical questions of whether certain types of journalism contribute to healthy, peaceful, social environments. What forms of journalism create unhealthy climates of resentment, inequality, and alienation?
These are the issues that need attention.
I propose my “duty to mend” as a principle to balance the enthusiastic support that already exists among journalists for a free press and its right to offend.
It might help to frame the ethical discussion in a wider and more thoughtful manner.
Originally on PBS MediaShift on February 25, 2015; reposted with permission.
Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist, author and educator. He is Distinguished Lecturer of Ethics at the University of British Columbia, Courtesy Professor at the University of Oregon, and founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin.
t’s 1955. On CBS, a deep-voiced announcer backs a jittery reel of black-and-white stills.
“October 8, 1871,” he intones with high drama. “The Chicago Fire.”
And then the hook: “You. Are. There.”
Screenshot courtesy of Chicago Film Archives, captured January 17, 2015.
The CBS News production then cuts to Walter Cronkite at the anchor desk, aside a microphone, script in hand. “Walter Cronkite reporting. October 8th, 1871. In this year and month, we are suffering in Chicago…”
“You Are There” was a CBS reenactment series through which anchor Cronkite would transport viewers to a historical event and treat it as though he were reporting it live. Breathless on-scene reporters, actors serving as famous sources and fake footage were all intended to put the audience in the scene of events like the Hindenburg disaster, the Revolutionary War or the Great Chicago Fire. Though easy to criticize today as staged and hokey docudrama, “You Are There” was nonetheless a novel effort during the heady experimental days of early television news.
We are in those heady days again, still seeking to carry our audiences to scenes to help them experience – and feel – the news of the day. But today, the experimentation comes in the form of a headset, a virtual reality approach that puts its wearer “in” the environment. And with that transport, come key ethical questions about representation, privacy, intellectual property and media effects.
The Technology
Virtual reality is not new. Beginning mainly in the 1960s with flight simulation, VR – also known as “augmented reality” or “immersive multimedia” – picked up speed with an MIT project mapping Aspen, Colorado, through video. The concept is simple: use a headset device to simulate a physical environment through sensory experiences, most commonly sight and sound.
Development in virtual reality today is driven largely by the gaming sector and consumers’ apparently insatiable appetite for those experiences. Industry leader Oculus, known primarily for its emerging Oculus Rift device, envisions a world of consumer-grade headsets that put a gamer into the experience of “Call of Duty” or “Grand Theft Auto.” That vision took a major step forward in 2014 with the arrival of the Samsung Gear VR, a virtual reality headset powered by smartphone, rather than the expensive desktop computers previously needed for processor-heavy simulations.
These headsets provide two kinds of virtual experience: animation or video. Both attempt to recreate reality and allow the user to walk virtually through scenes. With an Oculus Rift strapped on, a user can go into the animated environment of a Tuscan estate. The scene tracks with body movements, as users turn their heads or use keystrokes to ascend a staircase or peer over a stone wall. Through the Gear VR, they can go into a performance of Cirque du Soleil created through 360-degree video, watching various performers as if sitting on the stage itself.
But VR potential extends far beyond gaming and entertainment. In January, the United Nations debuted an emotional immersive experience following a Syrian refugee girl, “Clouds Over Sidra.” The piece is viewable on the Gear VR via its Milk VR delivery system, a.k.a., “the YouTube for Virtual Reality.” To appreciate the differences inherent in an immersive experience, watch a reporter explore a refugee camp through the Gear VR.
With that view, the potential for journalism is almost immediately apparent. Though its commercial prospects pale in comparison with gaming, immersive journalism is already in production. And in fact, one of the leaders in this space, documentary filmmaker Nonny de la Peña, has earned acclaim with Syria as her immersive focus, as well. Recently called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality,” she is working on all aspects of VR in journalism, including hardware development, reporting and virtual rendering.
As de la Peña explained to the BBC, immersive approaches advance journalism by putting the audience into a place and giving them a sensory connection with it.
“It creates a duality of presence. You know you’re ‘here,’ but you feel like you’re ‘there’ too. And the experience is much more visceral. It’s really a kind of a whole-body experience and is very unique – different than radio, than television, than any other kind of format for experiencing a story,” de la Peña says.
Dan Pacheco, professor and Horvitz Chair in Journalism Innovation at the S.I. Newhouse journalism school at Syracuse University, is experimenting with these technologies with students. He says that while the world is excited about what VR will do for gamers, he’s thrilled by the potential for transforming citizens’ knowledge of the world around them.
“We no longer have to be limited to telling stories. We can take you into an experience,” Pacheco says. “No matter how many times you tell a story, people don’t feel it. Once you start to show it, it’s a little better but still far, far away. Once you can move someone into an experience, that’s really the key.”
He has first-hand experience, having served as a consultant on Gannett’s first foray into virtual reality – a tour of an Iowa farm as part of its “Harvest of Change” series. The VR approach puts viewers into the farm environment, enabling them to navigate around barns and approach giant tractors. Visual cues open doors to more information on elements of the farm. The experience is best using the Oculus Rift headset, but others can get a sense of the experience using the Unity player on a web browser.
The place-based feeling of VR is particularly important for stories depending on a sense of space and perspective. The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri experimented with an animated VR approach to cover eyewitness statements in the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. A walk through their output, helmed by graphic journalist and RJI fellow Dan Archer, shows some of the possibilities of VR for journalism.
Each witness’ perspective is virtually apparent as the user experiences his or her statements. This gives the reporting an angle that’s not quite possible with text. Video would capture the sense of space, but cannot give the user the same control over movement. The package is rudimentary, as the technology is nascent, but provides a window into what will be possible in the future.
“It comes down to a much-abused term that’s being bandied about these days: empathy,” Archer says. “I first got into graphic journalism as a way of placing the reader at the heart of a news story by using art to visualize the accounts of my interviewees from their first-person perspective. That was several years ago, and the technology … has at last almost caught up to speed.”
As with all emerging media platforms, VR presents opportunities, but also demands serious ethical consideration. In some cases, traditional ethics contested over decades help inform our judgments. But in others, the very immersion itself prompts questions we have not yet tackled in journalism.
How real is the virtual?
Ethical questions begin with the basics. When constructing an animated virtual reality, what steps can be taken to make it as real as possible? What are the dimensions of surrounding buildings? What are the colors and shapes of people in the scene? What’s the relative perspective between the user and the trees around her?
In the case the Ferguson package, the VR rendering shows a blue sky with puffy white clouds. But video from the scene shows a more gray, dreary day. Does this matter for the story? Would it change the audience’s understanding? All of these questions must factor into animated recreations. But they’re also issues in 360-degree video. One would imagine it to be less fraught with potential for distortion, yet video that’s captured in 360 degrees still has to be edited in two dimensions. This can interfere with rendering reality as it was caught on the original video.
It’s important to recognize, however, that virtual reality does not introduce these concerns in significantly new ways. De la Peña faced criticism early in her work from those who claimed VR journalism was too subjective and thus could not be ethical. Yet when operating in text, still, video, audio or interactivity, we’re continually making judgment calls about what to cover, what to render and how to do it. VR certainly poses issues of subjectivity, but they are extensions of critical questions we need to be asking ourselves in all platforms.
Archer, in fact, notes that VR as a form holds promise for helping users recognize subjectivity because the choices are so apparent in a graphically rendered environment.
“All we can do is be open and honest with readers, and highlight what we chose to include and exclude.” Archer says. “My hope is that using this process we can lean more heavily on readers to explore what the notion of ‘truth’ is using this new virtual frame of reference.”
Whose reality is it?
Just as we must with any text, video, audio or interactive story, we must wrestle with the sourcing in virtual reality packages. The Ferguson piece lays this bare. Source perspective, motivations and biases all play roles in the creation of the virtual environment. Certainly the number of feet between a window and a road can be measured, scaled and recreated in VR. But where a person says she stood and what she says she saw are less certain. Yet when they are rendered in a virtual environment, they are necessarily made more real for the audience.
Who owns a reality?
The “Harvest of Change” series, the virtual tour of the Iowa farm, quickly raised questions of intellectual property and trademark. Does recreating an exact animation of a trademarked tractor design infringe on that design? Does it do so with iconic public buildings? With emerging technologies, we often find law lagging behind what’s possible. Ethics must fill the breach, as we weigh others’ rights to their creations and the implications of our own recreations.
How much does this cost?
The ethics of economics matter in an age of news media disruption. The “Harvest of Change” package – while fascinating and exciting – came at time when Gannett laid off dozens of employees at its flagship paper. Although Pacheco says the cost of the VR package was not exorbitant (he’s barred from disclosing exact figures), expenditures on experimentation always come at the expense of other elements of news gathering. This context, however, demonstrates that funding experimental platforms and approaches may be one of the most justifiable expenditures of strained resources – within reason, of course. Virtual reality is expected to capture an audience through gaming that has been particularly elusive for news media: teens and young adults. These virtual platforms may be an ideal way to stimulate their interaction with news, serving them as citizens. But this requires a focused, thoughtful strategy, rather than merely chasing the latest toy. It also requires that we consider for whom we are developing these technology uses and whether we are leaving important audience segments out. Early speculation was that the cost of an Oculus Rift would make it a rich kid’s toy, at best. Yet the Gear VR is surprisingly affordable and because it runs off a mobile phone, its potential is open to a more diverse set of users who would otherwise lack consistent access to a desktop machine.
Whose expectations matter?
Privacy is clearly one of the largest ethical considerations for journalists with immersives, especially 360-degree video. As with drones capable of low-cost capture of video, still images and sound from the air above both public and private property, use of video and even animations for virtual reality poses the risk of invading privacy. Law is sorely behind technological development in this arena, so ethics are more crucial than ever.
“We’re not that far from drones flying all over the place and capturing everything,” Pacheco says. “Pandora’s Box opened back in the ‘70s and we’re not going to be able to close that. It’s going to be interesting to see how people use that for good and how they use it in morally and ethically questionable ways.”
Privacy, especially in law, is largely premised on the protection of personal space, and we punish intrusions into that space. We ask where a person has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and generally conclude that such expectations are far stronger in personal spaces than in public ones. A woman has a reasonable expectation of privacy in her kitchen, but not in, say, a Starbucks in downtown Chicago.
But privacy is not merely a question of law. As media ethicist Cliff Christians notes, privacy is also a fundamental moral good. While privacy is essential for individual flourishing, protecting such human development is ultimately a common good.
“A private domain gives people their own identity and unique self-consciousness within the human species … Privacy as a moral good is nonnegotiable because controlling our life’s core is essential to our personhood,” Christians writes.
In an age when technology enables a transformation from simple observation to sophisticated surveillance, journalism must wrestle with the implications of this possibility. Virtual reality that relies on video capture, for instance, poses the problem of incidental capture. Imagine an immersive experience designed to transport users to a Liberian hospital treating patients with Ebola. Although currently limited in scope, technology will quickly be able to transmit live 360-degree video from such a hospital. Even if the clinicians or patients in focus consent to their story being used, the camera will pick up the full scope of the scene and enable users to move themselves in for closer looks. We must consider the privacy of the people within that scene.
And while VR would commonly be assumed to be more easily justified in a public setting – say, a street – the sophistication of the capture will also include spaces normally deemed private – say, a person’s living room windows. As we have struggled to conceptualize and deal with the privacy implications of emerging technologies like Google Street View, we will have to contend with the invasiveness of virtual reality. But the stakes increase with its use in journalism, specifically because news is so often about capturing people’s most difficult moments.
When is the virtual too real?
While some evidence is emerging that virtual reality may be useful as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, Pacheco and others worry about the effects of putting people in stressful situations through VR. The concern is that renderings that are sufficiently real may trigger memory as though the user actually experienced a place or event. No one could mistake Walter Cronkite’s staged Chicago Fire coverage as real. But consider a virtual reality headset with video images of fire, plus the sound of crackling and gusting, plus the thick smell of smoke, plus the sense of growing warmth. These sensations have far more potential to induce trauma.
VR coverage of war, torture, rape and other violence will prompt searing questions about lasting consequences of consuming journalism that eclipse our current research on media effects. All of these considerations must factor into uses of virtual reality for journalism, keeping subjects and audiences more firmly in mind than the mere possibilities the technology affords, Pacheco says.
“The most important thing that we need to keep in mind with immersive and experiential media is that because people feel like they’re somewhere else, you always need to keep the experience of the user as the most important ethical consideration.”
Kathleen Bartzen Culver is an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication and associate director of the Center for Journalism Ethics. This essay was originally posted on February 4, 2015 at digital ethics.org, the website of the Center for Digital Ethics at Loyola University Chicago.
2014 brought us the year of My Journalism Ethics. It was the year that “personalizing” journalism ethics went mainstream. Big time.
Major journalism associations, from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) to the Online News Association (ONA) grappled with the problem of writing ethical guidelines for an increasingly personalized, opinionated, and politically biased media sphere.
Some journalists embraced personalization – the idea that it is up to each journalist or each outlet to create and “customize” their own guidelines. Others rejected it. In either case, personalized ethics – “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Ethics” – was topical and contested.
More importantly, it has set the course for journalism ethics in 2015 and beyond.
For this review, I could have focused on other developments, from the beheadings of foreign reporters and free press struggles in China and Egypt to a proposed Bill of Rights to control news media in Britain. I could have focused on bad behavior by journalists.
Instead, I focus on the personalized ethics movement because it speaks to the very future of journalism ethics in a digital age: What, if any, journalism ethics is possible?
TOOLKIT ETHICS
What is personalized journalism ethics?
Start with a few general principles – a minimum of “content” – and then give journalists the tools (e.g., forms of reasoning) to construct rules adapted to their practice and audiences.
This is micro ethics: the ethics of specific platforms. It is not the traditional macro approach of journalism ethics which provides general norms for all journalists.
Personalization asks us not to think of a code as a content-based document with many principles. Instead, think of a code as a process for those who wish to write their own codes. The code is a tool kit. It adopts only a few common principles, such as truth-telling and accuracy. Then the code provides advice, such as questions to consider for writing guidelines.
Rather than a rich body of common principles for all journalists, there is a common process for code writing for types of journalists.
DIY ethics did not emerge fully grown in 2014. The trend is the third and latest response to the current crisis in journalism ethics: the collapse of a craft-wide consensus on its ethics – on its aims, principles, and best practices.
Everything is up for grabs.
The first response occurred roughly between the late 1900s and 2006, from the rise of online journalism and the birth of Twitter. An ethics “civil war” erupted between professional journalists and citizen journalists as to who were the real journalists and whether principles of gate-keeping journalism, e.g., objectivity and pre-publication verification – were still valid. Some new media journalists said fuddy-duddy ethics did not apply to the free online world.
The second response occurred between 2006 and 2011. The trend was mainstream accommodation. News outlets, from the BBC to the AP, wrote up guidelines on how their journalists should use social media and opine on their personal blogs. Perhaps the mainstream could civilize the online horde and re-establish order in the media universe.
The third phase, from 2011 to today, is the growing popularity of personalization as a way to re-establish journalism ethics across many forms of journalism, not just legacy media.
Personalization signaled that many journalists were skeptical of the possibility of a new consensus on ethics. In the end, journalism ethics may turn out to be a plurality of codes suited to particular practices, without overarching common principles. Pluralism, fragmentation and micro ethics was king; universal, macro ethics was not.
A PRIME EXAMPLE
The Online News Association is helping journalists create their own ethics codes.
The best example of personalized ethics in 2014 is the ONA’s current attempt to develop guidelines for members. The ONA site encourages its members to “build your own ethics” using the tools provided by the code. The ONA is “curating a toolkit to help news outlets, as well as individual bloggers/journalists, create guidelines that respond to their own concepts of journalism.”
The toolkit starts with a small set of common principles such as tell the truth, don’t plagiarize and correct your errors. Journalists make a choice between traditional objective journalism, where your personal opinion is kept under wraps, and transparency journalism, meaning you can write from a political or social point of view as long as you’re upfront about it.
Then, the toolkit provides guidance on constructing guidelines for about 40 areas of practice where journalists might disagree, such as removing items from online archives, use of anonymous sources and verification of social media sources.
In a previous column, I contrasted this approach with the SPJ’s revision of its famous code of ethics, approved by members earlier this year. I said the SPJ used a de-personal approach because the revisions maintained the code’s commitment to speak for all professional journalists. It did not name specific forms of journalism. Also, unlike the personalized approach, the SPJ code remained rich in content, articulating many common principles and norms.
For some, the DIY approach is a positive, inclusive and democratic approach, suited to a plural media world. The end of the dream of macro journalism ethics. For others, it is an abandonment of journalism ethics, an ill-timed concession to ethical subjectivism.
A FOURTH RESPONSE
It is customary for year-end reviews to fearlessly predict the future. I will not shrink from this tradition, even if it may be foolhardy.
I predict the continuing co-existence of, and tension between, the depersonalized and personalized approaches. Mainstream associations won’t abandon their depersonalize codes, and online associations won’t abandon their personalized guidelines. Nor should they. We need both forms of thinking. We need a healthy and experimental approach to code writing.
However, I believe this third stage should give way to a fourth response, an integration of both approaches. This journalism ethics combines macro and micro, common principles and personalized applications.
Getting the balance right will be difficult.
Nonetheless, journalism ethics will have little future, and certainly little public credibility, unless it has the following features:
New unifying principles: We construct a consensus around aims and principles for all responsible journalists. We focus on common values. The key is to develop principles that express the mission of a diverse news media serving an open democracy and a global world. The content will include new aims and principles, such as advocating for global humanity, and the re-interpretation of principles such as impartiality and independence.
Personalized value systems for new practices: We construct specific best practices for entrepreneurial journalism, non-profit journalism, social media journalism, and other new and innovative forms of journalism.
Public basis for all of journalism ethics: We place a crucial restraint on the types of personalized values and practices that can be proposed. Whatever these practices are, they must be consistent with the unifying principles of democratic journalism. We recognize that the basis of journalism ethics is public, not subjective. We should be able to justify any personalization of ethics by reference to the public good, not the personal interests of individual journalists. The ultimate moral authority of any journalism ethics is not the fact that the values are “mine,” but because they promote a flourishing society, however we define it.
Fourth-response journalism ethics will be a more complicated, sophisticated enterprise than in the past. There is no avoiding the complexities.
Suppose that journalists ignore this advice and create a simpler personalized ethics that is subjective or idiosyncratic. It announces what they, as individuals, believe, and what ethical restraints they accept. Full stop. There is no serious attempt to link these values to the practice of journalism at large, or to provide more objective reasons for affirming their values. Then they ask the public to accept their values, and to trust that they will follow their self-created, and self-announced, ethical values.
Given the level of public cynicism about journalists, they will be laughed derisively out of the court of public opinion. The public simply will not buy the idea of journalism ethics and self-regulation as anything less than a practice-wide accountability based on public principles.
The public will not buy an individualized My Journalism Ethics.
AM I DREAMING?
Is a new integrated ethics possible? It does not exist. Will it ever exist?
That is the trouble with predicting the future. One can always think of many obstacles. The world does not always satisfy our wishes, especially in ethics.
However, the rise of personalized ethics in 2014, especially in the form that it has taken in the ONA, advances our evolving response to ethical problems. Personalization forces out into the open the key questions of journalism ethics today.
Gradually, we get glimpses of how to redefine responsible journalism for a digital world.
Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist, author and educator. He is ethics adviser/lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Courtesy Professor at the University of Oregon, and founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin.
I knew 2014 would be a notable year in media ethics at about the two-week mark. I remember it vividly. In mid-January, the sports website Grantland ran a stunning piece called “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” — an intriguing narrative about a golf club inventor who was transgender. The story concluded with her suicide. I recall reading it the day it was posted and saying to my husband, “Something doesn’t feel right about this.”
Two days later, he shared back with me a social media firestorm engulfing Grantland. Something indeed was not right, and what we saw in that opening ethics salvo of the year encapsulates many issues we should learn from heading into 2015.
Despite so many examples of important stories well reported and compellingly told, this year was one of media missteps. Lists abound, including Columbia Journalism’s Review’s summary of the worst journalism of 2014, Poynter’s corrections roundup and the top 10 from iMedia Ethics. But more important to me than individual incidences of ethics concerns are the connective tissue between them. Dr. V’s story was an anatomy and physiology lesson for what was to come.
Trapped in our own perspectives
To be clear, Grantland got nothing factually wrong in its coverage of Dr. V. The story is accurate. It went wrong with context. This woman’s story was not of a putter alone or even of her interactions with reporter Caleb Hannan. It was a delicate and nuanced story of a person who — as transgender — faced enormous struggles and questions. By failing to consult with even one person with experience or expertise on trans issues, Grantland went wrong on issues as small as gendered pronouns and as large as outing Dr. V. They wouldn’t have had to look far. The site is owned by ESPN, home to baseball writer Christina Kahrl, whose depth of understanding could have averted the whole mess.
We had so many perspective problems in 2014. The New York Times stumbled in trying to turn a stereotyped phrase and referring to Shonda Rhimes as an “angry black woman.” Coverage of the Ferguson protests lagged until a pair of reporters were arrested and got their own first-person view. And a Fox News anchor reacted to groundbreaking news that a female fighter pilot led the United Arab Emirates attacks on ISIL by referring to her as “boobs on the ground.”
This lack of perspective beyond our own is but one reason it’s a good idea to diversify both the people producing journalism and the avenues for citizens to participate in it. Every ethical discussion must include consideration of all those who would be affected by a story and whenever possible, we should seek and value their input.
Chasing a big narrative
The Dr. V story also shared fraught ethical tissue with likely the most regrettable media performance of 2014: The Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus.” The bone-chilling tale of a gang rape at the University of Virginia had many elements familiar to those of us who know well the problems of sexual assault on campus. But it also struck some off-key chords, leading other media outlets — most notably the Washington Post — to question the story and find holes in the details.
But what is clear to me is that the magazine stumbled badly from the very outset of reporting. The writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has spoken of casting about extensively for the right case on the right campus. She was hunting a particularly grave and stunning narrative. But that’s not what campus rape is about. It’s not a case. It’s all the cases. In outing Dr. V as trans, Grantland missed the shared experience of trans people. In highlighting one horror in graphic detail, Rolling Stone missed the commonness of campus rape. They’ve been almost entirely overlooked in this debacle, but Atlantic’s piece on fraternity culture and the New York Times’ look at a campus sexual assault were ethical wins this year.
The Wall Street Journal discusses the Rolling Stone rape story.
Guessing at what isn’t known
Grantland raised a lot of questions with no answers in its putter piece. Other media this year erred in guessing when they didn’t know. The worst example — by far — came with the domestic abuse case involving Baltimore Ravens star running back Ray Rice. Before TMZ published video clearly showing Rice brutally punching his then-girlfriend in an elevator, all the public had to go on was video of the following scene outside the elevator. When Rice was suspended for two games as a result, it led to lots of uninformed speculation — as if to say, “We don’t know what she did in that elevator.”
The most jarring element of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” comes at its close, when readers learn the subject died by suicide. This passage feels tacked on and badly handled — fitting, as it kicked off what I will remember as a horrible year for one of journalism’s most difficult subjects. When Robin Williams died by suicide in August, I knew plenty of media outlets would go wrong. They would say he “committed” suicide, when experts repeatedly guide toward the phrasing, “died by suicide.” They would glamorize Williams and his death, possibly boosting the contagion effect. And they would express shock and surprise, despite Williams’ many years battling depression and substance abuse, two key predictors of suicide.
But I had no idea we would go this wrong:
Radar Online ran a photo of Williams at an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting, in clear violation of his privacy and contravention of the group’s parameters.
A CBS affiliate covered his attendance at AA meetings, courtesy of one of its own photographers who also attended.
Fox News’ Shepard Smith speculated about Williams being a “coward.”
ABC streamed live aerial shots from above Williams’ home after he was found dead.
And Henry Rollins betrayed his own experience with depression in a craven “F*** Suicide” post.
Thankfully, we are far ahead of where we were just a decade ago in understanding suicide and advocating for responsible coverage. Useful guidelines abound and should be routinely discussed in newsrooms. Advocates are also quick to root out problems and demand improvements. Apologies followed every one of the examples above. Let’s hope we learn from them.
Robin Williams’ death dominated news cycles. (Photo courtesy of Eggwork and used here under Creative Commons.)
Not everyone could claim the same corrective high ground. New York magazine was duped by a teenager into thinking he had made millions picking stocks. They’ve run a correction, but their online headline still reads as though the story is true. Conservative news site Breitbart also kept up a headline claiming Loretta Lynch, nominee for attorney general, had defended the Clintons during Whitewater. They had the wrong Loretta Lynch and appended a correction at the bottom of the page but left the original flawed headline live for weeks.
Yet the grand prize for doing worse in a correction than you did in a story has to go to Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana.
When outlets began focusing on flaws in its rape story, Rolling Stone could have done what it now has: investigate how things went astray and take responsibility. Instead, Dana took the initial errant step of blaming the victim, using her pseudonym, “Jackie.”
“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”
I suspect that one sentence did more to set back reporting on sensitive issues than any other development in 2014. Remember, Jackie has not retracted her statements. And she didn’t write or edit the story. But even though the magazine has now reworked its statement, that original is the dominant impression for many.
Ethics and public communicators
One final element of Grantland’s year-opening ethics controversy sticks with me. Simmons’ letter details his discomfort with the tenor of many responses, especially those directed at the writer.
(W)as that worth tormenting him on Twitter, sending him death threats, posting his personal information online and even urging him to kill himself like Dr. V did? Unbelievably, for some people, the answer was ‘yes.’ I found that behavior to be sobering at best and unconscionable at worst. You can’t excoriate a writer for being insensitive while also being willfully insensitive to an increasingly dangerous situation.
In that, I see an inescapable link to this year’s most troubling ethics case: GamerGate. While many claimed this movement was about calling out ethical lapses in videogame journalism, I was astounded and appalled by the misogynistic and threatening nature of some posts. People — particularly women — were attacked for speaking out, often getting “doxxed” (slang for having your personal information documented or published online).
I, like many, have had and still have hope that the participatory nature of digital media will help more people engage with news coverage, counter bias and correct errors. But GamerGate is challenging those hopes of mine. Much of the conversation — if I can even call it that — has been a toxic sludge of rumor, invective and gender bias. The irony comes from people who claim to be challenging the ethics of game journalists through patently unethical behavior.
It seems that to some, journalists must have ethics but other public communicators are free from responsibility. Wrong. We’re smack in an age when access to the means to publish — whether on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere — amps up the responsibility we all have. Anyone with an Internet connection needs to consider the responsible use of our freedom to publish. Truth, bias, independence and minimizing harm are no longer questions merely for journalists. And every petulant gamer who will engage in doxxing, rape threats or other abuses needs to wake up, smell those obligations and stop polluting the public sphere.
This pollution extends beyond GamerGate, of course. Take a look at the mayhem of Charles C. Johnson if you’re interested in another case study. We began 2014 with all sorts of questions about Grantland’s responsibility. The interesting questions for the coming year will be how far such responsibilities extend beyond news organizations and how we can hold other public communicators accountable.
Kathleen Bartzen Culver (@kbculver) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching and researching at the intersection of ethics and digital media practices. Culver also serves as associate director of the Center for Journalism Ethics and education curator for PBS MediaShift.
On June 5, the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee added a provision to the proposed state budget that would require the independent, non-profit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism to leave its home in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The provision would also prohibit anyone employed by the University “from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee.”
This action came as a complete surprise, blindsiding WCIJ just as the budget neared completion. No legislator has yet been willing to candidly explain why this punitive, unwarranted, targeted action was taken, much less why it was passed without any debate or opportunity for challenge.
If it remains in the budget, the Joint Finance Committee’s action will affect not only WCIJ, but the Ethics Center and J-School faculty, staff and students as well. And the impact will be nothing but harmful for all. The Center has had a productive collaborative relationship with WCIJ from the beginning. That relationship is now threatened with extinction. Reaction to the provision from all quarters has been vehement and overwhelmingly critical, but the budget bill remains unchanged.
As the Ethics Center’s incoming director, I am deeply troubled, angered, frustrated and astonished by the actions of the legislators who voted to act against WCIJ, the Journalism School and its students in this way. And I hope either they or the governor will reconsider.
The Center’s associate director, Prof. Katy Culver, has eloquently described the situation and its potential impact in a recent post to PBS’s Mediashift. We reprint it below with permission, and we invite and welcome your comments.
Prof. Robert Drechsel
Director, Center for Journalism Ethics
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Wisconsin Lawmakers Try to Remove Investigative Reporting Center from University of Wisconsin
Early this week, I awoke to learn that University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism student Mario Koran had won a prestigious scholarship named for a brave and talented young journalist who died last year while reporting in Mexico City.
Yesterday morning, I awoke to learn an overnight move by some in the Wisconsin legislature threatened the very collaboration that helped forge Koran’s reporting skills and imperiled my freedom to teach and influence young journalists like him. I am reeling from the juxtaposition, and every person who cares about moving journalism education forward should feel threatened by these events.
Koran is a student in our journalism master’s program and went on to the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, a program that draws two dozen journalism students into work with professionals to advance their reporting and writing skills. Koran won the inaugural Armando Montaño Scholarship. At just 22, “Mando” was found dead in Mexico City, shortly after beginning an internship with the Associated Press. The circumstances remain murky, but he had just finished an assignment about police violence. He’s remembered widely for his courage and passion for reporting.
Koran shares that passion, and he was able to stoke his fire through the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a novel –- and award-winning -– collaboration. The non-profit and nonpartisan center partners with our School of Journalism and Mass Communication to employ student interns and pursue highly respected investigative journalism to serve the public.
Part of WCIJ’s mission is to serve as a government watchdog, helping ensure our representatives act in citizens’ best interests. To that end, Koran just completed an investigation into failures in the GPS technology used to track sex offenders. It led to hearings, at which legislators read from his pieces to reinforce the gravity of problems.
Under attack
So everyone associated with WCIJ was blindsided by an overnight move to expel the center from its offices within our journalism program. The school provides no funding to the center, which is supported entirely by outside grants. It receives free space through a facilities-use agreement, in return for guaranteed paid internships for students like Koran, as well as guest lectures, class visits and educational support.
The state’s legislative Joint Finance Committee on Wednesday added a budget measure barring UW from housing the center in its space. But even more critically –- and dangerously -– the measure purports to end any interaction between journalism faculty and staff and the center:
“In addition, prohibit UW employees from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee.” (See the full motion from Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette)
This direct attack on our collaboration with WCIJ is an assault on our academic freedom, as well as on student learning. I had the privilege of meeting with Koran when he was just beginning his look at recidivism in the criminal justice system as a WCIJ intern. I told him I was astounded to learn of the proportion and cost of returning offenders to jail in the state and encouraged him to hunt for angles related to that. I did this in my capacity as a journalism professor, for which I am compensated by the university.
Threat to freedom and independence
To be clear: As written, the legislative budget measure would bar this conversation. Bar it. It would similarly prevent other things I have done with the center over the years -– reviewing intern applications, teasing out ideas from datasets, consulting on leads. And my association with the center pales in comparison with that provided by some of my colleagues.
(For a longer discussion about the motives of the Committee members adding this provision to the bill, read this article from The Cap Times.)
Clearly the measure raises constitutional questions, as a state institution that can bar us from working with WCIJ could also bar my writing for, say, MediaShift or the New York Times. And the measure is not yet a done deal. Cooler heads in the state Senate or Assembly could move to extract the provision or Gov. Scott Walker could use his line-item veto on it. Even the state’s most noted right-wing media figure, Charlie Sykes, called the action ”petty, vindictive and dumb.”
I hope citizens throughout the state and, indeed across the country, call on the legislature and governor to step back and recognize the danger of this kind of interference. Responses from the center, school and university decry the impact on students and the climate for public affairs reporting.
Innovation on the line
Just last year, the center and school won the Associated Press Media Editors’ first-ever award for Innovator of the Year for College Students. Brant Houston, the center’s board president and Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said, “The school and center have pioneered effective ways to involve students in producing award-winning journalism in the public interest.”
Every educator, reporter and organization that champions forward-thinking journalism education should fear the legislature’s effort and the censorial intentions behind it. Efforts to kill the intern model here in Wisconsin endanger other pro-am efforts housed at public universities in other states. Our WCIJ interns work with text, audio, video and data in addition to and in service of their reporting. They are getting daily, real-world, multimedia, leading-edge experiences that simply cannot be replaced in a classroom.
In the end, they suffer. “My time as part of the original, founding class of interns at WCIJ was invaluable in launching my career,” said former intern Alex Morrell, who has worked for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Green Bay Press-Gazette and Associated Press. “It taught me to think clearly and dissect complex issues with precision and confidence. It instilled in me the public value of fair, non-partisan investigative reporting and trained me to approach every issue and idea with the same vigor.”
Citizens suffer, too. No news outlet has covered the issues reported by WCIJ with its depth or sustained focus. The center’s free distribution of its work has informed audiences of 230 news outlets across the state and nation.
Fighting for press freedom
In a climate fraught with recent government surveillance of AP and FOX News reporters, every one of us must be vigilant. Students like Koran deserve the very best and most innovative models journalism education can give them. And citizens deserve the most full-throated defense of public affairs reporting and open government we can muster.
This brazen move against students and journalism is unconscionable. Our silence would be unforgivable.
One of the toughest situations a journalist can face is reporting on tragic events, especially the delicate matter of suicide. In this article, professor and longtime Australian journalist Leo Bowman tells the story of one newspaper’s unique campaign to start an open conversation about the complex issue of mental health. Continue reading →
On the evening of December 16, 2012 a 23-year-old woman and her male companion boarded one of the private buses which often ply the roads of Delhi, the bustling metropolis and capital of India . These buses charge travelers a nominal amount to take them short distances.
photo by LingarajGJ/Creative Commons
The detail of the events which followed have been covered extensively by the Indian and international media. The woman, a physiotherapy intern, was raped by a group of men inside the moving bus; she was beaten and mutilated with an iron rod to the point that she was disemboweled. Battered, naked and bleeding profusely, the two were dumped near an expressway in Delhi, where they were found by a passer-by. The woman died from her injuries thirteen days later while undergoing emergency treatment in Singapore.
Six men were charged in connection with the assault and were arrested. Police claim that the main accused, the driver of the bus, Ram Singh, has since committed suicide in prison; the rest of the men await trial in Delhi’s Tihar jail.
What was new about this news story?
Delhi, after all, had frequently been referred to as the rape capital of the world with 706 rapes reported in 2012, and a city where, activists believe, the majority of rapes go unreported. Conviction rates are near zero; one person was convicted of rape in Delhi in the year 2012 and he received a prison sentence of three years, light by Western standards. Most rapists are simply ticketed and let go. With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape in India registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30 and Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country. Research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than two million women go missing every year, starting in utero (with sex-selective abortion), followed by a life of violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, and lack of attention to personal health and well-being.
“Media has given the middle-class a voice”
“This case has jolted the consciousness of middle-class India like never before,” says Vipul Mudgal, renowned journalist and media scholar at the Delhi-based think-tank, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Denying that the coverage in the media was only about rape, Mudgal suggests, “What’s different [about this story] is that the media has given the middle-class a voice.”
Like the rest of the economy, media in India have undergone enormous changes in the past two decades. Post economic liberalization, Indian television has grown exponentially with more than 800 channels, out of which roughly 300 are round-the-clock all-news channels available in multiple languages. There are 330 million newspapers sold daily in the country. Second only to China, a staggering 900,000 million, about 75% of the population, has access to mobile phones. And there are 65 million Facebook users and an estimated 35 million Twitter accounts.
“For years, the political elites had side-stepped the middle-class since their numbers were relatively small and they were not seen as critical voters,” says Mudgal.
The Indian middle class today accounts for about 270 million people; this number is expected to rise by 40% in the next decade. There is a clear and palpable shift in the way politicians view middle-class citizens as they become economically stronger and technologically savvy.
In the last decade, India has experienced citizen activism among middle-class, upwardly mobile young men and women, especially against police corruption and the failure of the judiciary to act in gender-based crimes. This follows the growth of the neoliberal economy which has led to a generation of newly empowered young women who are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before. Changes came with the extensive media coverage following the murders of two young women, Priyadarshini Mattoo and Jessica Lal.
Priyadarshini Matoo was a 25-year-old law student who was found raped and strangled at her house in Delhi in January 1996. The main accused, Santosh Kumar Singh, the son of a high-level police Inspector General, was acquitted by a trial court in 1999. Wall-to-wall coverage by the media led to the reversal of the decision in 2006 by the Delhi High Court which awarded Singh the death penalty – a sentence commuted in 2010 to life in prison.
Jessica Lal was a fashion model in Delhi who was working as a bartender at a high-end party when she was shot dead in April 1999. The accused, Manu Sharma, was the son of a wealthy and influential Member of Parliament. Several news channels and newspapers took up Lal family’s cause and started a campaign focusing on justice for Jessica. After first being acquitted in a lower court, Sharma was eventually retried and found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
“This is a highly informed middle-class,” says Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, journalist and social commentator, “they are speaking up against the apathy of the political elites and absence of efficient governance and media is articulating this anger.”
Guha Thaukrta, who has written about social movements and ethics in Indian media, believes that this case is a historic turning point. “This not a movement against a single case of rape but against government corruption, lack of security, failing public transportation, and the entire political class,” he argues.
Guha Thakurta is referring to the large anti-rape protests which followed the initial assault in December. University students, labor unions, NGOs, housewives, and working men and women came to Delhi’s major public landmarks, India Gate and Jantar Mantar, to protest. The initial response of the government to these protests was brutal and immediate. They deployed large police force which used water cannons, lathi charge (baton charge), and tear gas to disperse the crowds; the underground public transport system was shut down and certain city spaces became out of bounds.
photo by vm2827/Creative Commons
The news media not only covered the brutality of the attack and the protests, it provided round-the-clock space for the protestors to voice their anger. News specials, with provocative titles such as “Speak Up Delhi“, “Enough is Enough” and “Why India is no place for Women?” were broadcast daily; reporters were shown frequently interviewing protestors who were referred to as “aam janta” (regular folks). Newspapers captured the social media zeitgeist in reporting the case of 19-year-old Sambhavi Saxena arrested during one such protest. On her journey to and at the police station, the 19-year-old Tweeted to India and the world highlighting her plight. Her tweet, “Illegally being held here at Parliament St Police Station Delhi w/ 15 other women. Terrified, pls RT” led to more than 1700 people re-tweeting her original tweet. According to Favstar, the social media analytics site, her tweets reached over 200,000 people within hours. All this resulted in the galvanizing of civil society where lawyers and activists arrived at the police station to offer help and advice. New Delhi Television (NDTV), an all-news cable channel, ran an hour-long special program titled, “Young India Rising” about Saxena’s arrest.
Within days the government began backtracking. The Prime Minister announced revisions in laws on sexual assault and government committees were quickly set up to review safety for girls and women.
“Government was using old-style policing on the street but ultra-modern spin doctoring in the media,” says Mudgal. To counter the protests and criticisms, the Home Secretary of India, R. K. Singh, and Delhi Police Commissioner, Neeraj Kumar, quickly held a press conference on December 21 to announce how the police had reached the victims in “six minutes and apprehended the criminals in 24 hours.”
“But media,” says Mudgal, “continued to legitimize the protests by the young, educated, urban population and to give a voice to their pent-up frustration at the inefficiency and corruption of the system and not simply to view this as a ‘law and order’ problem.”
Ethics of Rape Reportage
On January 8, Zee News, a 24-hour news and current affairs channel, broadcast an interview of the male companion of the victim who himself was badly beaten during the assault. Alternately referred to as “Deepak” and “Abhimanyu”, the interviewer did not reveal his real name. The man provided details of the attack and its aftermath, one in which the assailants had laid a carefully planned trap and neither citizens nor police rushed to help the injured couple.
Delhi police immediately announced that they planned to file a case against Zee News for broadcasting the interview. The case was to be filed under Section 228 (A) of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with the disclosure of identity of victims of certain crimes, including rape (as of the writing of this article, no such case had been filed).
Ironically, journalists at Zee News confirm that senior news producers at Zee had sent an email to all the journalists in the organization reminding them that Zee was not to name the rape victim or the witness.
“I think Zee News did us all a service by holding the mirror up to society and to the police,” says S. Jaganathan, a reporter for Lok Sabha TV. “They may have broken the law by revealing the witness’ identity, but they have done their duty as citizens. Zee did not name the witness or the victim. They only interviewed the witness.”
The victim was given fictitious names such as “Damini”, “Amanat” and “Nirbhaya” by different media outlets. The names were carefully chosen, laden with the values of sisterhood, courage, and trust. “Every family in India felt, oh my god this could happen to my daughter,” says Hari Kumar, New York Times reporter for India who has covered this case extensively for the Times, “the connect was instant.”
“The reporting was not sensational,” continues Kumar, “Nobody disclosed the name of the girl or published her photographs. Mainstream media, both print and television did not jump the gun. Media was very restrained.”
Media responds to Audiences
“There is a significant technological and generational gap between the governing and the governed in India,” says veteran journalist and journalism professor, Prasun Sonwalkar, “70% of India is below the age of 35 and most of our politicians are septuagenarians.”
For Sonwalkar, the coverage also exemplified media’s incessant focus on the emerging middle class which is the main consumer of media products.
“The rape happened in South Delhi where most of the political and financial elites live, the victim represented ‘us’, she was a medical student and an aspiring member of the middle class,” says Sonwalkar, “There was practically a ‘media scrum’ or mob reporting.”
“Covering corruption is more abstract,” says V.V.P. Sharma, Senior Editor with Headlines Today Channel, “Violation of the body is real.”
photo by zilvinas.saltys/Creative Commons
Both Sharma and Sonwalkar suggest that the “media scrum” about this particular rape case was to get as much ratings for the news channels as possible. Many of these news stations depend on advertising revenues which can only be generated by high TRP (Ratings) and in a television market that is one of the most competitive in the world. While they acknowledge that the intensity of the public debate around police corruption and judiciary has grown, the emphasis and dependency on ratings still overrides other ethical goals.
Amidst this frenzied coverage, for instance, the focus appeared to be disproportionately on retribution in the form of harsher sentencing, for example from the current seven years for a rape conviction to life imprisonment and possibly a death penalty. The danger in reflecting audience anger, especially following a horrific event such as this, is that people tend to seek revenge and politicians look for expediency to quell public dissent.
No doubt this case of rape has created a critical space for the discourse of social justice in the media and has forever changed the way Indian journalists cover crime, policing and corruption.
And for that a young woman had to give her life.
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Shakuntala Rao is Professor of Communication Studies at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, New York, USA. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her research and teaching interests are in global journalism practices, ethics and popular culture.
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