The
issue of what journalism is today and whether traditional journalists
have any justification in their attacks on bloggers, resulted in
researching an extensive amount of material and necessitated
separating this article into two parts.
The battle lines between
journalists and bloggers had been drawn years ago, and most of the
salvos have been fired by journalists. On February 17th
2016, Grant LaFleche, a reporter with The Standard, a
Postmedia owned newspaper in St. Catharines, Ontario, presented an
article 'Why do you need a community newspaper' in their
opinion column. Throughout this self-aggrandizing, opinion piece
LaFleche raises what he calls his “craft” to new heights, and
then drops this: “Blogging gives anyone with an Internet connection
a voice. However, with only a few exceptions, blogging isn't
journalism. Bloggers aren't doing interviews or poring over
government and scientific reports, they aren't doing the kind of
investigative work journalists do every day.”
It appears now 'journalist'
LaFleche has found a way to delineate the line between journalists
and bloggers, with a chorus of ra-ras from his peers as background
music. Yet the truth is something these backslappers prefer not to
see. On February 18th 2016, Neil Macdonald of CBC News
wrote an article titled 'The Rebel and the NDP, why not to
provoke Ezra Levant', with a by-line, “Thanks Rachel Notley,
for helping define what journalists are, or maybe aren't?” After
February 18th Neil Macdonald maybe sits alone at the local
journo-watering hole.
This article opens up with,
“Journalists entertain all sorts of self-aggrandizing notions about
what we do. The big one is that we are a profession, which we pretty
clearly are not. We don't even really qualify as a trade.
Professions generally have minimum qualifications. Not a journalist.
Journalists don't even have to finish high school.” Now if a
blogger had said this he or she would have UNIFOR and the whole
chorus line attack with threats of lawsuits and demands for
withdrawal with apologies, but this is Neil Macdonald.
Who is Neil Macdonald? Macdonald
is a senior correspondent for CBC News currently based in Ottawa.
Prior to that he was CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years, and
before that he spent 5 years reporting from the Middle East. He
often presents articles with courage and hard facts rather than a
'yes master' attitude.
He goes on to say, “If lawyers or
doctors or pharmacists breach the clear ethical rules governing them,
they can be formally charged and punished by their peers. But
regulating journalism? Out of the question, for the sake of
democracy itself, my peers would argue. There are no national
journalistic standards and no way to enforce them if they existed.”
Newspapers, and the journalists who
write for them, are facing a new world and it's not only because of
what Neil Macdonald has raised in his article. The general public is
becoming harder to fool. The Internet has provided many more sources
of information which too often expose the lacking ethics and
integrity of published stories in traditional press, or those
presented on television.
At the same time traditional media
faces a populace that demands ease of access to information without
limitation on choice. The Canadian Daily Newspaper Circulation
report provided figures for a total weekly circulation for 2009 at
36,987,591 with that total dropping to 31,765,434 in 2014. In
response to the decline in sales of newspapers, Postmedia, a giant in
the newspaper business, cut 90 jobs, combining newsrooms in
Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.
In 2013 La Presse launched its
unique tablet edition, La Presse+, and in January 2016 it was the
first major daily newspaper in the world to end weekday print
editions. Guy Crevier, publisher of La Presse has said, “This
project was a solution to transform our declining business into a
growing one. La Presse+ has known constant substantial growth for
almost three years now, while most traditional press is declining”
(La Presse successful shift away from print, Marianne
Bouchart, 17 February 2016 on GEN-GLOBAL EDITORS NETWORK). Tablet
users had accepted La Presse+ well, providing a daily circulation at
an average of 250,000; prior peaks in its long 131 year history were
in 1971 with 221,250 copies, and later in 2009 with 207,769 copies.
The decision to end daily print editions was simple logic.
Traditional press has found the
ground beneath its feet being pulled out from under it, and unless it
finds a way to float, to hover through the limitless boundaries of
the Internet, it will disappear altogether. Big city newspapers can
combine newsrooms, cut staffing and take other measures to streamline
costs, but not the smaller ones. The Guelph Mercury was
facing this encroaching modern world and had no choice but to stop
the presses and shut its doors. Started in 1854, it was one of the
country's oldest newspapers, but age cannot stand against the tide of
change and survive without the willingness to adapt.
Yet it is not only traditional
press that face huge challenges in the future. Magazines are feeling
equal pressure regardless of how glossy or stylish they may be. Some
try and send out free subscriptions to a select number of the public,
in the hope this fire sale attitude works. Others offer large
incentives for online subscribers, which normally is more attractive.
Canada Post also has felt the growing pressure of the digital world.
Deepak Chopra, its President & CEO, opened their Annual Report
of 2014 with his president's message, a warning in many ways. He
said, “The unprecedented volume decline of lettermail places
enormous pressures on our finances.” Like any large
corporation, Canada Post hit its workers first in its attempt at
streamlining, setting up a system of community mailboxes and cutting
out door-to-door deliveries. Executives rarely feel the pinch.
The Canadian Internet Registration
Authority Factbook for 2014 states, “Canada continues to be
one of the most wired countries in the world with nearly 87 percent
of Canadian households connected to the Internet. Canada ranks 16th
globally in terms of Internet penetration in 2013. This is up from
80 percent in 2010. Among its G8 counterparts, Canada ranks second
in Internet penetration behind the UK.”
How much more proof is needed that
the public's demand for information and its availability is changing
alongside with the methods of communication? Yet journalists still
choose to denigrate bloggers with labels, herding all bloggers into
one corral. One of the old boys of journalism, Morely Safer, had
said that he would trust citizen journalists as much as citizen
surgeons. Safer had no formal training in journalism, in fact he
only briefly attended the University of Western Ontario. Safer's
experience is exactly that – experience, gathered through years of
reporting and learning 'on the go'. No one can deny the value and
richness of his work, yet that does not provide the right to attack
others without foundation.
Tim Knight, another ol' boy who
wrote an article for Huffington Post titled Watching the
Watchdog: Why Citizen Bloggers Aren't Journalists. He
opens his article with, “Seems I've suddenly become a journalism
guru to whom young people with stars in their eyes and All The
President's Men in their future's flock for wisdom.” Can anyone
read these words and keep a straight face, other than Tim Knight?
Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editor
of The Intercept is a journalist, a constitutional lawyer and
an author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and
law. His two co-founding editors are Laura Poitras, a filmmaker,
journalist and artist, and Jeremy Seahill, who is an investigative
reporter and war correspondent. On January 28th 2015 The
Intercept published an article by Glenn Greenwald titled
The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists. Even
though The Intercept deals predominately with socio-political
issues relevant to the US, the commentary in this article easily
transcends any border or demarcation lines.
Greenwald comments on how “Prior
to the advent of blogs, establishment journalists were largely immunised even from hearing criticisms.” Can this in any way
explain the motivation behind the vitriolic sentiment of traditional
journalists towards bloggers?
Here in Canada that sentiment is
somewhat more passive, sprinkled with rose-coloured water.
Traditional journalists attempt to sell the virtues of journalism
opposed to what bloggers lack in their posts. After all 'real'
journalists do research, pore over government and scientific reports,
and conduct interviews to present insightful and truthful reports.
At the same time bloggers in Canada have rarely attacked or even
commented on traditional journalists, until now.
In his article Glenn Greenwald
continues, “What made the indignity so much worse was that the
attacks came from people these journalists regard as nobodies: just
average people, non-journalists, sometimes even anonymous ones. What
right did they have even to form an opinion, let alone express one?
As NBC News star Brian Williams revealingly put it in 2007:
“You're going to be up against
people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life,
developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I'm up
against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in two years.”
Whether it is the adulatory praise
of The Standard's Grant LaFleche for his 'craft', or the full
frontal mustard gas attack of NBC's Brian Williams, the delusions
continue. The American Journalism Review, August/September 2005
Feature Journalism's Backseat Drivers, opens with “These are
beleaguered times for news organisations. As if their problems with
rampant ethical lapses and declining readership and viewership aren't
enough, their competence and motives are being challenged by
outsiders with the gall to call them out before a global audience.
Journalists are in the hot seat, their feet held to the flames by
citizen bloggers who believe mainstream media are no more trustworthy
than the politicians and corporations they cover, that journalists
themselves have become too lazy, too cloistered, too self-righteous
to be the watchdogs they once were. Or even to recognise what's
news.”
Ethics and trust are two simple
concepts traditional journalists have lost touch with, and the
general public can no longer be fooled as easily as these watchdogs
of the past think. Scandals have ripped through what Grant LaFleche
call his 'craft'. Brian Williams faced the moment of truth regarding
his reporting of a helicopter flight and whether it was fired on, or
by who. As a star of NBC News, Brian Williams found forgiveness for
his misreporting and he continues to smack the airwaves. In Canada
Evan Solomon, a former star of the CBC, found that providing
self-serving guests for his on-air interviews was seen as less that
ethical. In this case Solomon's equation of news coupled with
financial profit hit the scandal sheets. Yet once again fame and
connections far outlasted the potential of consequence for such
breaches of ethics. The Toronto Star had one of its
heavyweight reporters Antonia Zerbisias caught publishing an article
where comments made by her were not entirely true. Zerbisias later
admitted that she did not verify her information prior to publishing.
Every new journalism student has two major rules drummed into them
from almost the first lesson: verify your source and verify your
facts.
True, no journalist, whether it be
Morely Safer, Tim Knight, Brian Williams or even Grant Lafleche, had
ever said that bloggers had no right to blog. If they had then they
would have to face off against Article 19. “Article 19 is
an international human rights organisation, founded in 1986, which
defends and promotes freedom of expression and freedom of information
worldwide. It takes its mandate from the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which guarantees the right to freedom of expression and
information” (The Right to Blog, Policy Brief 2013,
Article 19).
In their Policy Brief, The Right
to Blog, Article 19 makes two major and extremely challenging
statements. The first is from the brief's Executive Summary: “Where
the printed press and broadcast media were once the main sources of
information, the Internet has made it possible for any person to
publish ideas, information and opinions to the entire world. In
particular, blogging and social media now rival newspapers and
television as dominant sources of news and information.” Then
Article 19 argues that it is no longer appropriate to define
journalism and journalists by reference to some recognised body of
training, or affiliation with a news entity or professional body.
Dr. Axel Bruns, a senior lecturer
in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of
Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and author of several books,
presented a paper, News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism. In it he delves into the history of
mainstream journalism, bringing forth concepts of gatekeeping and
gatewatching to explain the flow of news, from the input stage where
information was to be considered as being newsworthy or relevant,
through to the output stage as fully formed news reports.
Gatewatching as described by Dr. Bruns requires the ability to
retrieve and search information conducted on a decentralised and
crowdsourced basis.
As intellectual theories both the
gatekeeping and gatewatching concepts neatly describe the evolution
of the news industry, though non-mainstream journalism, blogging, or
citizen journalism, whatever you wish to call it, has resulted from a
greater need. Dr. Axel Bruns finishes his paper with this thought:
“For mainstream journalists, in current industry practice claims to
professionalism are already highly problematic: levels of
journalistic training and induction to professional ethos and ethics
vary widely across and within individual news organisations, and
often depend more on the process of a journalist's socialisation into
the work environment than on their formal professional education.
Indeed, the very term 'journalist' has been broadened to include not
only core news professionals, but also commentators, hosts, and a
variety of other media personalities; as news blogger and journalism
scholar Glenn Reynolds has put it, 'correspondent' now often simply
has a meaning of “well-paid microphone holder with good hair”
(Weblogs and Journalism: Back to the Future, Glen Harlan Reynolds,
2003). As we noted earlier, at this point in the early
information age, the mainstream journalistic industry overall may be
experiencing a gradual decline which is at least in part of their own
making and due to a slippage in professional standards.”
Whether one pays attention to this
comment by Dr. Axel Bruns, or those made by Glenn Greenwald, a single
major point remains clear. True, the age of the Internet as a whole
has found profound impact on mainstream journalism, and no one can
change what is becoming a new reality. Yet that alone is not the
sole reason for journalists to be concerned over. In the end one
question based in antiquity resounds – quis custodiet ipsos
custodes, 'who watches the watchers'? Today the answer is
simple, and that is the reason why mainstream journalists, from media
stars to little wannabes, attack.
Governments and big businesses have
found a way to develop a symbiotic relationship with mainstream
media. Now that relationship has been shaken by individuals who do
not necessarily have a desire to form alliances and in fact are
considered to be insignificant compared to the traditional
media organisations. Still journalists fear these individuals and
look for anything to discredit their desire to question the status
quo.
Whether it be Glenn Greenwald and
the Intercept, or a respected journalist like Neil Macdonald,
serious questions are being raised regarding the direction mainstream
journalism has taken. Professionalism, it seems, is a concept which
varies from one individual to the next. After all there is no real
governing body to administer a code of conduct, and as Neil Macdonald
said, no way to really enforce one if such a thing existed. Each
media organisation has the wealth to retain legal storm troopers who
are called into action if on the rare occasion one of their
journalists brushes against issues of law; otherwise it has been
business as usual for decades.
These egos are now facing change in
the guise of bloggers and they don't like it. Unlike mainstream
journalists bloggers have no alliances to appease, no giant salaries
to be concerned about, they are only interested in the information to
be made public. Each blogger has his or her own motivation for doing
what they do, yet each shares a commonality and each wears the
criticisms.
The battle lines were drawn out of
egotism and fear of being challenged, of being held accountable for
every word published or aired, and worse, for what was censored from
the public. It is the nature of humanity to change, to evolve, and
there is no stopping it. Instead of fearing this evolution
journalists should look at re-evaluating what they are, and how they
serve the public-at-large. Independent bloggers are not going
anywhere, they will gradually reach greater numbers of readers
because of their independence. Now one could ask whether there can
be room at the table for both the mainstream journalist and the
independent blogger building a symbiotic relationship.