Apply the concept of epistemic responsibility to campaign coverage as described below. Discuss whether you believe that journalists covering the Trayvon Martin case fulfilled their epistemic responsibility. Explain why or why not. Your response is due Monday, Sept. 2, by 4 p.m. (No exceptions, ever.)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/14/zimmerman-trayvon-martin-nbc-news-column-rieder/2516251/?
utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNiD-XhWx7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEfewosBl0
http://dailycurrant.com/2013/07/15/ho-lee-fuk-sues-tv-station-for-defamation/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/2013/08/09/186943929/s-dakota-indian-foster-care-1-investigative-storytelling-gone-awry
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/on-syrian-weapons-and-mayoral-politics-unnamed-sources-raise-criticism/?hp
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunday, August 25, 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:
Regardless of my personal views on the Trayvon Martin case, I believe the journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility. Much like in The Paper, they reported accurately with the information available to them at the time -- to a point. The only truly reliable sources were Zimmerman and Martin, and since only Zimmerman could give testimony, the information is skewed either way. After a certain point, I think there is so much speculation based on circumstances, personalities and stereotypes. I think in deciding Zimmerman's guilt, people had their minds made up one way or another. It could have been self-defense. It could have been a horrible instance of racial injustice. You just don't know. And in this case, I think the uncertainty fed the fire, and made room for more speculation. The reporters took some of Zimmerman's statements out of context (although they were later corrected) and they may not have researched thoroughly all procedures for truth-finding. This goes against epistemic responsibility. It appears that they fed on speculation, wanting to paint a more concrete hero and villain.
NBC took Zimmerman's comments out of context, fueling the fire of racial profiling suspicions. Someone had to make the conscious decision to edit the comment, knowingly failing to fulfill the journalistic duty of pure, truthful sourcing. The released information was ultimately misleading, so I do not think NBC fulfilled their epistemic responsibility. The ABC police surveillance video coverage exemplifies the issue of timeliness discussed in chapter one. They wanted to beat out their competition by being the first to report the apparent findings in the video, but should they have waited? After all, if "truthfulness" means reporting information to the best of one's knowledge at the time, then ABC was not necessarily untruthful. Regardless, I do not think they should have been so confident in reporting evidence, or a lack thereof, in a case fueled by speculation. The pressure to uniquely deliver ongoing coverage of the Zimmerman trial contributed to its chaos. Throughout the case, journalists sought ways to mold information into a readable story with two clear sides, misleading the public and failing to fulfill epistemic responsibility.
It is obvious that journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility in the case of George Zimmerman. It is the role of journalists to use facts to make sense of the world. In this case, facts were often abandoned for a more “obvious” storyline— the kind that is straightforward and that anyone can piece together.
“NBC News edited Zimmerman's comments during a phone call to inaccurately suggest that he volunteered that Trayvon seemed suspicious because he was black.” “ABC News broadcast a story reporting that a police surveillance video showed no evidence that Zimmerman suffered abrasions or bled during the confrontation with Trayvon.” First, journalists report the “saucy story.” Or to put it another way: the false story. Then they retract their “report” and correct it, effectively taking the sauce right out of the story. But the damage has been done and the saucy story imbedded deep in the American subconscious: black, defenseless teenager murdered by racist, power-hungry white man. It didn’t matter what really happened at this point, only what (to the American public) had obviously happened. Applying the concept of groupthink to the American media in this situation really shows how irresponsible (and powerful) said media is. So no, journalists did not give the facts to the public. They gave the story to the public, and in this way, failed magnificently at fulfilling their epistemic responsibility.
I feel that journalists covering the Trayvon Martin case did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility. Instead of providing the public with the complexity and legality of the case, they presented a clear victim and a clear bad guy. According to the law, as well as according to a jury, George Zimmerman was innocent. However, in the public eye and in the media, which I think is an even harsher place than a courtroom, he was the guilty bully who killed a 17 year old African American. Although my personal beliefs are more inline with the media's beliefs, it's still important to remember legally he is innocent. The book gives us a clear example that relates a lot to the Trayvon Martin case. The press in the film The Paper tries going with the easy route of blaming young black kids with the murders of two successful Wall Street workers. Although the roles of the two races are flipped, it still shows that it is easier for the media to use biases of race to tell stories rather than just telling the truths of the story and letting the public decide. For the press, as I said before, it's easier to have the bad guys and the good guys. They choose who will portray the roles early on in their reporting and run with it through most of the coverage. Such as NBC and ABC broadcasting edited video and audio to make Zimmerman seem like more of the bad guy. I think Zimmerman's lawyer said it best that the press "took a story, that was fed to them and ran with it, and ran right over him (Zimmerman)."
In cases similar to the Martin/Zimmerman trial, journalists have to be wary of the "nuances and subtleties and shades of gray." While those shades and, ultimately, the narratives of the innocent v. guilty parties do create the more "delicious" and human stories, they also provide opportunity for misinformation. The best stories and the best writing come from the details gained from thorough and well-thought out reporting; but without certainty that those details stem from truth, they become more decorative and their efficacy is limited.
In the Borden reading, the hunt for the "cop quote," really shows the need for a story to be anchored by something closer to fact. In theory, those in law enforcement are the ones who will provide the insight that's less emotional and more clinical. That's the skeleton of your piece that can be humanized with details from other sources that are properly attributed to ensure that the known and investigative information are separately reported entities.
For a good story to run (and I'm talking good in terms of ethics and flavor) the official confirmation of fact serves as an anchor. If such information is provided, the narratives of the archetypal characters can't override those facts and the truth, balancing precariously between the he saids and she saids has a fighting chance of coming out.
An overwhelming majority of journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility in this case. Both NBC and ABC news purposefully left out information that would have given greater (much needed) context to this story. Where they totally disregarded information they already had (such as the editing of the police phone call) or just decided to run the story with the minimal facts they had, it's bad journalism. Like the beginning of the column reads, this is a murky story. There are lots of facts and details and only two people are really know everything. But because you need to piece everything together it takes time. I understand reports that want a good story, and the easy way to report a "juicy" story is portray an obvious good and bad guy. However, the best stories take time and are not easy to write and report.
I believe that journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. The role of journalists is to gather information from multiple sources and points of view in order to report the truth of an event. With regard to Zimmerman, the media portrayed him as the villain because it made a better or more “delicious story.” NBC News edited a comment made by Zimmerman during a phone call, implying that he viewed Martin as suspicious due to his race while ABC News broadcast a story that the police surveillance video showed Zimmerman with no visible injuries from the confrontation with Martin. Although, the networks apologized for the false reports, the impact said reports had on the public were already set in stone. The new found truths of the incident fell on deaf ears to the American public for it was now seen as a wannabe - cop white male killed an innocent black youth.
Due to the media’s influence with the case, the State Attorney charged Zimmerman with second degree murder. Thus, proving that journalists did not meet their epistemic responsibility because they set the stage for the trial without looking at the facts, but rather what would make a better story. Regardless of the outcome of the trial, I disagree with the media’s handling of the case. What may have seemed like a juicy story, turned out to be the linchpin in a domino effect, which is still unfolding among the American public, the families directly involved, and the judicial system.
Like everyone else who has posted in the class, I too believe journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility with regards to the Trayvon Martin case. I believe journalists and other media outlets wanted to appeal to a larger audience, and in the process they created a more stereotypical story. When the shooting first occurred, Trayvon was instantly viewed as the helpless victim while Zimmerman was the guilty suspect. To enhance the story, the press released photos of the two men clearly distinguishing who played which role. For the people, the case was already closed. However, not all the details of the incident were reported. If the people were not getting all the facts, how is it safe to say Zimmerman was guilty? Although I have personal views on the matter, I think it is important that the whole truth is released unless journalists want less people to trust what they report. Alicia Clark, journalists should not be right for just one day.
Much of the reactions and stories I heard when the Zimmerman case was still going on seemed to stem from assumptions, and they all sounded very self-victimizing. I remember hearing people complain that the country was no longer free, and that we should get ready to live in a fascist state. It made me stray the whole case, because a lot of those people were hoping for a guilty verdict simply because the media had painted Zimmerman into a villain. The message that I got was that it was impossible for this man to justify killing Trayvon. And based off the reactions I saw, it did seem inconceivable to most people.
Even when the guilty verdict came in, people did not accept it. Instead of having faith in the legal system, people claimed it was flawed. I highly doubt the Facebook ranters knew as much as the jury in the case.
The media made people very selfish, and I believe in that they failed their epistemic responsibility. I felt as though this was another token hate crime that only got to such a state because journalists painted it that way. The USA Today article is right, this story was a good one. But now a man, who did nothing wrong in the eyes of the law, has to watch over his shoulder for the rest of his life because the story was "too delicious."
Facts were forgotten, and tampered with (Thanks NBC!) Many people neglected to listen to the full phone calls, and opted for five minute news segments instead. This isn't about the liberal media, or any actual hate crime. It's about journalists playing with the public's emotions, even if their only intention was selling the paper. In that, I believed they had failed.
The reporters covering the Zimmerman trial failed, hands down, in their epistemic responsibilities by pursuing the "good story" rather than the true one. It was a complicated case that dealt with multiple hot issues, like gun rights and racial profiling. However, the Hollywood version with it's clear forces of good and evil, regardless of the side you 'rooted' for, is what the media decided to present.
Whether this is a result of lazy reporting or unethical reporting, or a combination of both, needs to be addressed. As mentioned in the article, it not only does the public a disservice to run a narrative because its "much easier for readers and viewers to relate to."
The journalists did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility because they completely misinformed the public on a very complicated story. It is the job of the media to inform the public in a relatively objective manner with all of the facts in place. These journalists didn't include all of the facts and parts of the Zimmerman phone conversation. My opinions aside, they made the story more "black and white" with racial profiling and blatant murder, than how complex the story truly was.
I feel that the journalists that were talked about in this article did not fulfill their epistemic responsibility, while covering the Trayvon Martin story.It is a journalists they are expected to meet "standards of intellectual achievement over and above those expected of persons simply as persons according to the text. NBC in my opinion, failed to do such actions during their time covering Martin's case. Edited Zimmerman"s comments to suggest him to be a racist leads the journalists to look bias. This bias goes against the fundamentals of what journalism entitles. The example of ABC airing video coverage and writing a story not matching up made the network come off as untrustworthy, thus goes against the act of truthfulness. I feel that it is a journalist's job to ensure that what they put out as news to be 100 percent factual. Otherwise it makes it hard to believe what you read. There are rules and codes that are to be followed when reporting the news they were not always practiced in covering the Trayvon Martin Case.
The journalists who initially covered the Trayvon Martin case did not satisfy their epistemic responsibility. The way that the simplified story escalated the racial tensions between Zimmerman and Martin gave the public a skewed version of the factual situation that was later outed in the publicized trial. I think journalism should be about presenting the public with the closest to the unbiased truth rather than creating a media sensation around a story that is slanted from the truth. Unfortunately I think stories that start out slanted never fully recover regardless of reprints or corrections. I also think that it is the public's responsibility to keep the media in check, and that too many of us don't educate or inform ourselves enough to do so. Regardless the journalists did not uphold their epistemic responsibility.
I loved the USA Today piece - and I especially loved the endnote. I remember the first days of the Duke rape case. I totally believed it. I played lacrosse for four years, I knew the depths of douchieness that lacrosse players were capable of, the fratboyish, uninhibited freedom to act in any way they wanted that came along with being a more often than not wealthy, niche athlete. The story fit so perfectly. A bunch of jerks from what tends to be the most entitled, Whitey Corngood bracket of college athletics committed the unthinkable. It was only a matter of time, right? Turns out it was all bullcrap, almost every bit of it. People lost their jobs, though, and the entire academic community turned on their innocent, if dickish, lacrosse players. But the story worked so well - it was so easy to follow, so easy to believe, so exactly what everyone was expecting, eventually to happen. Zimmerman too. But hey, epistemic responsibility is out the window at news networks. They're entertainment channels. Why does MSNBC have Al Sharpton on their payroll? The guy who blew up our state with his race baiting and blatant lying during the Tawana Brawley case? Why does Fox News host Hannity? These are channels that use their reporting to back up their main personalitys' rationale. You want good reporting go to the BBC, or someplace without an iron in the fire - they're just looking to do their job, not create narratives that fit in with their mission statements and will for years to come.
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