Tag: ethics

Old ethics and new media (VI)

Howard Owens, GateHouse Media’s director of digital publishing, has responded to YouTube’s decision to remove the Beverly Citizen’s controversial video of the “Horribles” parade.

According to Owens, YouTube acted after receiving a complaint from someone whose face was visible in the video. Apparently YouTube has a privacy policy under which it will take down a video at literally anyone’s request. Owens sums it up as follows:

We simply cannot allow YouTube, or any other business partner, to subvert our editorial independence. If YouTube wants to get in the game of hosting video for established news organizations — which it is doing — then it needs to respect the editorial judgment and independence of the news professionals in those organizations. If YouTube is unwilling be a true media partner, then, at least for GateHouse, we will need to seek alternative means of distribution of our videos.

Now, it’s easy enough to say that YouTube should act as a common carrier, similar to the phone company, and carry any traffic that comes its way, regardless of content. As a free-speech advocate, I would much prefer a policy like that.

But it’s not that simple. YouTube is successful in part because it does a good job of keeping out pornography and graphic violence. It’s the PG-13 nature of YouTube that makes it an attractive venue for media companies like GateHouse in the first place.

On the other hand, Owens is absolutely right that if the folks at YouTube are going to remove news videos arbitrarily, then there’s no way a news organization can do business with them.

I haven’t changed my mind about the video — I still would have edited it to remove the eight-foot-long penis and some of the more offensive signs. But that has to be the news organization’s call, not that of the service hosting the video.

I realize this post is entirely one-sided, and I hope YouTube has something to say. Soon.

Wednesday morning update: An unnamed YouTube spokeswoman tells the Boston Herald that the video was “inappropriate,” but leaves it at that.

Old ethics and new media (V)

Looks like GateHouse Media has taken matters into its own hands.

If you go to the Beverly Citizen’s “Horribles” parade story now, you’ll see that the video featuring the eight-foot-long water-spouting penis and the crude signs is back online.

The difference: The video is now hosted by Veoh Networks rather than YouTube.

Old ethics and new media (III)

In a weird coda to the controversy over the Beverly Farms “Horribles” parade, a source has informed Media Nation that YouTube has removed the video. Have a look at the Beverly Citizen’s story. When you click on the video, you’ll receive a message that says, “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”

The GateHouse Media papers, like many smaller enterprises, uses YouTube as a free, easy-to-use publishing platform. Editors upload their videos to YouTube, then embed the code on their own sites. But it looks like publishers who wish to control their content are going to have to figure out a way to do it themselves.

A non-disclosure disclosure

The Boston Globe today runs an op-ed piece urging passage of a free-trade agreement with Colombia. The piece, by Marc Grossman, is reasoned and nuanced, celebrating Colombia’s rescue of 15 hostages last week while acknowledging that the government of President Álvaro Uribe must continue to improve its human-rights record.

But there’s a hidden agenda. The tagline states that Grossman is a vice chairman of the Cohen Group, and is a former undersecretary of state. That’s a pretty weak disclosure. In fact, a little Googling reveals that the Cohen Group, founded by former secretary of defense William Cohen, helps private clients do business internationally. Here’s the lowdown, taken directly from the Cohen Group’s Web site:

The Cohen Group (TCG) assists clients to navigate the political and business landscape in Latin America.

Secretary Cohen and TCG principals have developed and maintain strong ties with political, business, military, and media officials throughout Latin America that can help to accomplish client business objectives in the region. Our understanding of and relationships in the region have enabled TCG to assist numerous firms in the U.S., Spain and elsewhere in Europe that have business interests in Latin America….

Ambassador Marc Grossman, as Under Secretary of State until 2005, worked directly with leaders from across the region on a broad range of political, economic and security issues. For his efforts to promote democracy and fight narcoterrorism in Colombia, he was awarded Colombia’s highest civilian honor, the Order of San Carlos.

An opinion piece such as Grossman’s is worthless if it’s not independent. The Cohen Group would benefit mightily from a free-trade deal with Colombia. Surely there are experts who could have made the case as effectively as Grossman without being tainted by their future earnings being tied up in the outcome of the free-trade debate.

Old ethics and new media (II)

The comments to my earlier post have transformed this into a substantive, productive conversation about journalism and standards in the new-media age. You’ll find intelligent posts on all sides of the issue, from outraged readers to GateHouse Media editors and executives.

I’m humbled by how much better the quality of the discussion is compared to my original post. As Dan Gillmor likes to say, “My readers know more than I do.”

Old ethics and new media

Let’s say some local yahoos decide to rent a truck, bolt a giant model of a penis to the front (complete with squirting water!) and festoon the sides of the truck with messages so crude and offensive that I’m not going to quote them.

Let’s say they decide to enter the truck as a float in a parade that is attended by hundreds of families and children.

Let’s say, further, that the people on the float decide it would be a fun idea to throw condoms at the crowd.

Of course, you already know this is not a hypothetical.

There are many ways of looking at the fallout from the “Horribles” parade in Beverly Farms, which featured three floats — including the one I just described — that made fun of the Gloucester High School pregnancy story.

Here’s another angle: the responsibility of community journalists, who are no longer armed just with a notebook and a pen but with video cameras as well.

The Beverly Citizen, a GateHouse Media paper, is in the spotlight because of a video that it posted showing all the highlights and lowlights, including some close-ups of the aforementioned penis and the signs.

Does the video go too far? I’ll take a cue from the Citizen itself. The news story, by Bobby Gates, is almost prissy in its description of the controversy. Not a single offensive sign is quoted from. As for the float, the story rather clinically refers to a “large, realistically shaped phallic symbol spraying water from the front of a truck.”

Even more out of sync with the video is a post on the Citizen’s blog that asserts the floats “went over the line” by mocking teenage girls. The signs? “And I won’t even go into the signs on the floats, which were lewd at best.” Well, OK. But the blog post was written by “dmacalpine.” And the video was shot by Dan Mac Alpine, whose camera hovered so seductively over the very signs that he (or maybe it was his doppelgänger?) didn’t think he could quote in his newspaper’s blog.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I do know that quick-and-cheap video is posing a challenge to community journalists, who are finding themselves embroiled in controversy for shooting footage of subjects that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they merely described them in writing. That was the case at another GateHouse paper, the Somerville Journal, a few months ago, when its video of the Naked Quad Run at Tufts University sparked discussion and even outrage.

The current, situation, though, is different, as the Citizen is traveling much further in its video than it dares go in its written description. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Let me go back to my original question: Does the video go too far? I think it does. I haven’t checked, but I am confident that neither the squirting penis nor the worst of the signs made it on to any of the local television newscasts. I know that both were left on the cutting-room floor in a news video I watched at the Fox 25 Web site, and it’s probably safe to say that no one is going to go beyond our friends at Fox.

Except, it seems, the Beverly Citizen.

Look, it happened. Hundreds of people saw it. Hundreds more heard about it. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise. But if they didn’t think they should quote from the signs, then they shouldn’t have showed them in the video. As for the penis — well, let just say I think the written description was sufficient.

The folks at GateHouse are not bad people. They’re hard-working journalists trying to find their way in a news landscape that’s changing by the day. I’d rather see them taking too many chances than too few. I’m neither horrified nor offended by what they did. But I do think they made the wrong call in this case.

Update: The Salem News runs a front-page photo of the penis-bearing truck in its print edition. But unless you’ve seen the video, it’s impossible to figure out what you’re looking at. Here’s the News’ story.

Life imitates art

Medill School of Journalism professor David Protess, on suspicions that Medill dean John Lavine may have piped a few quotes from anonymous students in an in-house magazine article: “I am not alleging that the dean fabricated quotes. I am alleging that it is inaccurate to say there is no evidence that he did not fabricate quotes.” (Via Romenesko.)

Slate columnist Michael Kinsley, lampooning the New York Times’ hair-splitting defense of its “anonymous former aides think John McCain might have had sex” story: “What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair.”

How graphic?

The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly flags a post on Wonkette, of all places, that includes a gallery of extremely graphic photos taken after the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Wonkette’s Megan Carpentier writes:

These are pictures of real violence, and of the horrible things people all over the world will do to one another, and it isn’t conveyed by seeing the reaction of another person.

But though Carpentier imagines that the U.S. media won’t touch such images, the New York Times today offers a narrated slide show containing many of the same pictures, taken by John Moore of Getty Images. It’s not quite as grotesque as Wonkette’s raw feed, but believe me, you’ll get the idea.

My own instinct is to show everything as long as it’s newsworthy. Obviously these pictures are. (I’m refraining from posting one only out of copyright concerns.)

Among other things, seeing the true horror of yesterday’s attack provides a context for the polite Pakistani man who called a BBC radio program and told the shocked host that he thought Bhutto’s assassination was a good thing, since it would open the way for a new generation of political leaders.

Corrections and blogging standards

The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, blogging at The Medium on NYTimes.com, recently wrote that neo-Nazis were portraying Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul as one of them. She didn’t check with Paul. Hence the lengthy “Editor’s Note” that now precedes the item.

As it turns out, this is interesting fodder for a consideration of blogging ethics. If Heffernan had contacted neo-Nazi groups, gotten their version of events, and then failed to do the same with Paul, well, that would be an obvious journalistic lapse. But that’s not what she did. Instead, in classic blogger style, she pointed to accounts elsewhere, particularly in Little Green Footballs, which, as she notes, has a reputation for being “rigidly empiricist.”

Which means that I’m not sure how I come down on this. I don’t think any blogger believes you should have to verify independently everything you link to as long as you’re linking to a reasonably reputable source. On the other hand, there’s no question that the New York Times can do a lot more damage to someone’s reputation than Little Green Footballs. So perhaps the standard does need to be different.

There’s also the matter of how blogs root out stories. This became a subject for discussion at a New England News Forum conference at Southern New Hampshire University recently, as we pondered Talking Points Memo’s efforts to determine whether or not Mitt Romney had ever said he would never appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet. (As we now know from the Martin Luther King Jr. story, you would first have to figure out how Romney defines “never,” “appoint,” “Muslim” and “Cabinet.”)

TPM has been doing it open-source-style, putting half-vetted stuff out incrementally and letting the story emerge over time in a very public way. It’s a fascinating methodology, and one quite different from the closed-system model used in traditional journalism. But it can be pretty devastating to someone’s reputation if it turns out to be untrue — a position taken at the conference by, among others, David Tirrell-Wysocki, an Associated Press executive who’s also the executive director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester, N.H. From the “running notes”:

“I’m held accountable,” said Tirrell-Wysocki. “But who is holding the blogger accountable? That’s the downside as I see it.” He said blogs are akin to the conversation at the doughnut shop: “It’s what people are talking about.”

Essentially that is what LGF is doing, preceding its post on Paul by saying, “Take this one with a grain of salt, please,” but then laying out the accusation. Heffernan’s post is equally skeptical, as she concludes that “maybe it was only a matter of time before Paul got roasted on his own spit, i.e., the Internet.” Now Heffernan is getting roasted on the Internet, too.