Posted by
Recovering Bureaucrat on Saturday, August 12, 2006 12:24:00 PM
THE CANONS OF JOURNALISM - 1920's STYLE
Jerry
Fox
The movies voluntarily rate themselves. Television Shows
have a rating system to give us some guidance; major Internet providers offer
guidance on what we might want to lock out from computer access. Some magazines still come in Brown Paper
Wrappers.
How about Newspapers.
Here we have an industry that is fully protected by the U.S.
Constitution from attempts by government to abridge its freedom. How are we to
know if they police themselves? Which
ones titillate? Which ones truly
inform? Which ones are politically
neutral and balanced in their reporting, keeping editorial slant on the
editorial pages? Which ones are
politically biased, twisting much of their copy to reflect that bias, whether
reportage or editorial?
Visualize a smoke filled room in Washington. A chill still in the air in April. Imagine the editors of all the major
newspapers in the country gathered together to develop a code of ethics for the
newspaper business. Improbable? Fantasy?
Anything but. It was 1922. There was no television. Radio was brand new. Newspapers were king. At that meeting, the American Society of Newspaper Editors
(ASNE) adopted a code of ethics which they called the Canons of Journalism. The editors recognized their awesome
responsibility and wanted some rules to govern the industry, some standards
against which a newspaper could be judged by its peers. The Canons expressed the need to
protect freedom of the press, and established rules for Sincerity, Truthfulness,
Accuracy, Impartiality, Fair Play, and Decency.
Good stuff.
The Canons held sway until the seventies. The flower children, Viet Nam, Watergate, the
“if it feels good do it” period during which the morals of the Country seemed
to go through agonizing changes very quickly.
Radio had by now grown to a major force
in the entertainment and news business. It had been joined by mass
market television around 1948. Both were
vacuuming advertising revenue from other outlets - especially newspapers. And the new kid on the block, supermarket
tabloids, appeared to be ignoring all the Canons anyway. The rules so carefully developed in 1922 did
not apply to radio and television, and nothing similar existed to govern those
“new” media, and the internet was not a public property yet.
Newspapering is a business.
It had to meet the competition.
So, in 1975 the ASNE reviewed the Canons of Journalism and
revised it into a Statement of Principles. Much of the 1975 version is unchanged in
basic content, just upgraded into the more direct and forceful language of the
day. Three things, though, were totally
left out.
The original Canon on Fair Play said in part, “A newspaper
should not invade private rights or feelings without sure warrant of public
right as distinguished from public curiosity.”
That statement is gone from the 1975 version.
The original Canon on Sincerity, Truthfulness, &
Accuracy said in part, “Headlines should be fully warranted by the contents of
the articles which they surmount.” The
1975 article on Truthfulness and Accuracy (Sincerity is left out) does not
contain a standard for headlines.
The original Canon on Decency said, “A newspaper cannot
escape conviction of insincerity if while professing high moral purpose it
supplies incentives to base conduct, such as are to be found in details of
crime and vice, publication of which is not demonstrably for the general
good...” There is no Article on Decency
in the 1975 version. The entire Article
was omitted from the revision. Against
the backdrop of the seventies, the strong growth of supermarket tabloids, and
the orientation of television news, it is easy to see why the ASNE gave up on
this one.
It is great that the Newspaper industry has a Statement of
Principles. It is great that so much of
it has remained unchanged over so many years. But we do see an erosion in the
Principles, brought about largely by other media and the pressures of
competition.
Two Canons, Sincerity
and Decency, have already been silenced, and Fair Play has been rolled back a
ways. Truthfulness, Accuracy, and Impartiality are at best suspect, being under
continuous attack by the supermarket tabloids, tabloid television shows, and to
a growing extent the nightly television news.
And only time will tell whether there will be any restraint at all on
the content of the Internet. Recent
events suggest otherwise.
Yet there is a new and very widespread activity on the
internet that has potential for both good and evil – the “blogosphere,” where
anyone with a computer can write anything and publish it instantly – this blog
is an example of just that. Bloggers
come from all walks of life. Some are
expert in one or more technical areas.
Examining news photos for “doctoring,” evaluating the type used in an
alleged “copy” of a damning letter; or simply analyzing in great detail some
statement of a leader, and by application of simple logic, showing the leader
to be something of a dunce. The impact
of the “blogosphere” as an instant critic of newspapers is turning out to be
quite profound. It is an ongoing and
developing story of its own. Even more
formidable, the Internet is enjoying
phenomenal growth as yet another mass advertising media, further increasing
competition for the limited advertising dollar.
Does anybody really care about standards any more? Is there some connection between the relaxing
of the newspaper standards and the decline in moral values that we see
today? Or is all of it just the march of
history in a free and increasingly permissive society? Or maybe its even worse. Newspapers, radio, and television are all
businesses. They exist to make
money. They do that by satisfying their
customers. Their customers are us. We must want what we are getting. If not, we’re being awfully quiet about it. As for me, this blogger thinks Grandpa’s
generation thought it through and had it right.