Mixed blessing

THE PHILIPPINE blogging community is divided over whether to draft and/or adopt a code of ethical conduct that would govern online expression. As early as the onset of this century—before the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks over the Internet—some bloggers were already saying that the new media (any form of communication via electronic means—for example, the Internet—made possible by computer technology) are so unlike the old (print and broadcasting) in that, having empowered ordinary citizens by enabling them to express themselves, subjecting them to the codes of ethics and professional protocols that supposedly govern the old would remove that advantage. Many bloggers who upload information and/or who comment on events and issues of public interest also argue that they’re not journalists but advocates.

Some journalists have criticized blogger resistance to the drafting, or the adoption of already existing, codes of ethics for online practitioners. Providing information, analysis or opinion on issues of public concern, and providing it on a regular basis, they argue, make what some bloggers do, journalism.

Neither is advocacy contrary to good journalism, so long as journalists meet the fundamental responsibilities of accuracy and fairness. Advocacy is also basic to the Filipino journalism tradition, as exemplified in the writings of the journalists of the reform period (e.g., Marcelo H. Del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, Jose P. Rizal), who made sure to support their advocacy of reform with factual and contextual accuracy.

Whether in the form of information, analysis or opinion, communication via the media necessarily has a public impact. It’s a responsibility that demands not only minimum levels of excellence, but also observance of ethical standards. An inaccurate report online can so mislead people into, say, campaigning against a proposed law that could address an existing problem, or into voting for a candidate for public office who’s been wrongly described as competent and honest. Uploading that report would also be unethical if done to deliberately mislead.

These claims are valid enough. But equally valid are some bloggers’ claims that the professional and ethical standards of best practice in journalism have been observed erratically at best, and not at all at worst. Print and broadcast media are so hobbled by economic and political entanglements that merely getting at the truth through the old media has become as difficult as pulling teeth.

And yet every self-respecting print and broadcast organization has an internal mechanism to assure observance of professional and ethical protocols, in addition to performing other functions. Some journalists critical of bloggers and citizen journalists point out that  the absence of that mechanism is the primary reason inaccuracies, name-calling and outright slander, disinformation, and other problems are so evident in the new media.

That mechanism is the desk—the group of editors also known as desk persons, copy editors, or sub-editors that constitutes the gate-keeping unit of the newspaper, TV, or radio newsroom—which theoretically should always be in place, and is charged with  making sure that a news story meets established journalistic criteria such as accuracy and fairness. The deskman or woman also makes sure no laws like those against libel and slander are violated, decides the placement of news reports and what photos and other illustrations should go with them, and writes the headlines and photo captions.

The desk does have a necessary and positive function in the old media. But some journalists exaggerate its effectiveness and assume its good faith. The gate-keeping function in the old media is in truth a mixed blessing of upside and downside—of the solutions it makes possible, and the problems it generates.

Individual desk people may nor may not even perform the desk’s assigned tasks adequately, as even a superficial scan of newspaper pages or reasonably focused attention on a TV news program is likely to reveal. Factual errors, inaccuracy, lack of fairness, among other professional and ethical lapses, do occur regularly in the old media despite—sometimes because of—the desk.

But these are more often than not issues of competence rather than of deliberate disinformation or outright malice. A more vexing issue has been the focus of journalist complaints against the desk. It is that the desk too often serves as other than a technical gate-keeping mechanism, and often functions not only as a political and ideological filter by keeping information or opinion contrary to the media organization’s views out of the news pages or the six o’clock news. Too often is it a means through which the biases of the media organization find expression even in the supposedly opinion-neutral front page news.

The desk has been blamed, for example, for enhancing anti-Muslim and religious and ethnic bias, gender insensitivity, and ideological prejudice through the exercise of its editing and re-writing powers. The mere substitution of a neutral word like “said,” for example, with a word that implies judgment (such “substitutes” for “said” as “declared,” “argued,” “noted,”  “opined,” “pointed out” obviously assume the truth of what was said), or one that suggests either a negative or positive interpretation of events that is not from a source, can be leading enough to manipulate the unaware reader into adopting the preferred views of the media organization.

Instead of merely reporting what a source said and providing contextual information, a news report after desk tweaking could interpret what he said thus:

As edited by the desk: “Despite the bill he filed before the 15th Congress abolishing the Priority Development Assistance Fund, Senator X dismissed outright Senator Y’s allegation that he misspent his pork barrel funds.”

As originally written by the reporter: “Senator X said Senator Y’s claim that he spent his Priority Development Assistance Funds (or pork barrel) for his campaign is based on Y’s misinterpretation of what PDAF funds may be used for even during campaign periods. Senator X is the author of a bill abolishing the PDAF.”

The failure to detect and correct inaccuracy is even more fundamental. Only accurate and reliable information is of any value, while inaccurate information is not only misleading and dangerous, it is also destructive of the climate of information and informed opinion by poisoning the very sources of much of public discourse.

The mechanisms of professional and ethical observance the media have developed, sometimes haphazardly in the course of their checkered history, are obviously far from perfect. They need and demand criticism as inputs in their further development. They are all the media professions have at present, and their imperfect state is no argument for their abandonment in the old media, which have wrestled with ethical and professional issues for over a century since the advent of the yellow press in the West.

New media practitioners can adopt these mechanisms in full awareness of their flaws, and with the knowledge and intention of assisting in their improvement in the course of their own practice. They can also develop their own corrective mechanisms, even if it should require going over the same ground, and developing codes and standards that echo already established ones. They may end up reinventing the wheel, but no matter. What’s at issue in human communication is after all not the means, the vehicle or the medium, but its content, the quality and value of which are what in the end really matter.