Skip to main content
University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tag: media ethics

Roundtable: Truth, Trump and journalism

We asked several media experts to weigh in on some of the ethical dilemmas facing journalists as they report on the Trump administration. From dealing with dishonest sources to using the term “lie” to describe falsehoods, our experts say the challenges the press faces today should be met with a renewed commitment to the core tenets of journalism.

Some members of President Trump’s administration have been accused of dishonesty when dealing with the press. Should media outlets continue booking guests they believe have been dishonest? And what, if any, journalistic practices should change when interviewing such guests?

Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post: We may not have the luxury of excluding these officials, since they are in positions of authority and power. However, we can bring particular awareness and preparation to our knowledge that they haven’t been truthful in the past, and be ready to challenge them, especially in the moment.

 

Keith Woods, NPR: I think our job is to report on facts and inaccuracies. So talking to the official spokespeople for the White House is critical. Our job, when there is reckless disregard for facts, is to ramp up our truth-telling, fact-checking efforts and continue to show the public the actions of those elected and appointed to represent them. Our sin isn’t in talking to people who continuously get things wrong; it’s when we fail to report their falsehoods.

 

Dave Zweifel, Wisconsin State Journal: I think it all depends on who the interviewee is, what position he or she holds. Frankly, I think that the interview shows should stop inviting a Kellyanne Conway, for example, who has become known as a notorious liar, famous for her admiration for “alternative facts.” Besides, it’s become apparent that she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about and is frequently contradicted by her own boss, the president. There are others, though, who are key people in the president’s administration that should be heard, lies and all. What practices need to change, though, is that interviewers need to point out obvious falsehoods or have other guests on the show that can do that … to let obvious false statements stand is a disservice to the reader/viewer. If a guest refuses to appear again, that fact should be pointed out with an explanation why the invitation was refused.

 

Scott Cohn, freelance journalist: Like it or not, any administration gets to choose its spokespeople. A blanket refusal to book an administration official or spokesperson because he or she might possibly give dishonest answers does not further the ultimate goal for journalists (and the public) of getting to the truth. Instead, the journalist must come to every interview fully prepared and armed to the teeth with facts, and not be afraid to question any statements that appear to be false. But it is important to draw a distinction here between official administration spokespeople and “surrogates,” i.e., people who purport to speak for the administration but have no official role. If they have demonstrated dishonesty in the past, there is no reason to continue speaking with them, any more than there is a reason to deal with any other source that has proven not to be credible.

 

I would add that this question speaks to a broader issue that predates the Trump administration. Particularly when it comes to cable news, but by no means limited to that medium, too much of what passes for journalism is in fact simply “talking heads” allowed to speak unchallenged. If the current dynamic in Washington leads to more actual reporting on this administration and future ones, the profession and the country will be better off.

 

Jill Geisler, Loyola Chicago: “Dishonesty” is a word that we need to treat with care. Journalists understand that sources of all types may not tell them complete truths, may provide information out of context, may reframe issues to appear better or worse than objective facts support, and some may intentionally provide false information. Journalists have dealt with these issues long before the Trump administration. They do so by persistent questioning, fact-finding and reporting what they learn. They respectfully challenge and responsibly report.

 

Having said that, we know that respected fact-checkers have found that this president and some of his representatives and supporters have been prolific in providing “alternative facts” – i.e. untruthful or deceptive replies.

 

So, what about your question about booking such people as guests on media outlets? I think there’s a difference between interviewing individuals who are appointed or elected members of the Trump administration, in their official roles, and booking “guests.” For example, CNN used some Trump supporters as surrogates in panels during the election. If those people have consistently dissembled and don’t now hold official positions in the administration, then CNN can reconsider booking them. If they hold official positions, the very nature of their positions keeps journalists from avoiding them.

In his time in office so far, Trump has been openly hostile toward the press. What, if any, journalistic practices should change in response to this?

Sullivan: We should not rise to the bait of being the enemy or opposition party. We should realize that this is a political strategy that has worked very well for Donald Trump. Our response should be to do our jobs of examining the facts, challenging assertions, digging into documentation, developing sources and holding the administration accountable. We should be neither friend nor enemy, but watchdog and citizens’ representative.

 

Woods: Journalism has been reviled by powerful people since the first presses rolled. Our job doesn’t change because the president dislikes us. But we do have the responsibility–and opportunity–to explain ourselves and prove the power and relevance of strong journalism as the president calls more and more of the public’s attention to the role of the press in America.

 

Zweifel: I don’t think there’s a need to change any journalistic practices. Throughout history, there have always been politicians who’ve been hostile to the press. The best bet is to keep doing the job we’re trained to do, digging for the truth and informing our readers. And, we should also make sure our readers know of the president’s (or any other politician’s) hostility. They can judge who’s right.

 

Cohn: Very little should change. Trump is not the first president to be hostile to the press, even if he has raised that hostility to a new level. He won’t be the last. Journalists must continue to do our jobs, unswayed by the inevitable personal attacks on us and our colleagues. We know how to report, and the fundamentals do not change just because the person or entity we are reporting on does not like our findings. The truth is the truth, and I firmly believe that readers and viewers are ultimately smart enough to recognize it even amid shouts of “fake news.” Having said that, it is particularly important in this environment for journalists to be accurate and fair, and to take extra pains to do so. The reporting on the Martin Luther King bust in the Oval Office is a prime example of the kind of unforced error we cannot afford. There will always be honest mistakes, and this one was corrected quickly. But why was everyone so quick to accept the premise that the bust had been removed? What would it have taken to double check or seek a comment before reporting it? The most effective response to a hostile source is to do our jobs impeccably. Our most powerful weapon is the truth.

 

Geisler: The journalistic response should be a heightened commitment to the First Amendment, to investigative reporting, to keeping bias out of our journalism, even when we are angered by the injustice of the presidential vilification, and we should make certain we support each other in public forums such as news conferences. If the president or a representative refuses to answer one journalist’s question as a way to punish that person, and the question is of importance to citizens, other journalists present should pick up the baton and keep asking the question. This isn’t just to create a theater of solidarity among journalists, it is to put competition aside in pursuit of information the public deserves to know.

Some argue that journalists calling out false statements or using the term “lie” hinder their objectivity. What are your thoughts on this?

Zweifel: I think it’s a journalist’s duty to call out false statements and when warranted brand a statement of claim a “lie.” I applaud The New York Times for doing this on occasion. Being “objective” doesn’t mean we should ignore basic facts. That’s more a disservice to so-called objectivity than pretending that we don’t know if a statement is a lie when, in fact, we do.

 

Cohn: Our business is about facts. If a statement is demonstrably false, we have a duty to say so. That does not hinder objectivity; that IS objectivity. But characterizing a statement as a “lie” is a different matter. The term “lie” implies intent, and in most cases it is impossible to know the intent of the person making the statement. That is not to say we can never characterize a false statement as a lie. If we can provide evidence that the person knew a statement was false when he or she made it—for example, the person wrote or said something different in the past—then the statement is objectively a lie, and we have a duty to characterize it as such. (Then again, the original statement or writing might be the lie, and the more recent statement might be the truth. See how tricky it is?) The bottom line is that we should report what we know, not what we think. If we know a statement to be false, we must say so. If we know a statement to be willfully false—and that is a high bar—we should call it what is: a lie. But if we don’t know that, we have no business reporting it.

 

Sullivan: I would use “lie” sparingly—only when we have full reason to believe that a falsehood is intentional. And we should be ready to use it, using the same threshold, for people other than Trump. If a news organization isn’t prepared to use the word for a business leader or a foreign head of state, then it shouldn’t be using it for the U.S. president. But when something is clearly an intentional falsehood, use it. We took too long to use the clearly understood word “torture” when the facts called for it. Same thing here.

 

Geisler: The word “lie,” used as a verb, should be handled with care. It says the speaker knew it was false and intended to deceive. If we know the speaker’s knowledge and intent, the word applies as a verb. But how do we know that? At the same time, the word “lie” as a noun, can mean “falsehood”—so, it might be used, as The New York Times did.

 

I’m splitting hairs pretty finely here, but I do see a difference. Still, the word “lie” always carries with it a certain name-calling, and journalists should avoid putting themselves in the position of appearing to be attacking. There are plenty of other words: falsehood, untruth, fabrication, fiction, distortion, whopper, tall tale, for starters. As for calling out false statements, yes, journalists should not hesitate to clearly state that what has been said is untrue—and to do it in chyrons, headlines, tweets, interviews and within the body of stories. We can’t let “alternative facts” overtake provable truth. It’s on us to provide the proof.

 

Woods: I’m not a fan of using the word “lie” without a fairly high level of proof that a person intended to mislead. I think we can do all that public service journalism is designed to do—identifying errors, exaggerations and false or misleading information—without suggesting that a person intended to tell a lie. It may be so; it may strongly appear to be intentional. But if we can’t prove intent, we should save that powerful tool for when we have the factual goods to justify it.

How to teach the ethics of using eyewitness video

When journalism students visit our offices at WITNESS to learn about video and human rights advocacy, the most common questions we hear are on the ethics of using eyewitness footage: How do you verify a video you find online? How do you know if a video is “verified” and if you can use it in your story? When and how would you use videos made by terrorist groups in a report?

As a human rights organization dedicated to using video as a tool for advocacy, these are questions we and our partners wrestle with every day. Increasingly, video documenting human rights abuse is filmed not by professionals but by average bystanders who have never been trained on issues like informed consent or by organizations aiming to spark fear or groups attempting to spread misinformation.

When such videos surface as part of a news story or a human rights investigation, what is a journalist or advocate to do with them? How do we apply the traditional codes of ethics when using footage we ourselves did not produce (often described as “user-generated content,” “UGC” or “citizen video”)?

It’s not surprising these questions are what young professionals want to talk about. Eyewitness videos are not only a central part of news reporting today, but a common element in social media channels. Addressing the ethics of using eyewitness footage provides students with a lesson that is immediately relevant to their own practices as consumers, creators and curators of information.

Yet, guidance on the ethics of using eyewitness footage hasn’t caught up with its importance as a reporting tool. WITNESS’s Ethical Guidelines for using Eyewitness Videos in Human Rights Reporting and Advocacy was created to begin to fill that gap.

Considering the stakeholders of eyewitness footage

WITNESS’ guidelines were written to help reporters, producers and advocates think through who could be affected by sharing eyewitness footage, and how to minimize potential harm to those people. After all, ethical mishaps are often the result of a lack of information. In the case of eyewitness footage, many reporters or producers simply don’t know what questions to ask about the footage and haven’t had a chance to consider the potential consequences of sharing it with a wider audience.

The guide is organized in three sections depending on the stakeholders of the footage. When teaching the ethics of using eyewitness footage, this is a good place to start. For any video, the central questions you’ll want to think through are:

  • Who are the stakeholders?
  • How could they be potentially harmed by the footage?
  • How could you as a journalist minimize potential harm?

You might be asking, why “stakeholders”? Why not just “filmers”? Or “subjects”?

When using eyewitness footage, there are a number of different people who could be affected by its distribution. First of all, there are those on camera. You don’t necessarily know if they consented to being filmed or even knew that they were on camera. Finding themselves on the evening news could change their lives forever. Depending on the nature of the footage, it could put them at risk of humiliation, harassment or worse.

Other stakeholders include those who filmed the footage and those who shared it. (Often this is the same person, but it could be different people with distinct objectives). Did they realize they were sharing it publicly? Could the footage put them at risk due to the nature of the footage? Are they aware of the consequences of attaching their identity to the footage, and did they take steps to protect their identity (such as sharing it on a new YouTube account without their name on it)?

If someone uploaded a video to their Facebook page, they may only expect their circle of friends to see it. We’ve seen several headline news cases involving eyewitness footage in which the filmer later expressed regret for associating their name with the footage (such as the bystander who filmed the chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island). The safety of those who provide newsworthy footage is critical for journalists to consider.

Finally, stakeholders include the audience. What are the potential consequences of sharing footage that may turn out to have been disseminated as part of a misinformation campaign or a hate group? What sort of footage would warrant a warning to viewers about its graphic nature? How can a journalist share footage responsibly when it has not been independently verified?

How to teach the ethics of eyewitness footage

Our ethical guidelines don’t provide answers to these scenarios, but rather sets of questions to help reporters identify and address ethical challenges that can easily fall through the cracks.

In your classroom, you can find an example from the week’s news, from your community or from a class project, and use these checklists as a starting point for a discussion on the ethics of reporting with eyewitness footage.

CG_CHKLIST_PerpVideos_FB_20160614

EG_Checklist_UnverifiedVideos_20160614

EG_CHKLIST_AssessRisks_FB_20160614

If you are searching for examples for discussion, you can find several from around the world in WITNESS’ Ethical Guidelines. The Eyewitness Media Hub’s Medium channel is another great source of case studies illustrating how eyewitness footage used in the media inadvertently affected the people behind the footage.

More Resources

For much more on the ethics of using eyewitness footage in reporting, check out our blog series tackling a different aspect of the topic each week. The Eyewitness Media Hub, First Draft News and the ONA’s Build Your Own Ethics Code are other fantastic resources for guidance, tools and case studies on using eyewitness videos in reporting.

How do you discuss the ethics of using eyewitness video to journalism students, and what has been particularly challenging or successful? What resources would you recommend? We look forward to hearing from your experience in the comments below.

Madeleine Bair leads the WITNESS Media Lab at WITNESS where she examines how eyewitness video can be used safely, ethically, and effectively for human rights reporting and advocacy. Follow her on Twitter @madbair and follow WITNESS at @WITNESSorg. WITNESS Program Coordinator Sarah Kerr also contributed to this post.

This post originally published at MediaShift. Reposted here with permission.

Engaged journalists need to confront ethical questions

I’ll go ahead and admit it: In early December, as I finished drafting this “Redefining Engagement” series, I began wondering if I’d missed something big along the way.

“I’m still uneasy about some of the implications of this new [community engagement] paradigm,” I wrote in an email to Peggy Holman, executive director of Journalism that Matters. “If journalists are part of this future, what values/roles do they get to bring with them?”

Since launching the series two weeks ago, I’ve made the case for a type of engaged journalism that rebuilds public trust, amplifies diverse voices and bridges the gap between newsrooms and the communities they serve. I’ve written about promising experiments, like The Listening Post in Macon, Georgia, and The Coral Project’s new online comments tool; explored boundary-pushing ideas, like restorative narrative, inclusive journalism and a redefinition of “objectivity”; and tackled some lingering questions about community engagement, like how will the dollars and cents add up?

But even after 10 stories and 13,000-odd words, this series has yet to broach a pretty central concern: If engaged journalism is going to replace existing routines and practices with new ones, will traditional journalistic values and ethics go out the window too? And if they do, what’s left to warrant calling this thing “journalism” anyway?

My hunch is that I’m not the only classically trained journalist who has struggled with this question. Admittedly, there’s something about community engagement that can seem at once inspiring and a tad unsettling. On the one hand, who can argue with principles like “speak truth to empower” or “nothing about us without us”? For my money, those sound like pretty good values to aim for.

But I’ve also wondered how these values relate to other core principles of journalism. Does “speaking truth to empower,” for example, imply a departure from “speaking truth to power” and the watchdog role it entails? And does “nothing about us without us” mean that journalism’s independent gatekeeping function is obsolete, or that professional news judgement is dead?

So far in this series, I’ve largely sidestepped these thorny questions, choosing instead to highlight examples of engaged journalism in which the role of the capital-J “Journalist” is well defined and the practitioners’ adherence to traditional ethical principles is clear.

But this subject matter permitted no sidestepping, leaving me no choice but to confront the questions I’d been kicking down the road.

To help me navigate this murky intellectual terrain, I turned to two tour guides: Mike Fancher and The Elements of Journalism. Fancher is the former executive editor of the Seattle Times and the founding director of the Agora Journalism Center, and as someone who made his career in the legacy media, Fancher is well-positioned to comment on the movement to reform it.

It was during our interview that Fancher mentioned The Elements of Journalism, the famous book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel that outlines journalism’s 10 fundamental principles, forming a kind of ethical guide against which journalists can measure their performance. I’d read Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book as an undergraduate, but needless to say, I was due for a refresher.

So how does engaged journalism impact ethics? Below, I address that question through the lens of the ten elements of journalism, with help from the insights of Fancher and Holman, who together build a compelling case for why community engagement supports, rather than contradicts, the core values of journalism.

Mike Fancher, former executive editor of the Seattle Times, takes the mic during a group session at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Mike Fancher, former executive editor of the Seattle Times, takes the mic during a group session at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth

The obligation to truth is perhaps journalism’s oldest and most universally honored principle. It’s the reason former NBC anchor Brian Williams lost his job for embellishing the details of his war reporting, and why the public still celebrates remarkable feats of truth-seeking, such as Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate.

In engaged journalism, the obligation to truth doesn’t change. What does change is how reporters seek truth. As Fancher explains, engagement provides a powerful defense against the confirmation biases that can influence a journalist’s reporting and storytelling.

“There’s a perception that when journalists go into the community, the people they talk to and the questions they ask are based on their predetermined idea what the story is,” Fancher said. “Engaged journalism is saying, ‘Let’s be open to change our own assumptions about the story, and when we’re seeking truth, let’s try to get in touch with as many people’s truth as we can.’”

So no, engagement doesn’t weaken journalism’s commitment to the truth; engagement only calls for more voices and perspectives to inform it.

Its first loyalty is to citizens

“Journalists like to think of themselves as the people’s surrogate, covering society’s waterfront in the public interest,” Kovach and Rosenstiel explain. “Increasingly, however, the public doesn’t believe them.”

There are lots of reasons for the public’s mistrust, from corporate ownership to the resurgence of partisan news organizations (see: Fox News). But amid these challenges, engaged journalism strikes me as a strategy for winning trust back.

Consider the fact that at the Experience Engagement event, conference organizers didn’t begin by asking how journalism could produce stronger profits or how it could boost audience metrics. Instead, they asked: How can journalism support communities to thrive? This question puts the public interest at the fore and reflects a style of journalism that’s meant to be both with and for the people.

In that respect, Fancher says engaged journalism isn’t something new to journalism, but rather represents a return to one of its fundamental principles.

“A lot of metropolitan daily newspapers embraced the notion that, ‘Hey, we’re your newspaper. We’re here for you,’” he said. “In some ways, this is not as foreign a notion as some people might see it.”

Its essence is a discipline of verification

Skeptics of engaged journalism received some ammunition in 2008 when a user of CNN’s iReport — an experiment in “citizen journalism” — falsely reported that Steve Jobs had died. Several online news outlets picked up the story, Twitter ran wild, and Apple’s stock even dropped, all before Jobs’ family had a chance to deny the erroneous user-contributed report.

The iReport example has been used as a cautionary tale about collaboration between news organizations and the public. But this framing misses the mark. For one, in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s not just citizen journalists who are falling short of journalism’s verification standard. Remember that time when CNN’s John King misreported the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon manhunt, or, better yet, when CNN’s web editors allowed that false Steve Jobs report to be posted on iReport, apparently without double-checking its veracity? Indeed, there are plenty of verification failures these days, and both citizen journalists and professional journalism deserve some of the blame.

But there’s an even bigger reason why the iReport debate has little to say about community engagement: Basically, because it’s not community engagement. It’s audience development, and there’s a huge difference.

For example, in a recent iReport article, CNN editors invited users to submit videos showing their preferred method for popping bubble wrap, along with the promise that “your video could be used on Jan. 25th, which is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day.” Believe it or not, when community engagement advocates talk about inclusive journalism and participatory media, that’s not exactly the kind of engagement they have in mind.

At its best, engaged journalism is about creating news structures that support collaboration between journalists and communities. That means finding ways to amplify community voices through reporting and storytelling. It doesn’t mean outsourcing responsibilities such as verification or news judgment to the public, Fancher says.

“No, journalists are still in the core of the conversation,” he explained. “We just need to have more people included in that conversation.”

Part of a visual map illustrated by Nitya Wakhlu Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Part of a visual map illustrated by Nitya Wakhlu Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover

There’s no shirking the fact that the independence principle appears decidedly at odds with the tenets of engaged journalism. According to the community engagement paradigm, journalism works best when it involves collaboration with community, a networked process in which journalists and community members are interdependent.

The question here isn’t whether engaged journalism brings the independence principle into flux. It does. The question is whether that’s a bad thing — and whether, in the digital age, journalism has any other choice.

“The traditional mission of journalism has been to provide people the news and information they need to be free and self-governing,” Fancher said. “The problem with that is the word ‘provide.’ We live in a world that’s much more interactive now, and people are not satisfied to be passive consumers of news and information. They want to share information, they want to create information, they want to be more involved in the process of determining what matters in their lives and in their communities.”

In this interconnected world, it seems that the notion of independence might need a facelift. And perhaps that begins by distinguishing independence from detachment. As Kovach and Rosenstiel explain: “Editorial independence has over time begun, in some quarters, to harden into isolation. As journalists tried to honor and protect their carefully won independence from party and commercial pressures, they sometimes came to pursue independence for its own sake. Detachment from outside pressure could bleed into disengagement from the community.”

Engaged journalism can help combat isolation, and that’s a good thing. The hard part is figuring out how to balance the principle of independent journalism with the realities of an interdependent world.

“That’s what we’re wrestling with,” Fancher said. “But I think it’s a legitimate conversation for journalists to engage in.”

It must serve as an independent monitor of power

In December, as I finished drafting the Redefining Engagement series, this is the principle I couldn’t get off my mind. As I wrote in an email to a colleague: “The thorny question that remains is how the watchdogs, with their sharp teeth, and the community weavers, with their empathetic powers of listening, can coexist within the new journalism.”

Indeed, “community weavers” appear to serve a very different function than public-accountability watchdogs. For one, their disposition is cooperative, not adversarial, and their mission is less about “afflicting the comfortable” than about “comforting the afflicted.”

Holman says this philosophical pivot could help reverse the finger pointing, foot stomping and political shouting that pervade modern civic discourse.

“When people shout, it’s because they don’t feel heard,” she explained. “The point of community engagement is to create a space in which people who see the world differently hear each other.”

It’s an aspirational notion, but also one that raises questions about journalism’s relationship to power. For example, if the community weaver’s role is to bring people together, do we include elected officials, government bureaucrats and corporate CEOs in that mix? If so, what are the implications? Can journalists forge more trusting, empathetic relationships while still using their sharp elbows to hold the powerful accountable?

These are tough, even uncomfortable, questions. But it’s worth remembering that engaged journalism doesn’t call for us to all hold hands and sing “kumbaya” together. Rather, engaged journalism is about listening to community members and their concerns, honoring and amplifying their voices, and strengthening their capacity to engage with one another and with the public officials who represent them.

When Holman and the co-authors of Experience Engagement’s developmental evaluation talk about fostering a “civic communications ecosystem,” I think that’s what they have in mind. And, as Fancher explains, that vision is consistent with the main reason why independence from power emerged as a principle in the first place.

“The purpose,” Fancher said, “was to help journalists avoid conflicts of interest where they’d be serving some vested interest other than the public’s interest. The purpose was to be able to say to the public: ‘We stand for you above everything else.’”

Peggy Holman joins a discussion at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Peggy Holman joins a discussion at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise

The notion of a civic sphere dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and it remains at the heart of engaged journalism. Indeed, as noted above, Experience Engagement’s developmental evaluation explicitly outlines the need for a “civic communications ecosystem” that would “provide robust information, feedback, inclusive dialogue, strategy and action for serving community goals.”

That vision shares much in common with Kovach and Rosenstiel’s description of the civic forum, which similarly calls for journalism to impart trustworthy information, serve all parts of the community (“not just the affluent or demographically attractive”) and help steward compromise in order to support collaborative solutions.

Holman says an example of this approach at its very best comes from Canada in 1991, when the newsweekly Maclean’s brought together 12 people specifically chosen for their differences and tasked them with reaching a consensus vision for the country’s future.

For two-and-a-half days, with Canadian TV filming the whole thing, the 12-person sample group worked with a pair of conflict resolution experts to move beyond their differences and find common ground. The resulting document, dubbed “The People’s Verdict,” was published as part of a 40-page feature in Maclean’s, and the documentary footage aired as an hour-long special on Canadian television.

Notably, this application of engaged journalism sparked lively dialogue among readers and viewers, as well as town hall meetings that addressed issues raised by the project. In other words, Holman says, it helped support a civic sphere.

“This narrative trajectory enabled millions of viewers to vicariously experience this different kind of conversation and its power in dealing with normally divisive public issues,” she explained. “It helped trigger months of conversation around Canada and offers us guidance in how to magnify the impact of such ‘mini-public’ conversations up to society-wide scale.”

It must strive to keep the significant interesting and relevant

According to Kovach and Rosenstiel, journalism is essentially a two-step process: “The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lives. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant and engaging.”

Engaged journalism would appear to support both objectives. When journalists listen to communities, they better understand the information and issues that matter to people’s lives. And when journalists put community voices and stories at the heart of their work, rather than amplifying political bluster, the result, I would argue, is a more meaningful and engaging news product.

However, despite this apparent compatibility, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s eighth element of journalism is one that advocates of community engagement are sometimes guilty of neglecting. The problem: In the well-intentioned effort to make media more participatory and inclusive of diverse voices, there’s a tendency to undervalue the journalist’s craftsmanship and professional news judgement.

At Experience Engagement, for example, one interviewee suggested that journalists should really be asking themselves, “How do we get out of the way so that people can tell their own stories?”

I think the bigger point being made is that journalists should do a better job giving communities a stake in their own representation. However, there’s a lot of distance between honoring authentic community voice and simply handing over the keys. The latter approach neglects the expertise of journalists, and it seems likely to produce storytelling that — however authentic — would be less well crafted, less compelling and ultimately less interesting to a mass audience.

So sure, journalism needs to fix its record of parachuting into marginalized communities and misrepresenting their experiences and perspectives. But as Fancher explains, engaged journalism still needs to put journalists at the heart of the storytelling process, and it still needs to value the sensibilities and skills that make journalism a professional craft.

“This is not an approach that says ‘We’re going to stop being journalists and start being something else,’” Fancher said. “It’s an approach that says, ‘We’re going to be better journalists.’”

It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional

“Traditional news routines privilege the voices of politicians, official spokespeople and perceived ‘policy experts,’ while largely marginalizing community stories. This norm explains why people in positions of power often dictate civic discourse — and why news coverage tends to focus on presidential candidates’ xenophobic immigration proposals and fear-mongering war cries instead of on, say, how immigration policy impacts the children of undocumented immigrants.”

In my post on deep listening, that’s how I framed the need for news routines that empower communities, rather than politicians, to set the agenda. This tenet of engagement journalism mirrors Kovach and Rosenstiel’s call for comprehensive and proportional news coverage that reflects the broad scope of community life.

In fact, the need for engaged journalism is largely a symptom of the media’s failure to honor this principle. Amid dwindling budgets and strained resources, news organizations have too often been content to report primarily on political campaigns and other institutions of power, instead of putting community life at the heart of their coverage. Engaged journalism requires a rebalancing of the scales.

As Fancher explains, “If there’s a paradigm shift here, it’s that we have tended to think of the newsmakers as being institutions and people who are designated as leaders of communities. That doesn’t change, but it’s not complete. We need to be in the communities to understand their lived experience and to and help them tell their story to the policymakers and to the decision makers, so that the policies relate to what people want to talk about.”

Regina Lawrence, director of the SOJC's George S. Turnbull Portland Center, participates in an activity at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Regina Lawrence, director of the SOJC’s George S. Turnbull Portland Center, participates in an activity at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience

This principle of journalism is under attack in the American media — but not by community engagement. As journalists were reminded last month when casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s family purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the real threat is partisan ownership and the age-old quandary of self-preservation.

Consider this: In December, following Adelson’s surprise decision to purchase the newspaper, editor-in-chief Mike Hengel resigned amid concerns that Adelson — a billionaire conservative philanthropist — would attempt to use his ownership stake to influence the paper’s coverage. Similar concerns arose in 2007 when News Corp., the company owned by controversial media magnate Rupert Murdoch, took control of the Wall Street Journal.

But the most damning sign of trouble broke last month, on Christmas Eve, when career-long reporter Steve Majerus-Collins announced his resignation from The Bristol Press in a passionate and pointed Facebook post. Majerus-Collins cited the ethical disregard of his editor and publisher, Michael E. Schroeder, who allegedly used a false byline to publish a bogus story in support of a political ally.

“A newspaper editor cannot be allowed to stamp on the most basic rules of journalism and pay no price,” Majerus-Collins wrote in his post. “He should be shunned by my colleagues, cut off by professional organizations and told to pound sand by anyone working for him who has integrity. So I quit.”

Engaged journalism might not alleviate the problem of unethical meddling by management, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. As outlined above, the community engagement approach is consistent with journalism’s core values of truth-seeking and loyalty to the public, and it has no more room for influence-peddlers than do principled reporters like Majerus-Collins.

Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news

This principle, added to The Elements of Journalism’s latest version, reflects the reality that contemporary digital technologies have blurred the distinction between citizen and journalist. As the American Press Institute explains, “Writing a blog entry, commenting on a social media site, sending a tweet, or ‘liking’ a picture or post, likely involves a shorthand version of the journalistic process. One comes across information, decides whether or not it’s believable, assesses its strength and weaknesses, determines if it has value to others, decides what to ignore and what to pass on, chooses the best way to share it, and then hits the ‘send’ button.”

In this digital sphere, legacy media’s gatekeeping power is disappearing. But what has begun to replace it is an equally vital sensemaking function. Given the seemingly endless flow of news and information online, journalists are now charged with providing “citizens with the tools they need to extract knowledge for themselves from the undifferentiated flood or rumor, propaganda, gossip, fact, assertion and allegation the communications system now produces.”

This new sensemaking role is consistent with the idea that journalism should be a collaboration with communities. As addressed above, the move toward collaboration doesn’t mean creating insular pages on a news site where “citizen journalists” can post unverified, unfiltered news reports without the benefit of professional news judgement and craftsmanship. Rather, it means journalists should find ways to work with community members — in their reporting, in their storytelling, in their distribution and in their engagement — to uncover the news and information required to sustain a free and self-governing society.

The callout to skeptics

This article began with a question about whether traditional ethics and values would persevere — or disappear — with engaged journalism. And it wasn’t a rhetorical question. When I sat down to start writing, I still had real concerns about the broader implications of this new approach. Would community engagement require tradeoffs? If so, what would journalism gain from its collaboration with communities? What would it lose? And how would we decide if the tradeoffs were worth it?

These questions are far from settled, and it seems important to keep them at the heart of the reform movement, where they can be openly discussed and debated.

But it’s also important to acknowledge that a conversation strictly among the converted is unlikely to yield progress. This debate needs the voices of the skeptics, those who either don’t see their work valued in the paradigm of engaged journalism or who don’t believe that such sweeping reform could ever actually happen.

This article, then, is an invitation for the skeptics to push back and poke holes in the case for community engagement. That’s how the conversation will move forward. That’s how the hard questions will get answered. That’s how we’ll produce better journalism and a stronger democracy.

At the Agora Journalism Center, we hope this series has been a step in that direction. Now we invite the skeptics to take the next one.

This post originally appeared as part of a series on MediaShift. It is republished here as part of an agreement.

“Redefining Engagement” is a special 11-part series on the progress, promise and potential challenges of community engagement in journalism. The series, produced by the Agora Journalism Center, will be published in serial this month by MediaShift. Click here for the full series.

Ben DeJarnette is the associate editor at MediaShift. He is also a contributing writer for the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering place for innovation in communication and civic engagement. On Oct. 1-4, 2015, the Agora Journalism Center and Journalism That Matters partnered to host Experience Engagement, a four-day participatory “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon. Journalism That Matters has been hosting breakthrough conversations about the emerging media ecosystem for more than 15 years.

The search for sensitive coverage of the tragedy of suicide: An Australian story

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

Of Vultures and Watchdogs

Nelson Mandela is a national treasure for South Africans. Our government recently issued new banknotes with Mandela’s face on it, a daily reminder of the social, cultural and political capital that the country’s first democratic president created. Mandela is also globally admired. So it’s understandable Continue reading

Brand Journalism

In this article, journalist Ira Basen asks a pointed question: Is the growing trend of ‘brand journalism’ — corporations producing ‘content’ to promote their brands – good or bad for journalism and the public sphere? Is it ‘really’ journalism, and how do we define journalism anyway? If skilled journalists produce accurate articles for corporation web sites and magazines, who cares if it is not produced by the mainstream news media? Continue reading