Somebody stop this lady. Quickly.
Two months ago, Huffington Post blogger/amateur journalist/ruiner of everything Mayhill Fowler shook journalism down pretty hard, when she broke Barack Obama’s dumb tirade about rural Pennsylvanians feeling bitter and clinging to guns and religion because they’re too poor to live in San Francisco and attend fancy fundraisers. Obama’s people instantly lost it, complaining that fundraisers are always off the record, and implying, if not openly charging, that Fowler had violated some sort of ethical something by reporting their candidate’s comments.
Marc Cooper, Fowler’s HuffPo editor, vigorously defended her, writing, “What’s gray is when a reporter engages in any level of deceit to get the story or violates a ground rule to which he or she promised to comply. Not the case with our reporter, thanks very much. She was known to the campaign as an OffTheBus reporter and they let her in as such and she worked the room as such and she recorded the event in the open as she sat with campaign staff.” And Jay Rosen, who co-founed OffTheBus, laid out the frustrating contradictions and vague ethical boundaries inherent in a system that asks politically active citizens to both participate in and report on politics. The consensus conclusion? There wasn’t one. Talking heads concluded that this internet thing was really shaking stuff up, but they seemed to move on before reaching consensus about how the episode should inform the way journalists practice journalism.
And then, last week, Fowler struck again. She got Bill Clinton to call Todd Purdum “sleazy,” “dishonest,” “slimy,” and a “scumbag.” She did not, however, identify herself to Clinton as a reporter – a fact that earned her her second Whither Journalism? Times story in three months. This one’s much more troubling for anyone who has to wear credentials and shake down politicians for quotes for a living, because of the simple fact that there’s a debate raging over whether or not web journalists have to act like regular journalists.
It’s obscene that this is even up for debate, but if you’re going to ask a public figure to deliver an inflammatory quote, you tell that public figure where the quote will end up. It’s called doing your job.
The buried lede, which actually acts as the clincher to the Times piece, is Rosen’s shocking admission that, “We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this. We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.” If I’m reading that correctly, Rosen is saying that OffTheBus’s editorial leadership never made it clear that, if its writers were acting as journalists, they should identify themselves as such. That seems like it would be the first thing any editor would tell a first-time reporter, whether or not they’re bearing the magical “citizen-” mantle.
My first reporting assignment for the Weekly Dig involved running around half-drunk at Rock the Vote, interviewing other drunks, and goading them into hurling profanity-laden invectives at John Kerry. I had a notebook, and I told the drunks I encountered where I was from. That’s how you report. It’s no different here – though, surprisingly, some people still need to be told that publishing over wireless broadband doesn’t exempt them from the ethics we all work with. Anybody can be a journalist, but if you play the game, you have to play by the rules. Otherwise, the whole thing collapses. And it’s worrisome that not everyone with a stake in this game realizes what a dangerous road they’re walking by daring the thing to collapse on itself. From the Times:
The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday…
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Jonathan Alter, a columnist and political reporter for Newsweek, said in an interview. “If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist.” “You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody,” Mr. Alter added. “It’s just a form of cheating not to.”
But to Jane Hamsher, a onetime Hollywood producer who founded Firedoglake, a politics-oriented Web site that tilts left, Mr. Alter’s rules of the road are in need of repaving… “It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for,” she said. Told, for example, that the Times ethics policy states that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover (whether face to face or otherwise),” Ms. Hamsher was dismissive. In the context of political reporting, she said, such guidelines are intended to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”