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Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism

234 pointsby funmiover 5 years ago

20 comments

Knulpover 5 years ago
I feel like the conversation is lacking a journalist point of view so I&#x27;m going to pitch in :) I usually don&#x27;t say anything in this kind of debate (especially on Twitter ;) ) because it&#x27;s pretty useless, but I love reading the community here and it&#x27;s the first time that a debate disppoints me. I feel like it&#x27;s one sided and completly lacking the usual counter-argument and debate. Also, bear with me if I make english mistakes - I&#x27;m french and it&#x27;s not my native langage.<p>First I&#x27;d like to adress there&#x27;s very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don&#x27;t think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can&#x27;t say &#x27;journalists&#x27; the same way you can&#x27;t say &#x27;engineers&#x27; because there&#x27;s people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We&#x27;re not interchangeable and we don&#x27;t all do the same job at all.<p>All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you&#x27;re like everyone else : you&#x27;re an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it&#x27;s a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you&#x27;ll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don&#x27;t necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can&#x27;t fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they&#x27;re considering reconducting your contract, you&#x27;ll just get cut. It&#x27;s just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.
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mannykannotover 5 years ago
I think the author unintentionally misspoke in calling him &quot;one of the last&quot;. The growth of journalism in which Lehrer&#x27;s standards are not observed should not distract us from the fact that there are many journalists reporting with integrity, and in some cases, great courage.
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proximitysauceover 5 years ago
In addition to partisanship and sensationalism, access journalism has dramatically lowered the quality of what gets reported:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Access_journalism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Access_journalism</a><p>It&#x27;s also worth referencing Chomsky&#x27;s Manufacturing Consent which lays out the playbook for propaganda posing as journalism:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Manufacturing_Consent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Manufacturing_Consent</a>
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40acresover 5 years ago
For me, Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to journalism. There are a lot of downsides to strong institutions and gatekeeping, but when it comes to journalism I always felt like I was reading The New York Times or The Washington Post and not an individual reporter. The shroud of not getting an up close an personal look put the institution at the forefront.<p>With social media, Twitter specifically, the journalist becomes the main focal point -- unfortunately the biases comes out as we are all human and you begin to get a closer look at how the sausage is made, how much &quot;access journalism&quot; corrodes coverage, and particularly how non-diverse these institutions are (everyone feels like they went to some Ivy or liberal arts college with somewhat wealthy or well connected in journalism relatives). A majority of the content is still really good (climate reporting, international politics, &#x27;explainers&#x27; and data backed reporting are all excellent) from the big institutions but I&#x27;ve totally avoided political and most opinion columns since 2016.
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specialistover 5 years ago
Lehrer&#x27;s Rules are solid, ethical, and actionable. I agree 100%.<p>Alas, they are completely moot in today&#x27;s ad-supported automated outrage machines. And I&#x27;m fresh out of goodwill.<p>Until we decide that discourse is more important than profits, forge a new consensus, we have to treat reporting like the replication crisis in science.<p>Just two rules apply:<p>Sign your work.<p>Share your data.<p>The corollaries are just as simple:<p>Unsigned, unsourced statements are gossip.<p>Unsupported data is propaganda.
12xoover 5 years ago
Attention is the currency of media. Modern, mainstream &quot;news&quot; programs are not journalism per se, they are just conduits for advertising dollars.<p>The sad part is that concocting sensationalism is extremely profitable, especially politics. And when you can create the controversy and then charge outrageous amounts of money to the very people to whom you poke, you control the discourse and you make a lot of money, which in America is power.<p>Modern, mainstream &quot;news&quot; is just like fast food. If you care about your body and your health, you will not eat the stuff. But most people dont care, dont mind and dont even think about it. Its cheap, tasty and convenient.
djinnandtonicover 5 years ago
13. Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.<p>The worst problem with journalism today, encapsulated in a single sentence.
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jellicleover 5 years ago
Somewhat amusingly, the list highlights the Achilles heel of journalism by omitting one simple rule: &quot;tell the truth&quot;.<p>Not lying is not at all the same as telling the truth.<p>Modern journalism, at best (very rarely seen), tells you something that is, narrowly taken, true. Even this version of journalism does not attempt to tell you what the actual truth of the matter is.<p>Narrowly true statement: &quot;Republican Senator Blarg said today on the floor of the Senate &quot;these charges are nonsense, fake news, totally made up&quot;.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s a true statement! It was said! But it&#x27;s also misleading about the whole matter to convey it to your readers.<p>Telling your viewers the real truth of the situation: &quot;The charges levied in the Senate are obviously accurate and serious, but Republican Senators are lying about them in an attempt to obfuscate and downplay the situation.&quot;
kristiancover 5 years ago
Many journalists seem to have discovered that becoming noisy, performative blue tick ‘personas’, acting out journalism on Twitter, and saying things like ‘this, literally this’ a lot as a substitute for actual analysis is also good for their careers.<p>They act out this status-dance of pretending to loathe every second of life in the toxic digital hellscape that, in the talk tracks and visibility it gives them is actually very beneficial for their careers.<p>They couldn’t actually admit it’s been good for them though, as that would mean admitting profiting from the algorithmic, privacy problem-invested landscape that they barely understand but have made their careers criticizing.<p>But of course, everyone’s at it! So the only way to get ahead is more paranoia, more angst, more toxicity. Once you’re bought in, you can’t go back to tacking to the middle. So we get an arms race of performative angst and hyperbolic statements.<p>Before you know it, you’re claiming that Slack notifications give you PTSD symptoms: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pfpicardi&#x2F;status&#x2F;1220738739514814467?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;pfpicardi&#x2F;status&#x2F;1220738739514814467?s=2...</a><p>The problem is that that is antithetical to the real work of journalism - which should be about seeking truth without fear or favour.
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fnord77over 5 years ago
most of these seem like a good personal ethos to have, even if you&#x27;re not a journo
salimmadjdover 5 years ago
Even the &quot;newspaper of record&quot;, the NY Times has lost its journalistic process.<p>This is just one recent example that comes to mind. See why Harvard Professor is suing the NYT [1] for completely twisting his post about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein [0]<p>I found this so outrageous how NYT would completely twist words and not make the appropriate corrections when given the evidence.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=D135DBWfabM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=D135DBWfabM</a>
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macspoofingover 5 years ago
If you take the present journalism climate as the norm, these rules are radical. Can you imagine CNN reporting on Trump voters and following rule #6? Or reporting on Trump and following rule #5, #11?
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babyover 5 years ago
In their current form, medias:<p>1. do not care about creating panics or damaging society<p>2. are incentivized to provide click-baity to-the-minute reporting.<p>How to fix this?<p>Maybe regulation, even though dangerous in this freedom of speech territory.<p>One thing I was thinking (inspired by one of Andrew Yang&#x27;s point) is to have a press tax to fund a delayed international news outlet.<p>It changes the incentives: the media has no funding issue and is not incentivized to attract more readers; and it changes the impact: delaying each piece of news to wait until more information is available is good.
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celticmusicover 5 years ago
probably a silly complaint, but it would&#x27;ve been really nice to put the asterisk on the left side of the numbers so that one could immediately see by scanning which are the refined 9.
degosukeover 5 years ago
I wonder whether the improvements in machine learning would ever be sufficient, so that for an article we could generate a quick report of how many points from the list are &quot;checked&quot;.
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MarioManover 5 years ago
These are excellent rules, but they’re useless without sites and journalists that follow them. Does anyone here have some recommendations worth reading?
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proximitysauceover 5 years ago
It&#x27;s much more rare though and it&#x27;s almost entirely absent when looking at political coverage. Two journalists I can think of off the top of my head who have acted with outstanding integrity in recent years are Ronan Farrow and Julie K. Brown (broke the Weinstein and Epstein stories respectively). Part of what makes their journalism so strong is that they had to fight <i>the entire industry</i> to get their stories out.<p>Political coverage is a nightmare though. Just yesterday George Stephanopoulos was caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner [1]. This happens on both sides of the isle regularly at this point (the White House itself is hardly faultless). It&#x27;s only ratcheted up since 2016 where it seems the press took it up themselves to &quot;save&quot; us, where the definition of save seems to be: push their own political opinions.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WhiteHouse&#x2F;status&#x2F;1220758756071497728" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WhiteHouse&#x2F;status&#x2F;1220758756071497728</a>
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MaupitiBlueover 5 years ago
Reading his rules, it’s hard not to agree with Bob Woodward that many journalists have become “unhinged” over Trump.
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qrbLPHiKpiuxover 5 years ago
&gt; No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.<p>This is the entire internet.
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bilbo0sover 5 years ago
Interesting that none of the rules of journalism include just reporting facts. In fact, it says that journalists should be disciplined for &quot;reckless&quot; reporting of any fact.<p>It kind of explains why we live in the fact light environment of quotes and spin. Presumably, if a hard fact proves unpopular with a large enough group, then those facts, even when backed by hard evidence, can likely land you in a lot of trouble.<p>A bit understandable I suppose? I mean, if talking bad about Trump or Obama increases the number of shooters in your Walmarts and churches, then yeah, probably should be careful about doing that. At the same time, if you have to walk on egg shells around people so emotionally invested in a person, or place, or subject that they&#x27;re going to shoot up anyone who disagrees with them, then your journalism on that issue is not likely to be very &quot;good&quot; in any case.
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