POST NOW, REGRET LATER: Ethical guidelines needed for online news

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

In today’s online environment, it’s been said that everyone is a journalist.  If that’s really true, then everyone ought to read this.  

It’s the Code of Ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists, an organization I’ve been a proud member of for many years.  It has just been updated to bring it more in line with the ethical challenges of the digital age.  It should be required reading for anyone with a Twitter account, a blog, a Web site or a smartphone.  

I was reminded once again of our desperate need for guideposts when unidentified hackers worked their way into the online accounts of a number of celebrities.   They located private nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, among others, pirated them, and posted them online for the world to see.   

Celebrity journalist Perez Hilton quickly re-posted them to his site - then scrambled to take them down when it dawned on him the awful line he had just crossed.  

My thoughts on what happened with Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos. What I learned from this all. And what I will do differently going forward! My feelings. My heart. Sincerely.

“I didn’t even stop to think about my actions,” Hilton said in a remorseful online video that reminds me of the old adage that you should never make big decisions when you’re distracted.   “I was on vacation with my son and my mom in Vegas, trying to have a good time, and I’m like, oh my god, this huge story is happening, let me get this out there, let me do this as soon as possible.  And I made the wrong decision.”  

Wrong indeed.  That should be obvious to any second grader.  (Why aren't we learning this at home anymore?   Maybe that's another column.)

Granted, on one level, this is nothing new.  Major journalists have always had the power to make or break reputations, careers, and lives.  And a big part of reporting is to get new information first.   The competition to be first with news is what drives real journalists, and when they succeed, it pays the bills.    

Look at this newsstand photo I snapped on August 29, the morning the story broke about the hospitalization of Joan Rivers.   The empty slot on the upper left was for the New York Daily News.  It was alone in putting the story on the cover.  Predictably, the paper sold out.  

But there’s an important distinction in the Rivers story.  In the drive to get it first, the Daily News also got it right.  And just as important, it did right, by both its readers and by its subject.  It crossed no ethical lines in its reporting, because although the Joan Rivers story is a private tragedy for her family, it is also a very public tragedy for her many fans, and it has raised legitimate questions about her medical treatment.  

Could there be any similar justification for what was done to Jennifer Lawrence?  

“Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect,” says the SPJ Code.  “Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity - even if others do.”

And while the Code notes that “private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention,” it does so under the exhortation - in bold face font - to minimize harm.  "Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness," the Code says. 

SPJ’s Ethics Code is voluntary.  And it’s no substitute for a well informed conscience.  But in today’s nonstop communications world, where too many consider the Golden Rule quaint, and where, as my colleague Charles Feldman has often pointed out, we literally have “no time to think,” the Code of Ethics is worth bookmarking on your browser.  That’s true whether or not you consider yourself a journalist.   

I AM NOT A CROOK and other media miscues

The power of negative answers over positive ones is well demonstrated. Why do politicians and public speakers so often forget it?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Forty years ago this week, Richard Nixon was on TV ending his career.  I was on the radio starting mine.

I was still in my teens, a full time student and a part time newscaster at a popular AM radio station on Long Island, New York, trying hard to sound older and more experienced than I really was.  But I still count my 755 pm roundup on the evening of August 8, 1974 as among the most memorable of my career.

Richard Nixon "preserved head" on the TV cartoon series "Futurama." 

Most Americans today did not live through the Watergate scandal that brought President Nixon down.  Their impressions are formed by history books, or more likely, through lingering popular culture references.  (Fans of the TV cartoon series Futurama, for instance, know Nixon as a crochety preserved head.)  

And then there's the five word phrase that for all of Nixon's multitude of accomplishments and his legion of sins, we most closely associate with him to this day:  "I am not a crook."  For public speakers of all stripes, those words hold an important lesson about how not to respond to a challenge from the audience.  

Nixon uttered those words at a press conference in November, 1973.  He was addressing a convention of newspaper editors in Orlando, Florida.  His infamous answer came in response to a question about Watergate - a question whose intent Nixon saw as malevolent.  (It's well documented that Nixon was no fan of newspaper editors.)

"People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook," Nixon intoned.  "Well, I'm not a crook.   I've earned everything I've got."  

Put politics aside for a moment and focus on language.  The positive - "I've earned everything I've got" - got lost in the negative "I am not a crook."  Unwittingly, Nixon demonstrated the established principle that negative responses to negative questions acquire a life of their own.  If the issue is big enough, those responses can follow you to the grave, and beyond.   

Researchers have long known that human beings have something known as a "negativity bias" - in short, we have greater recall of, and give greater weight to, negative experiences over positive ones.   "Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good," wrote Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, in co-authoring a 2001 paper entitled, "Bad is Stronger than Good".

You would think that politicians, who have long accepted the premise that attack ads work because of their inherent negativity, would absorb that lesson and avoid negativity in statements about themselves.  But they don't.    

Earlier this year, New Jersey governor Chris Christie hoped to put questions about the so-called "Bridge-gate" arm-twisting scandal to rest by holding a 2-hour news conference and answering every conceivable question from reporters.    "I am not a focus-group tested, blow-dried candidate or governor, " Christie said.  "I am not a bully."  No wonder that USA Today's front page carried that very quote the following day.  

The antidote, of course, is to remember always to try to answer a negative question positively.  The problem is, doing the opposite is our first reaction.  We fool ourselves into thinking we are effectively swatting down the negative when we all we do is reinforce it.  "I am not, I was not, I did not."  All  we do is make it bigger.  

"When I was in high school, I used to play basketball," a recent trainee told me.  "And when I'd get to throw a foul shot, my coach would yell at me from the sidelines.   'Whatever you do,' he said, DON'T MISS!'   

"I never remembered don't," my trainee concluded.  "All I remembered was miss."  

Unfortunately, I don't think he was old enough to remember Richard Nixon.  

MEMO TO TOP MANAGERS: Athletes use coaches, why not you?

When a corporate communications team calls us seeking training for its senior leader, one of the first questions we ask is... "is your exec open to the process, or are you dragging them in kicking and screaming?"  But even inhabitants of the executive suite need mentors, argues the former president of PayPal and OpenTable and senior vice president at eBay.   

"Growing with the business required the rapid acquisition of entirely new skills," writes Jeff Jordan.  "However, It's tough to learn new skills when bigger and bigger groups of people are watching you make stupid mistakes."  The best way to respond?  "Regard that scrutiny as a valuable asset," and "engage a coach to help you work through your issues and develop the skills you need."   Courtesy the Harvard Business Review.

LINK TO COMMENTARY>>

EVEN LESS TIME TO THINK

Social media raises the ante on the dangers of media speed

Media commentary by Charles Feldman

When Howard Rosenberg and I started thinking about, and then began to write, what became No Time To Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-hour News Cycle (Continuum Publishing), the year was 2006. (The book was published in 2008.)

Facebook, founded in Cambridge Massachusetts, was barely two years old in 2006.  Twitter was just getting started in San Francisco.   We mentioned them in the book, of course - but our focus was primarily on the impact of 24-hour radio and television news, as well as blogs, which had forced journalists to greatly accelerate the pace at which they reported the news.  

All speed, little light, has too often been the consequence of instant social media, argues Feldman. 

This acceleration led to mistakes - some small and relatively unimportant, others large and of potentially enormous consequence.   But what seemed fast in either 2006 or 2008 is positively snail-like today.  

In No Time to Think, we headed one chapter, “All the News Before It Happens.”  That is even truer now than it was when we went to press.

The iPhone, with its photo and video capability, has made potential “citizen journalists” of all of us.   But the emergence of instant social media, which mobile technology helped spread, has backed even the most staid of mainstream journalistic institutions into a corner.  

In this corner, rumor and innuendo sometimes pass for “news.”  That’s been the case in the past, of course.  What’s different today is that a new, more insidious ethic has taken hold - one that not only makes it okay to “report” things that turn out to be factually wrong, but almost relishes the notion that others (presumably our so called “citizen journalists”) will quickly catch the mistakes and correct them.  

This occasionally happens, to be sure - but not nearly enough.  And it is hardly the point. Getting it right, rather than being first, used to be the cherished standard.  Now, getting it first is often the goal: damn the facts, full speed ahead.

It is said that journalism is the first draft of history. But if this is so—and I think it is—then social media is the first letter (or perhaps the first 140 characters) in that history. The speed at which these characters now flow - going viral sometimes in mere minutes - is presenting journalists, not to mention the consuming public, with uncomfortable challenges.

We did not—and could not—argue in No Time to Think that the genie needed to be put back in the bottle.  Of course, it cannot, and I am not advancing that argument now. The world we have is the world in which we all must live. 

It's self-evident that speed has always shaped journalism: the telegraph was faster than the pigeon; radio and television carried information at the speeds of sound and light.  

And yet, serious journalistic institutions tried to, and did, maintain standards to restrain the compelling desire to get the news out quickly at the expense of facts.  We did, after all, still control the microphones and cameras and transmitters that carried our stories to the far corners of the globe.  

We still do.   Which is what makes the current rush to be first, rather than right, so unnecessary.  

If we were to update our book, we would no doubt subtitle it, “The Menace of Media—and Social Media—Speed and the 24-second News Cycle.”  Alas, by today’s questionable standards, even 24 seconds may be too slow.

Charles Feldman, special consultant to Dunlop Media, spent 20 years as an investigative reporter at CNN.  He is based in Los Angeles. 

RAY RICE "APOLOGY": How not to conduct a crisis press conference

Imagine this.  You represent a professional football player who has been arrested on a charge of assaulting his wife.  You get your client into a pre-trial intervention program to avoid prosecution, wait for the smoke to clear, then schedule a mea-culpa news conference at which you expect he will, at minimum, offer a heartfelt apology. 

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice checking notes on his smartphone during an "apology" press conference.  At left is his wife, Janay Palmer.   Image from nfl.com. 

The player does apologize - to his fans and to professional football - but he neglects to do so to the wife at his side. Then, as this real-life story of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice stumbles from bad to worse, he tries to read key messages from his smartphone - in full view of the reporters assembled.  

"He kept picking up the device and paging through it while the room hung in awkward silence," writes TV critic David Zurawik.  "The one thing written on that screen should have been: Apologize to the woman sitting next to me.”  Courtesy The Baltimore Sun.

LINK TO COMMENTARY>>