In the Foxhole

The President has recently kicked up some controversy regarding his treatment of Fox news. The administration stated that it views the network as "not a news network," and has tried to exclude it from interviews. Quite a change from the previous administration (but isn't that Obama's platform?)

Let's get some bias up on the table: I don't like Fox news, and I haven't for almost a decade-- well before I got into journalism myself. In that time my bias has been cemented by meeting the people who avidly consume their product and finding that those people and I have little ideology in common.

So when I heard that the admin had called them "an arm of the GOP" I laughed first-- and then I cringed.

I at least appreciate the transparency of the White House in their handling of the situation. The issue is not a new one, but their approach is. The boldness of their actions has made a place to debate the relationship between the government and the media and people have begun to ask questions that we should have been asking for years.

How much control should the administration have over who does and does not have access?

Should, and could, we define some ethical standards for the admin/media relationship?

How slanted can a news outlet become before it gets called on the carpet for it?

I've heard some people argue that this is a free speech issue, but I disagree. The admin is not attempting to say what Fox can or can't publish; they're saying they don't like what is being published. Access isn't a constitutional right. It falls more into ethics.

Despite my own personal bias against Fox news, I have an ethical issue with the White House trying to exclude them. Yes, I agree with the admin that they are biased, but to me it's an obvious trait of the outlet. Maybe I've just known that they're right-leaning for long enough that it seems obvious, but I picked up on it when I was 13 or 14 so I bet most people pick up on it too.

Plus, people who lean the same way will seek out news organizations that give them the kind of coverage they want. It's the exact reason why I don't pay attention to Fox. These are the people that Obama needs to be reaching out to right now, the people that are already weary or disapproving of him. It could be a wedge between him and many people, one I don't think he should keep pounding on.

That said, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a news organization were as vociferous in favor of Obama as Fox is against him. I doubt they would have made it this long without someone making a fuss--as they should.

Ideally, I feel that this situation should never have come up. The media does need to remain skeptical, especially with regards to the government. It is the function of the media to be the watchdog, the whistle blower, the guardian of democracy. But it absolutely must be accurate, fair, and consistent.

Is Fox fair? It depends on how you look at it. They believe that no other news outlet is critical enough of the current admin, so they appear to be trying to make up for what they claim is an imbalance in the field. Their news chief described it as "The Alamo."

I take issue with that. I believe that a news organization is responsible unto itself to be fair, and to call out other networks when they are not-- not to take is as a duty to make up for everyone else. We, the public, are at fault for not demanding unbiased journalism. For supporting it, in fact. Perhaps this controversy will lead to a closer examination of the way Fox does business, though I doubt it will change it.

Whatever the outcome, I'm curious to see where this leads; not only during this administration but in future ones as well. Will the public be more aware of media bias? Will this sensitize the media and the public to the way that admins quietly blacklist news outlets? Will it be possible for them to do so in the future, even subtly, without getting attention and criticism for it? I think this will largely depend on the outcome of this situation.

We may be setting a precedent here, so we need to be sure it's one we want to continue to follow.

Blog about Blogging

The Coconut Grove Grapevine blog is devoted to keeping the Coconut Grove community up to date on happenings, community events, etc. It combines facts with opinions, and some of the entries are much like press releases. 

The reads more like an opinion column more than a news article, with few in-article links. It does have sidebars of links to past blogs. News sources are generally not cited.

One thing that I didn't really like about this particular blog was that it was easy to mistake advertising for content. There is a sidebar of "Quicklinks," that one would expect to be to other articles but actually link to paid advertisers. The links to other news sources and community resources is much farther down the page, after a number of ads and an extensive list of other local blogs. 

As a whole, though, this blog is an interesting example of how citizens experience their community in the 21st century. The town square used to be the place to go to meet fellow community members, hear about upcoming events or how past events turned out. This mode changed after our society moved it's home base to the suburbs. Now individual neighborhoods may have their own forums of interaction, but the larger community generally doesn't have anything resembling a town square or city center. This, I think, is the modern replacement. 

Ethics

The trend that I find the most troubling in the field today is the degradation of news quality because news organizations are scrambling to beat each other to post stories-- to get the scoop has become a 24-hour obsession instead of a 5:00 deadline. It seems that news organizations are more interested in quantity and timing than overall quality.

(Although perhaps Capp's Good Enough Tech idea probably works with news articles as well-- they aren't as great as they used to be, but I can follow them on Twitter from my phone, so they're good enough.)

This 24-hour feeding frenzy that technology has enabled seems to have weakened our sense of ethics as well.

I have to wonder if having a deadline be as soon as possible, all the time, makes people forget to step back and look at a bigger picture. How does tweeting from a funeral while it's in session fit into the larger picture of news coverage?

It's the fastest for keeping people up to date.

It breaks the events down into the bite-sized pieces most people seem to prefer these days.

Perhaps it even makes an event more immediate, making a reader feel more connected to a story, maybe humanizing the situation more.

And in this case it's ridiculously insensitive and self-serving.

The media can be invasive enough when it's covering an important issue. There are times when it serves the greater good to go up to a family in mourning and ask the hard questions. But this was a situation where no public good came from up to the minute updates. It just fed consumer voyeurism and benefitted the paper. It was insensitive to the family to make the intimacies of their tragedy into an online spectacle.

Just because a technology is available doesn't mean we should use it whenever we can. There are situations where updating from Twitter could be really great for the public-- like in sports, for example. But issues like funerals need to be handled with more delicacy. General readers could have waited the three or four hours until the reporter could get to a Starbucks, pound out an article and upload it.

Ethics continually evolve. We need to ensure that they evolve as quickly as our technology does. News organizations need to step back and continually weigh the advantages of technology against their potential harms.

Just because you can post it, doesn't mean you should.