When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain.

Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists against their competition by spawning fresh, potentially exclusive, stories to go on their websites or into their newspapers.

• Journalists could argue that they provide a public service.

  Probably, but:

  • That doesn’t necessarily cancel out their engaging in business-against-business intelligence work.

  • Couldn’t the businesses that journalists investigate also argue, under the dominant ideology in this country, that they provide a public service by offering goods in the marketplace? If so, do they contribute better public services than do journalists?

• Journalists could argue that, if the corporation is clearly harming the public, then the journalist has a stronger moral claim to investigate them.

  But, journalists can’t know about the corporation’s harm until after their investigation. Their investigation could demonstrate that the reporter’s hunch was incorrect, in which case we would have to go back to whose public service was greater.

Does it matter whether journalists are considered corporate spies?

If journalists coordinated with law enforcement before investigating private businesses (given that we rely on the government to watch over business otherwise), thereby working on behalf of a public agency, would their work stop being corporate espionage? [1]

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Note also the irony in the message at the bottom of the video window: “Did you know? Viewers like you are our largest single source of support.”

(Thanks to Bob Moser for the link.)

Consider (what I think is) the article’s conclusion:

Having failed to persuade President Obama to scrap a proposed tax on high-cost health insurance policies, labor leaders took their case Tuesday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and they said they received a more favorable response.

“[Labor leaders] said they received a more favorable response [from Pelosi].” Shouldn’t this be an extraordinarily easy argument to prove? All I need is a to read a labor leader telling me how they were received by Obama, and how much better their reception from Pelosi was.

But what are we told about the reactions of “labor leaders”? Only Andrew Stern saying: “I love the House, and I love the speaker.”

By what rules of logic and argumentation can we reach the conclusion from Stern’s statement?

If no such rule exists, why should we believe what the article is arguing? Why couldn’t the article have simply featured a few quotes?

What upsets me is that the kind of logic on display seems to be common among journalists–those who describe their role as helping people know about what their government is doing. It frustrates me that what passes for political journalism is appears to be devoid of basic argumentative skill.

But, I can’t back up with data the feeling that this writing style is common. It is just memory talking. So, I would welcome arguments to the contrary.

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