As many of our readers and friends know, the members of our staff are a unique group of people who enjoy many different pasttimes, including games with words and images. Give us a doodle pad, a crossword puzzle, a game of Pictionary or Scrabble, or just an evening of conversation with good friends, and we'll show you some happy folks.
When it comes to journalistic pursuits, however, we take our contribution to the media landscape fairly seriously, and we often wish more of our professional colleagues in the media would do the same.
With those thoughts in mind, it was with an explosive mixture of shock, surprise, laughter, and sarcasm that we read the messages flowing into our Twitter feeds and e-mail accounts on Thursday. Arthur Brisbane, the current Public Editor for the New York Times, asked one of the most inane and ridiculous questions we'd heard posed in public, by a media figure, in quite some time.
Brisbane's initial question - and the headline of his piece - was simply: "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?"
After we all had nearly fallen out of our chairs, and recovered from what seemed to us - and apparently most of the journalistic world - as one of the dumbest questions ever, we did what media folks often do in similar situations.
First, we checked our clocks and watches to make sure we hadn't drunk too much. Then we checked the time Brisbane published his initial column, to make sure he hadn't been drinking too much when he hit "publish." After reading his initial piece, to say that Arthur poorly asked the question he wanted answered, or that he didn't really communicate what he wanted to know clearly, may already be the understatement of the year. That is, if it weren't an election year.
Most members of the media who we talked with or read about on this incident thought the question Brisbane was asking could be easily rephrased as: Should members of the news media tell the truth? The reactions from our colleagues to this question ran the gamut from a satirical piece in Vanity Fair asking if they should spell words correctly, to some very thoughtful and serious responses from respected journalists like Jim Romanesko, Jay Rosen, Greg Sargent, and Rem Rieder.
On its face, the question Arthur published as his lead wasn't the one that he meant to ask, and in his follow up, he made the acknowledgement of that miscommunication painfully clear. The question he ended up asking was a very important one, though, and as Jay Rosen points out, it's one that far too many in our media profession have ignored for far too long. In short, for a sickening number of people in our profession, "...truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities" a long time ago.
Like Greg Sargent, we're also somewhat sympathetic to Brisbane's concern, specifically because of so many modern media issues, "that regular fact checking by reporters could mean some statements will get checked and others won’t." As Sargent makes clear, newspapers – and really ANY organization that ethically and honestly uses the word "news" to describe any part of what they do – have a duty to make sure they're reporting the truth before anything else they do, now more than ever.
Rieder followed up in the American Journalism Review, "beware of false equivalency. If Democrats are prevaricating more than Republicans, or vice versa, don't succumb to the temptation to be equally tough on both sides." As one of our colleagues (who wishes to remain private) has said for several years now, "If you want to be both an ethical and an honest journalist, you can be fair, or you can be balanced. But it's damn near impossible to be both at the same time."
As Rieder notes, partisans on all sides will work the media ref these days, now more than ever. One has to accept, bad reporting happens too. Crappy commentating, sloppy cartooning, and poor editing also happen, from time to time (though hopefully not here). Even blatant propaganda happens these days – though for some in our business, that's all they do anymore.
What made us smile and truly enjoy Brisbane's accidental stumble into brutal honesty was that the question of ethics in the media is still being asked – and answered with a resounding, positive reply that truthtelling IS the most important thing we in the media can do. We owe it to those who take in what we write, draw, say, and otherwise produce.
We owe it to ourselves too.
