For the last few months I’ve been trying to help the Media Bloggers Association, mainly via e-mail.
I’ve been appointed to three committees, none of which I’ve been much use to. I started in publicity, moved over to membership, and I’m now on ethics.
Publicity they had in hand. Membership passed over a list of prospective members, but I had no basis on which to judge them so I just approved the list. This got me interested in ethics.
Do bloggers need an ethical standard? Probably not, for cat blogging or talking about what a hard day we’ve had. But when we’re doing journalism, when we’re researching and writing about other people, then I think we do.
I would like a simple, straightforward set of ethical guidelines. Those of the Society of Professional Journalists represent a good start:
The page goes into more detail, but those are the headlines.
The problem with the SPJ code is that it’s unenforceable. Journalists have no say in deciding who a journalist is. Employers have all the say, and they don’t have to subscribe to this ethic in their hiring, firing or promotion policies.
I figure a group like the MBA could at least enforce simple rules by creating valuable member benefits and kicking out those who refuse to conform, following some objective process.
But that’s not how it’s going down, mainly due to one person, Jeff Jarvis (right).
Jarvis wants no standards, and certainly no policing. Might as well disband the committee.
“Why pledge to be honest? Only if you're assumed to be dishonest.
Used car salesmen should take the pledge. My blog friends do not need to.”
No objective measures of ethics, thus anything goes. Want to lie, misrepresent, ignore facts, engage in personal destruction for the sheer fun-raising hell of it? Heck, there’s no such thing as truth. We define what’s truth based on who yells the loudest.
Well, pardon my language but bullshit. There’s a fine line between libertarian and anarchist, and Jeff Jarvis just crossed it.
The state should not license journalists, but if journalists themselves have no standards then they have no credibility. There is nothing on which to judge what they say, no reason for them to claim any privilege. Jeff Jarvis likes the standards of mob rule because, frankly, he has a big megaphone and right now he has a mob behind him.
That may not always be the case.
If you just want to have a Blogging Club then, yes, anyone with a blog gets in, anything they want to do is fine, and maybe if enough of us get together we can get a better deal on our car insurance. Or buy some neat baseball hats.
But if you’re going to claim to be a Media Blogger, if you’re going to enter the marketplace of ideas and tear people down, build others up, report on facts and claim credibility, then, yes, we have to define what that means among ourselves and hold all members’ feet to that standard. The only thing we can withhold is our endorsement and maybe that doesn’t mean much, but if we work on building the credibility of the ethics rules, and the ethics process, it might mean something in time.
It makes no sense to try and educate potential bloggers in the best journalism practices and then say, oh by the way this doesn’t mean anything go do what you want, we’re not going to stand for anything and we’re not going to be outraged if you ignore everything we’ve said.
If there are no objective ethical standards, and no way to enforce them, because Jeff Jarvis thinks it’s institutional-media-think, why bother with the course. “I'll take a course. I won't take an oath,” he writes.
I’ll sit in the room but I won’t be tested. So how do I know you know anything? I’m supposed to take your word for it.
That’s anarchism.