Apply the concept of epistemic responsibility to campaign coverage as described below. Discuss whether you believe that journalists covering political campaigns fulfill their epistemic responsibility. Explain why or why not. Your response is due Tuesday, Jan. 29, by 9 p.m. (No exceptions.)
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/why-campaign-reporters-are-behind-the-curve/?hp
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunday, January 27, 2013
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
14 comments:
Epistemic responsibility is defined as using appropriate procedures to find out the truth. This is a journalists job, to find out the truth and convey it to the public. Epistemically speaking, using deceit or trickery of any sort is not appropriate ways of obtaining this information. Borden said in chapter 1 that, "Some ways of knowing are more responsible than others." In regards to political campaign coverage, journalists seem to zoom in on the stronger candidate with good strategics, not someone with sound ideas or the candidate who is prepared to govern the U.S. people. As Issenberg said in the article, reporters miss a lot of things during campaign times. They fail to use all appropriate procedures to obtain the truth. Rather, they focus on polls and numbers as the backbone of their stories. Although numbers can only go so far,journalists are using what they have and what is available to them to report facts. Appropriate is the key word in the definition. While politicians and campaign workers have access to private collections of data, like demographic and lifestyle lists, journalists have not advanced much in their reporting and gathering tactics. They bring in "experts" to comment on the election. However, they do not have access to most of these documents politicians do. So in terms of epistemic reporting, they are doing their job. It would not be appropriate to steal documents for an article. In this case, the public gets the truth journalists have sought out with the materials they can use and obtain appropriately.
caterina, does the first half of your response contradict your conclusion, perhaps?
The article in the New York Times about the way journalists are reporting the presidential campaigns brings up an interesting point to consider. This article describes the campaign coverage as falling behind or "behind the curve". It says how many reporters are behind in strategic understanding of how campaigns are run and how voters are targeted. In my opinion, I do not believe that these reporters are fulfilling their epistemic responsibility. According to the textbook, epistemic responsibility is finding the truth by using appropriate and ethical means of discovery. If we know that there are strategies being overlooked or misunderstood, or even not even attempting to be understood, then how can we say we are providing the public with the most accurate information we know is available? We cannot be truthful if we aren't keeping up. I believe it is ethically irresponsible to make assumptions when a reporter knows they are missing something. I think, like the end of the article says, they should leave a little mystery where there are holes in our knowledge.
As stated in Borden’s piece, a journalist is not only responsible for finding out the truth, but also for finding that truth in appropriate ways: what is referred to as that journalist’s epistemic responsibility.
Unfortunately, it seems that more and more journalists are only paying this ideal lip service. In the case of campaign coverage, reporters seem to believe that they are “finding out the truth” by zeroing in on voter polls or statistics, by reporting on “what type of people” the candidates are. Unfortunately, this means that reporters are focusing, in essence, on which candidate is the better performer and not on which candidate has the better policies or would be better qualified for the position. As the article described, this type of reporting also makes it easier for journalists to miss important facts about the candidates—they are so worried about presenting the big picture that they miss the smaller details.
In that sense, I don’t believe many campaign reporters are fulfilling their epistemic responsibility, though I’m still deciding whether it’s the journalists themselves that are at fault for this failure or our society at large. Do they research their stories? Yes. Do they research them in the right way, or present the information that the public actually requires to make an informed decision? No. The facts that the campaign reporters present are true, yes, but not the truth the public needs. As we’ve all heard hundreds of times, truth is relative. And it’s up to journalists to decide which version to present to the public.
Everyone wants someone to be honest and tell the truth. This is when the concept of epistemic responsibility comes into play. As mentioned in the book, epistemic responsibility is using the right methodology to discover the truth. This is a quality that journalists should, or at least should try to obtain. After reading the article it states that campaigns are slow and falling behind, meaning that the reporters are falling behind as well. This is not showing epistemic responsibility. They are not gaining the right information and getting this important information out to the public. Journalists are not using the right strategic measures of keying in on the important aspects of the campaigns. They are focusing on more of the presentation aspect side of them, instead of what each representative is trying to achieve. Journalists are overlooking the important facts about the representative candidates, which are the important facts needing to get out to the public who wants to hear about them. In the article it states, “Journalists tend to mistake the part of the campaign that is exposed to their view — the candidate’s travel and speeches, television ads, public pronouncements of spokesmen and surrogates — for the entirety of the enterprise. They treat elections almost exclusively as an epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds whose primary tools are image-making and storytelling.” This is not proving their side of epistemic responsibility. They need to get the key important fact points that each candidate wants to achieve, not how they look when they say their wanted goals for the people. While journalists want and try to do their job of gaining the right facts truthfully and getting this out to be read by the public, they need to do so in a timely fashion, and not miss the appropriate strategies that are being used as stated within the article. While most say slow and steady wins the race, this isn’t the case here.
In Chapter One of "Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies," we are introduced to the concept of epistemic responsibility. According to philosopher Lorraine Code, this term refers to the "processes" we use in order to uncover the truth. In her New York Times article "Why Campaign Reporters Are Behind the Curve," journalist Sasha Issenberg laments that though she hoped reporting covering the 2008 election would "rise above superficial...reporting," she has come to realize she and her colleagues have missed "much of the story." In fact, Issenberg reveals that campaigns have "modernized" in such a way to prevent any one reporter from interpreting what's going on. Furthermore, she states that campaigns now have access to various statistics to diverse demographics, making it easier for them to shape strategies. Hearing such information was alarming to me as an America, because I had no idea that data such as my religious beliefs could be manipulated and used to target me as a voter. I'm disappointed that this material has not been brought to my attention sooner or to the extent I would expect. In my opinion, a journalist is not only responsible for covering candidates in an election, but disclosing their methodologies as well. By leaving out some of this information (as a result of being ignorant to its existence), a journalist is not telling the full story which is part of his or her epistemic responsibility. On another note, Issenburg writes that journalists often mistake politician's travels and advertisements as the "entirety of the enterprise" and thus miss out on some larger topics of conversation. Again, by failing to report these stories, journalists fall short of their responsibilities as a result of being sidetracked.
A journalists’ job centers upon his ability to find and present an accurate depiction of people, places, and things; his ‘epistemic responsibility’ is to present the truth as best as he understands it. In regards to modern political campaign reporting, the article presented today’s reporters as falling short of their responsibility. The author describes today’s reporting of political campaigns as “horse race reporting,” as reporters commonly struggle to report the latest results of the polls, as opposed to seeking to understand what is actually going on behind the polls and truly contributing to who the next president will be. While these reporters may be reporting on what is truth to their knowledge, as journalists it is important to be able to scope out the real story and make it public, so long as the means by which the material is gathered is ethical and no one gets hurt in the story being run. Moreover, in order to fulfill their epistemic responsibility, journalists cannot rely on second-hand sourcing that may paint a very different picture than what is actually happening. I know that the political landscape and other privacy issues can make truly fulfilling one’s utmost responsibility to the truth of the matter difficult, but nevertheless it is the job of a journalist.
Epistemic responsibility is defined in chapter 1 as the duty to recovery the truth or to seek the truth. In a journalistic sense that would refer to the journalist's duty to report the truth and to publish that within their stories. In regards to journalists who cover political campaigns, I do not believe that they fulfill their epistemic responsibility. I believe rather often pieces are infused with the politics themselves rather than facts or the ideas of a candidate. They commonly allow for the public relation specialists of the candidate to be their source of information or follow a campaigns press release as a source. As I have learned in my political communication class, that is exactly how campaigns control the issues and things published in the news. I understand that it is a difficult task to fulfill a journalists epistemic responsibility in these situations due to the extensive knowledge that is necessary to comprehend a lot of what is discussed by candidates. However, there is always room for journalists to grow and strive to become more educated on the topics that they focus on, rather than relying on second hand information to write their stories. Therefore they can check the information they are handed by campaign managers etc.
In an era of constant communication, numerous social media and sharing sites, humans leave little to the imagination or don’t get a chance to hide their dirty laundry before it’s found and hung to dry by someone else. In these instances, I believe journalists especially find it hard to maintain a level of epistemic responsibility when most people can find the ‘good story’ without them. I partly believe that the change in media coverage during campaigns have become to “drama-ridden” is due to the fact that they need to keep up with every commoner’s ability to find the dirt. I agree with many points made within the article, and believe the title “ Why Campaign Reporters Are Behind The Curve” should be changed to “How Campaign Reporters Can Keep Up With The Curve.” Journalists get the brunt of being “unmoral” not only because of the stories they print but because they still hold the ability to reach masses of people. In a world of instantaneous gratification, people want to read the shortest, most filled with highlights stories, and move onto the next. It is not only journalists’ responsibilities to sustain epistemic responsibilities but the readers as well; we are not only guilty of reading the stories, but sharing them in outrage with friends, family, or co-workers. In the end- a journalist is a human just like the rest of us, not an extra-terrestrial with different make-up, unfortunately for them their moral decisions are shown to the world on a daily basis, compared to the readers who may never have to show their moral dilemmas on a grandiose scale.
As defined by Borden, epistemic responsibility is not only a journalist’s responsibility for finding out the truth, but also for finding that truth in appropriate ways. Right off the bat, reading the article in the New York Times, it is quite obvious that journalists are not actually in fact finding the truth. In reality, they are choosing to fixate on which candidate is a more successful campaigner or better strategist, when what the public needs to know is who has “sounder ideas or is better prepared to govern.” So clearly by not providing the information, or the truth, the public needs to make an educated decision on who to vote on is violating one’s epistemic responsibility. In regards strictly to campaigns, journalists treat elections as battles to win the votes from the public, by using storytelling and image making. They focus mainly on what they see, such as speeches and television ads, instead of digging around and finding out details about a candidate. By doing this, it is almost a lazy approach at their job. A journalist’s job really is to find out the truth, and share it with the public, but also to do so in the appropriate ways. This is a rule they most certainly ignore and break. Time after time I have heard of things being stolen and classified documents being exposed, which is inappropriate and also illegal. If this isn’t slacking, and possibly failing in epistemic responsibility, I don’t know what is.
Epistemic responsibility can be described as engaging in acceptable policies in the search of truth. Most journalists strive to communicate the facts to the public. In most cases, the facts are what seem to be present in written publications. This can only be done by sharing with readers every piece of information journalists are aware of - but that is where the problem lies. If a journalist has only a portion of the overall material, his or her writing can only be truthful to an extent. When it comes to political campaigns, according to the article by Issenberg, “journalists remain unable to keep up with the machinations of modern campaigns.” This is problematic because a journalist cannot uphold his or her epistemic responsibility if facts are determined by new specific demographic and lifestyle markers that are being reported by campaign professionals in support of one candidate. In current journalism, the most “celebrity-like” candidate receives the most (and best) coverage, rather than the candidate that has “sounder ideas or is better prepared to govern.” I find what Romney exploited regarding current campaign coverage interesting. The idea that the press’s fascination with the carefully calculated results and deceptive pitches exceeds the actual ability to interpret the underlying methods makes it exceptionally difficult for journalists to relay all the details in an honest manner.
According to the textbook, Epistemic Responsibility suggests that we must take care to ensure that we are using appropriate procedures for finding out the truth. In this way, as journalists, our information will be accurate and relevant enough to send out to the public. This article explores how journalists are "behind the curve" when it comes to politics and how voter polling is scored. I believe that many journalists don't entirely understand the polling process and how data-mining and micro targeting work. Politics change on a day-to-day basis and it is difficult to keep up with but I think that journalists are not keeping up with their epistemic responsibility. I believe that if they are writing about politics, the information should be 100% accurate and therefore they need to be able to understand the polling data correctly. The public needs to be able to understand what is going on in the political world in order to be able to cast a vote to the best of their ability.
Epistemic responsibility is defined by Borden as not only a journalist’s responsibility for finding out the truth but for discovering that truth through appropriate methods. According to Issenburg’s article, journalists who cover political campaigns are fulfilling their epistemic responsibility by reporting what they see and refusing to use deceit to obtain information that isn’t legally obtainable (or even simply possible to find). This can be considered “appropriate.” But this is also dishonest reporting in a way because it is not giving the full facts to readers, and it is something I think is the fault of campaign culture, not the individual journalists. A quote that demonstrates this point is when Issenburg said “We may be covering the horse race with more bytes and airtime than ever before, but we’re looking at the wrong part of the track and don’t know how many legs are on a thoroughbred.” Journalists are struggling to keep up with political campaigning, but when the campaigns themselves become so focused on “strategic calculations” and “gamemenship,” the press (as susceptible to this as ordinary people) simply lacks the ability to decode the tactics underneath. Essentially, the press is reporting what they are seeing, and it is what they are seeing that has changed, not the way the press is reporting it. Actually, I think that in addition to campaign culture, journalistic culture is at fault for this as well, but in a different way. We all know journalism thrives on competition. A publication desperately trying to outdo rival publications is going to report whatever they think readers want to read and will comprehend, and they want to do this as fast as possible to beat the editor down the street. So in a sense, this mindset seems to encourage reporters to not go against the grain and report more thoroughly, but to report what they see on the surface and to do it quickly (at least when it comes to the “horserace” reporting ideology that accompanies journalism covering political campaigns). But this raises the question of whether that fault lays with the individual journalist themselves, the publication, or both: everyone who follows this principle of competition who then reports on campaign coverage.
I believe that journalism involving political affairs is tricky due to the nature of politics. Both journalism and politics are similar in that they strive to make positive changes in our society. They differ because the aim of journalism is to spread knowledge of current events so that the masses are well informed and the aim of politics is to persuade a majority of the masses to support decisions on law-making and government. That difference can sometimes pit journalism and politics against one another because as journalism strives to continually educate, in many cases that education may be counter-productive to a politicians personal agenda. As the article mentions, modernized campaign strategists are "four steps ahead" and "have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding what moves votes." With this in mind, it seems apparent that there is a vast element of politics being somewhat of a game where tactical move-making is more important than straight-forward discussion. Epistemic responsibility is becoming lost because though journalists may be doing their best to report on the truth they are witnessing, they can only witness really what is being strategically distributed to them by political figures for the sake of promoting their own agenda. In this respect, the criticism of journalists not being able to fulfill epistemic responsibility is skewed. They may technically not be actually fulfilling it but in some ways they physically cannot. With ethics, we aim to guide our actions toward a more productive light, so the awareness of this complicated inability to fulfill epistemic responsibility should promote journalists to work harder at finding ways to more appropriately cover campaigns and not just spew the personal agenda of political forces. I believe with that mindset with the results it could possibly provide would be fulfilling epistemic responsibility,
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