Information wars
A discussion on reporting, ethics, truth, journalism
Elisabetta Tola and Diogo Rodriguez
“You can’t have an ethics code that is not a living document, you can’t update it every 10 years.” Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, set a very clear frame around the conversation that developed for the entire day at the “Reporting from the Front Lines of the Information Wars” event held on Thursday May 9 at Columbia Journalism School.
The occasion was the launch of two new centers of journalism, both funded by the philanthropist Craig Newmark: Poynter’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership and Columbia’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security.
Craig Newmark explained at the opening why he so strongly believes, as a reader and a citizen, in the need to work more on the ethics and security of journalism, before leaving the stage to a series of panel discussions on how to address the questions and how to test solutions at the ethical dilemma in journalism.
To follow the conversation on Twitter, you can look up the hashtag #NewmarkEthics.
There was also a live streaming of the entire event, and the video of the entire event is now available on YouTube:
The conversation between Emily Bell, Kelly McBride and Kyle Pope started the day and set the scene, raising these key points to be addressed:
- The terms of the relationship with audience have changed
- We now have studies and evidence that show that people do not buy only journalism: they are interested in the values and there is a strong correlation between those values and the political frame and culture
- Ethics and trust are now key issues to be addressed in journalism: they should be taken into consideration within the discussion on business model and the tech development, they cannot be held separately
- We need to be able to experiment more tools and technology to address these issues and to find new solutions to challenges in this field
- We do not have a mechanism to build audience trust and to explain to our audience how and why we select certain stories and go about our investigation in a way or another
- Ethics is not only about telling the truth: it is necessary to have mechanisms to explain why journalism exists
- What is the value of transparency in journalism?
- We need articulate standards of ethics for journalism but we also need to update them regularly, they cannot be something fixed for years and years
- We need appropriate space to bring and develop this conversation: it’s very difficult to do it in a newsroom dealing with everyday business, that’s why these Centers offer a good place to develop this reflection
David Folkenflik, from NPR, animated a very participated panel and session on “Modeling an emergency”, bringing the entire room to discuss a simulation of ‘should we publish or not’ case when a leaked piece of evidence gets in our hands from one trusted source. Panelists were Victoria Baranetsky, Yasmin Green, Mathew Ingram and Noah Shachtman.
Key questions:
- How should we handle information that is leaked or brought to us by sources?
- How much time should we take before publishing something that is potentially newsworthy information and yet might be inaccurate?
- How to reduce mistakes and foster trust and accountability for our readers and members (who, in many cases now, are becoming the ones supporting the newsrooms).
The keynote with Emily Bell, Maria Ressa and Zeynep Tufekci raised a lot of questions and comments online, and offered much food for thought.
Maria Ressa offered an update of the situation she and her newsroom are facing in the Philippines, with attacks by President Duterte. Here’s some further information on Ressa’s situation in a CJR post.
Some insights we got from the keynote:
- We haven’t really adjusted the way we think, as journalists and media, nor the way we work on our ethics yet to the huge transformation we underwent: we do not have anymore monopoly on people’s attention nor on the generation and distribution of information
- We need to work on the new important role of journalism but we have to focus on credibility and attention management
- It is important to work through social media: we need to be there to provide context, to fact check, to flag to the people who are talking and reading there when there is a lie or wrong data and information — that’s how we fight back.
- We cannot leave this kind of information work to social media platforms: they do not have the social forensic skills that we as journalist are capable of — we need to work on the information that is circulating, we cannot withdraw from that.
- Information is power, misinformation and disinformation is global in scope, it has to do with power, and often this power is used to attack the people, that’s why we have to be there doing our job — showing to the people how they are being manipulated and how the amplification of information works in the digital environment.
- We cannot leave to the platform owners and teams to deal and decide how the public sphere should be fed information — it’s not their job and we need to take it upon us as journalists to play our crucial role in framing the reality, in proposing a whole new series of standards and ethics — but it’s not going to be a quick fix.
- We need to go back to the north star = the public interest. Journalists have the power to assign credibility and focus the attention, and we need to do it with the public interest in mind.
- Trust is a crucial issue, and we have to build it again
- We also need new technologies to improve our ability to fight back as journalists in verification, security, use of informations and so on
Two roundtables have then provided the opportunity to discuss some very day-to-day issues that newsrooms have to face when taking decisions on whether to publish or not a certain topic, how to frame it, how to make sure that standards of ethics are met and be respected by the journalists in the newsroom:
“What happens when your story isn’t believed?” with Kyle Pope, Irin Carmon, Angie Drobnic Holan and Topher Sanders:
“Public editor roundtable: what should newsrooms do? With Kelly McBride, Philip Corbett, John Daniszewski, Manny Garcia and Mark Memmott.
- How to update and maintain high standards in the newsroom
- How to maintain security and protect journalists from threats
