Blog Ethics From the NYT.

Adam Cohen thinks that we bloggers have a probem with ethics, that we really all ought to be sharpening up our act and dealing with the world like proper journalists. That he uses, as his first example of a blog The Drudge Report shows that he hasn’t quite grasped the basics of the field, for of course Drudge is not a blog. Moving right along:

The thing about influence is that, as bloggers well know, it is only a matter of time before people start trying to hold you accountable. Bloggers are so used to thinking of themselves as outsiders, and watchdogs of the LSM (that's Lame Stream Media), that many have given little thought to what ethical rules should apply in their online world. Some insist that they do not need journalistic ethics because they are not journalists, but rather activists, or humorists, or something else entirely. But more bloggers, and blog readers, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent blogs with the highest traffic shouldn't hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media.

Every mainstream news organization has its own sets of ethics rules, but all of them agree broadly on what constitutes ethical journalism. Information should be verified before it is printed, and people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints, especially if they are under attack. Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts, and disclose any significant ones. Often, a conflict means being disqualified to cover a story or a subject. When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising.

That first paragraph entirely misses the point about how it all works. We could offer an analogy  from the economics of markets. No one (and I do mean no one, from Friedman and Hayek to La Rouche and any Marxists still remaining) doubts that markets need to be regulated. The question is, who does the regulating? Is it the government, as many would want? Or is it the consumers themselves, voting with every dollar they spend? So with media, on the one side the MSM, with a formal set of rules about what one can say and how one can say it, on the other, blogs, where regulation comes directly from one’s readers. Go too far and no one reads you. Errors of fact get quickly corrected in comments sections. Errors of logic are at least attacked in same. Errors of opinion get lambasted by other blogs with different such.   Compared with, say, trying to get errors in a Paul Krugman column corrected, blogs are wildly open to revision, not necessarily by their writers or an ethics code but by their readers.

The second paragraph is similarly out of touch. Blogs are quite rightly not held to those standards of "ethical journalism".  Only what comes out of the system, after the unsupported allegations, the rants, the foam-flecked screaming, only after the filtering process provided by 8 million blogs shouting at and correcting each other, only that should be considered ethical journalism. Each individual blog post, he is correct, is simply the unsupported word of a partisan (given the financial rewards currently available, there is no one doing this who doesn’t have some kind of bee in their bonnet) but the system as a whole works very well. It’s an economic thing (not a great strength of NYT writers I know, but try some Hayek), that information is distributed. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of reporters and fact checkers the NYT has (or any other organisation), how many sources they speak to, how often they refine their words, 8 million blogs have access to more information than they do. The question is, how is that information processed? Or, if you prefer, how is the data held in this dispersed manner processed so that it becomes information, robust information at that?

The unfortunate truth is that if each blog post were held to the same standards of "ethical journalism" then we would be just as lame as the MSM at processing data. Probably even worse, in fact, for none of us individually have the same resources as one individual newspaper. Yet the system as a whole has vastly more resources than not just any one newspaper but all of them added together.

There’s also another way of looking at this, following a discussion at Left to Right on academic diversity. At what level of granularity do we actually want to have diversity? Should all history courses include some Asian history? Or should all History Departments teach some Asian history?  Or should all Universities ensure that some Asian history is taught? Or should the system of all Universities ensure that Asian history is taught?

Should every economics class include both, say, libertarian (for example, Austrian) and Keynesian ways of looking at things? Should they be taught as separate units within a course? Should departments make sure that both are available on the same campus? Or is it only necessary that the entire system teaches both, even if at different Universities?

Back to blogs, at what level of the system is it necessary that it be "ethical"? At what level of the system is it necessary that the truth be spoken? As Cohen points out, in the MSM the attempt is made that only those individual pieces that can be rigorously checked on a stand-alone basis pass the tests. This leads to large amounts of data being rejected, as they cannot be confirmed as information.

Blogs work at the system level. Any and all pieces of data, each individual datum, is allowed into the system. What is information is what comes out of the whole system. It’s a different way of reaching the same goal, processing data into information, but one that would be entirely crippled by the insistence that only what is already proven to be information can be allowed into the system.

In short, adopting the same system of journalistic ethics for each and every blog, for each and every blog post, would entirely cripple what blogs actually do, work at the system scale, not the more granular post or piece scale, to process data into information.

It would be quite wonderful to see a piece on blogging that did not include Ms. Cox but apparently anal sex jokes really are the way to the MSM’s heart. Not sure who that says most about actually. In conclusion we get:

Bloggers may need to institutionalize ethics policies to avoid charges of hypocrisy. But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline. As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.

I cannot speak for the other 7,999,999 bloggers I am told there are out there but I have no particular desire to reform the American media. I’d like those who go into it to have at least a nodding acquaintance with basic economic thought but that’s not a reason to storm the barricades, more the lack of it being an occasion for gentle head shaking over their ignorance. What I would want to make sure people understand is that we are aiming for truth in the end, the blogosphere being a method of attempting to reach that that works at the system level, one that has its own inbuilt ethical checks and balances, that it is a system that only works if we do not have ethical policies at the individual level, for if we do, how can we process all of the data?

Update. Highly amusing addition to the debate in today’s, Monday’s, NY Times. A Times panel has reported on how it can boost its own credibility. Some choice thoughts:

As examples, the report cited limiting anonymous sources, reducing factual errors and making a clearer distinction between news and opinion.
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The report also said The Times should make it easier for readers to send e-mail to reporters and editors. "The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being," the report said.
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When specific newspapers were mentioned, The Times fared about average, with 21 percent of readers believing all or most of what they read in The Times and 14 percent believing almost nothing.
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The full report will be on nytco.com but as of my writing, 11 am GMT, is not.