In defense of journalism ethics
I sent the following out with my Slate.com internship application. I love Slate, as you might have realized, so I can only hope this is the beginning of more to come.
Befitting (or appealing) as another McCain ethics controversy might be, there is not much defensible about The New York Times’ fiery report, “For McCain, Self Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risks.” The article, which has received over 2,300 comments since its publication, has ignited a significant ethics debate of its own: To what degree did the Times overstep its boundaries as an objective voice to deliver what many view as hearsay and speculation?
Slate’s Jack Shafer, at least, would argue that the newspaper committed no such encroachment. In “McCain’s Smoking Blonde: In Defense of the New York Times’ Takedown,” he partially dismisses the “hooey” of the report’s accusations, preferring to focus on the article’s more historical and empirical criticisms of the senator’s questionable ethics record.
While there is some merit to Shafer’s arguments, he certainly understates the Times’ misconduct. In fact, to label any part of McCain’s “takedown” – if one can call it that – a success of investigative journalism is to ignore the newspaper’s plethora of ethical breaches. As Press Think creator and NYU professor Jay Rosen articulated in his blog, the article relies wholly on piecemeal anecdotes contributed by some of McCain’s closest advisers and co-workers. In other words, there’s not much substantial for Shafer to defend.
Most disturbing in Shafer’s remarks is his omission of the Times’ decision-making process, a frenzy during which even executive editor Bill Keller admitted the article lacked empirical support. According to The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman, Keller informed the four primary reporters in December that they had insufficiently refuted McCain’s on-the-record denials of his involvement with Iseman. Keller instead believed that “the reporters needed more than the circumstantial evidence they had assembled to prove the case.” But while the article was certainly retooled – first appearing in print in the Times’ “The Long Run” series, then as the investigative report – the evidence supporting it was still largely circumstantial.
Indeed, Shafer rebukes this criticism (not to mention his colleague Anne Applebaum’s blog), noting that, “the Times doesn’t have to produce photographic evidence of the hot dog meeting the bun to cast suspicion upon the McCain-Iseman intimacies.”
But Shafer is only partly correct. It is often true that the suspicion is the news, that the absence of certainty reinforces the public’s need to know. For those stories, Shafer would agree, anecdotal evidence is doubtlessly satiating. But what was the real intent of the Times article: To inform readers of McCain’s troublesome and porous ethics record or draw a conclusion about the Arizona senator’s intimacies? Was McCain’s dealings with lobbyists the news, or was it his potential relationship with a female lobbyist that deserved premier billing? The headline perhaps is our clue; undeniably subjective, it reeks more of moral judgment than ethical scrutiny. That the Times still found the piece fit to print – especially after it endorsed him in January – is indeed an ironic twist of fate.
Undeniably, Shafer is correct in that there were a number of undisputed points in the Times’ report, most notably those that depicted the senator as inconsistent. This, at least, formed the lead in The Washington Post’s more warmly received version of the story, which left the details of secret sexual rendezvous and impassioned private politics for readers to surmise.
But the problem, despite Shafer, isn’t that “the imperfect Times article doesn’t expose a raging blaze.” It’s that the Times article tried to set that blaze by overtly insinuating what could not be supported by hard fact, the consequence of which has been an unexpected maelstrom of condemnation and concern. And that reaction is rightfully deserved: It is not a newspaper’s job to disseminate uncorroborated myth, regardless of whether those potentialities originate from close advisers’ mouths. Newspapers present information so readers may form their own conclusions; the story ought to speak for itself, as Keller would agree. A defense of anything less would thus be as uncouth as the Times’ report.
