Tag archives: Journalism

Are journalists corporate spies?

David Herrera,

A thought experiment:

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]

  1. E.g., the journalists in Dietemann v. Time, who coordinated with the Los Angeles District Attorney before investigating a quack doctor. ↩

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Future of context: Same as the past?

David Herrera,

I generally agree with the goals of Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris’s Future of Context project.

But at the same time, I don’t quite get it. Concern for context in journalism has been around since before the Hutchins Commission, which in 1947 wrote: “The media should provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.”

So, what’s different today? The Web, obviously. It provides great opportunities for context and background.

But, then again, so do books, and they’re not new.

But, then then, the most oft-cited “explainer” I’m aware of is a radio program, This American Life’s “Giant Pool of Money” (which lived up to the hype).

I’m left with a couple of questions:

Does “context” mean something different now such that Web provides it better than “old” media could?

If explainers are so important to our understanding, why do we need newspapers? Even after we understand the context, what good is a daily report when a more infrequent summary could provide the same, while linking it to the context we’ve already absorbed or the context we don’t know yet? (As a commenter on PressThink notes, explainers are not simple.)

Has the meaning of “context” changed such that the time and effort normally considered required to understand an issue in context is no longer applies? If news organizations’ try to provide the news quickly and in easily-digestable forms, should we expect them to provide context?

Robert McChesney on press subsidies

David Herrera,

I have lots of respect for Robert McChesney (see his “Labor and the Marketplace of Ideas: WCFL and the Battle for Labor Radio Broadcasting, 1927-1934”) but his recent interview on PBS’s NOW is almost embarrassing. He’s on the show to argue in support of increased subsidies for the press — which isn’t a terrible argument in itself, but surely it can be made without chanting, ad nauseum, “the Founding Fathers!”, “the Founding Fathers!”

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.)

Washington Post: Speak only when spoken to

David Herrera,

We discussed some institutional legacies of journalism in one of my classes today, such as the idea that the newspaper or the broadcast anchor holds authority over what’s important in the world; the idea, as Walter Cronkite might have put it, that mainstream media control “the way it is.”

Wouldn’t you know it? That view reared its head in the Washington Post:

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for a reporter in our newsroom to be challenging the views, or challenging the integrity, of our editorial board”

speaketh Liz Spayd, the Post’s managing editor.

A reporter challenging authority? Perish the thought!

Diversions

David Herrera,

Jan. 22: Added dropped words so the post makes sense.

It’s a news industry truism that most people read newspapers for the comics and the sports. Assuming it’s a true truism, and even given that most readers of The New York Times are not comparable to the rest of the country, doesn’t Michael Roston’s advice on what the Times should charge for on its Web site make sense? Charge them for the diversions! Wedding listings, maybe crosswords. Hey, it might work.