Ethics

Some of the most popular content of the New York Times is (shocker) opinionated and biased. Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman … As op-ed columnists they get to report AND express opinions that influence readers. The Times felt that their content was so important that a few years ago it put up a pay wall around the op-ed columns (and some other stuff in a web initiative called TimesSelect), thinking that its star columnists’ work was so important that people would pay for it online. (Didn’t really work out so well.)

Not as popular: newspaper editorials and candidate endorsements. Yet they’re been with us for decades, and no doubt influenced many people who read them looking for guidance. Alas, some newspapers are getting out of the business of expressing opinions on such controversial issues as which candidates most deserve citizens’ votes. As Alan Mutter notes on his Newsosaur blog, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has decided not to endorse political candidates from now on. Mutter terms the AJC action “wimping out,” and I agree.

And I noticed some more wimpish behavior by a solid, quality old-media institution today, thanks to the non-wimpish Huffington Post.

Check out this significant and powerful story published by the St. Petersburg Times (which is owned by the Poynter Institute; disclaimer: a former employer of mine): “Nearly blind woman’s world grows darker as the medical bills pile higher.” Published September 28, it’s the story of a family going broke from medical bills despite having health insurance, and their insurance company denying further claims because the family has cost the company too much already (due to a rare genetic disorder that’s making the mother and her daughters go blind).

Great story; important. Reading it makes you want to help this unfortunate family. Alas, the St. Pete Times website, TampaBay.com, offers no way for readers to take action and directly help out with the family’s massive pile of unpaid medical bills. I know, as a long-time journalist, that putting up a widget on the website alongside the story, allowing sympathetic readers to directly donate online to the family, would be unseemly, under traditional journalistic thinking. “Heavens! Then everyone will be bugging us to raise money for their personal catastrophe! We’ll be seen as bleeding-heart liberals pushing the case for the public option on health care reform!”

Now take a look at what the Huffington Post did with this story. It summarized the St. Pete Times piece, embedded the video piece from TampaBay.com (as is allowed, and as I’ve done at the bottom of this item), and then added to its package a widget allowing anyone to donate money to the family’s PayPal account to help pay the medical bills. (This is part of a new initiative, introduced today, called HuffPost Impact.)

Hmmm. Well-respected Florida newspaper does dynamite article about a family’s miseries under our current health-care system. But it takes an Internet up-start to “break the old rules” and with a phone call and a few lines of code allow readers to help the family.

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? Newspapers are struggling, losing readers, losing advertisers to newer forms of media, losing relevance. Yet they stick to the old ways of doing things. And in this case, the local news institution that brought this family’s story to public light will not get the credit when caring members of the public help pay off their medical debt. The Huffington Post will get that credit, because it’s not afraid to take action to support a worthy cause.

What a sad story for the newspaper. It’s sad for the family involved, too, of course, but at least a new-media news entity decided that it didn’t need to live by the old rules, and asked its readers to take action.

“Tradition” lives on in the newspaper industry. Sigh.

A couple stories in recent days remind us that the days of privacy are over.

Example 1: The naked upside-down skier
Surely you saw the story about the unfortunate man skiing with his son at the Vail resort in Colorado. There was a problem with the chairlift seat, and he fell through; but instead of falling to the ground, one of his skis got stuck in the chair and he ended up hanging upside-down — sans his pants and underwear which had been pulled off. So the poor guy was hanging under the chair, with his son watching from above, for 7 or more embarrassing and frightening minutes while Vail staff rescued him.

Of course there were photos. This was at the bottom of the lift, and other skiers waiting in line snapped photos of the embarrassing and odd scene with cell phones and digital cameras. Some ended up on the web, and they spread like wildfire — worldwide. The photos that most people saw online were from a professional photographer — skiing on his day off — who could get fired for taking the shot.

I noticed that the websites of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News did not run the photos (which just showed the skier’s butt, not his genitals), but both did link to sites that carried the pictures. A Vail newspaper did publish the photos. But despite the majority restraint of the traditional press, the poor guy became a joke on websites and in e-mail boxes around the world.

Vail executives no doubt didn’t want those photos published anywhere, and according to one news story I read, they rescinded the photographer’s season ski pass. But that’s absurd. Any number of skiers with cell phone cameras could have gotten the same shots — and even posted to Twitter or Flickr directly from the slopes. The resort’s best efforts at saving the naked skier’s dignity could not have prevented the images of the scene from going viral online.

Example 2: Judge tries to squelch pics of released murderer
Along similar lines, a story out of Ireland is about a judge ordering local newspapers not to publish photos of a convicted murderer who had served his term and was getting day releases to be in the community. The judge’s reasoning was that publication of what he called unbalanced articles plus the photo could result in violence against the ex-convict.

That’s not unreasonable thinking, just as is Vail wishing to protect the dignity of the skier (and make it less likely that he’ll sue their pants off). But again, the judge’s ruling only goes so far in protecting the man from reprisals. Someone else will take a photo of the man and post it on a blog, or photo-sharing site, or Twitter, and his identity will be revealed.

That’s today’s reality. Neither of the guys in those stories should have their photos posted around the web, it can be argued. But nothing will keep the photos hidden away. Human nature and the Internet won’t allow that.

On LATimes.com today, Andrew Malcolm posted this on the site’s political blog: “After Sarah Palin VP debate, Joe Biden to step aside for Hillary Clinton?.” It’s a long analysis of an Internet rumor that, near as I can tell, has no solid basis for taking seriously. (See Snopes.com’s analysis.)

Hmmm, a mainstream media outlet has devoted 23 paragraphs to an unsubstantiated Internet rumor. The author is “a veteran foreign and national correspondent” who has served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004.

Now contrast that to the Internet rumor that surfaced a few weeks ago, first on DailyKos.com, that VP candidate Sarah Palin’s new baby was not hers, but actually was her’s eldest daughter’s (ergo, cover-up). At first blush, the rumor appeared potentially credible, since the DailyKos author presented a bunch of photographic “evidence.” The rumor was eventually debunked.

What did mainstream media outlets do with that one? Mostly left it to percolate and grow in the blogosphere, keeping their hands clean because the rumor was “too sensitive” to touch. When the din got loud enough, there were a few mainstream reports about the brouhaha. No one in the mainstream press, to my knowledge, dived into this rumor with significant coverage. (We can discount the National Enquirer crowd. And there probably were some mainstream reporters digging around to confirm or refute the rumor, but since nothing was found there were not major mainstream-media stories.)

So, ummm, what’s the difference here? In both cases, the din rises online, and people start to wonder. Is Trig really Sarah’s baby? Is Biden really going to drop out? Both rumors could and should have been treated similarly. But the Palin routine was considered off-limits, while the Biden rumor was not.

I’m still annoyed by the Palin rumor and how the press handled it. Most editors and reporters felt the rumor was too politically charged to go after; they’d get accused of “left-wing media bias” for going after a story that was perceived as belonging in the gutter. Bullshit. It was blowing up and spreading widely, and mainstream reporters could have served the public by getting to the truth.

With Malcolm posting such a detailed piece on the Biden rumor, I sense some press hypocrisy. Yeah, Malcolm is one writer and does not represent the mainstream press. But the LA Times chose to publish his thoughts, which were based on an unsubstantiated rumor. One of the top mainstream news organizations just went crazy with an Internet rumor. Why didn’t it treat the Palin rumor in the same way?

To offer a more constructive thought, perhaps the press would do well to take a look at what Snopes.com does so well: confirm or deny Internet rumors. It seems to me that that’s a pretty good thing for news organizations to be doing. Ignoring some rumors — even when the conversation about them has reached fever pitch — while covering others is strange.

Finally, here’s Malcolm’s response, e-mailed to me earlier today:

“It’s a fully qualified article about rumors and how/why they stick sometimes. In this heated election climate 40 percent of the country takes turns wanting to censor articles on itself. Too bad. This is now the 72nd ranked blog in the world and second highest newspaper politics blog. Millions of people are reading our unexpected items and we’ll keep writing them.”

(Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Malcolm’s piece; I am criticizing the press for avoiding addressing the Palin baby rumor.)