Retracting your words: cyber accountibility
New media tests the limits of journalistic ethics
by Tom Llewellin
The web is a boon to the free exchange of information in numerous ways. The barrier to entry is set low enough that virtually anyone with the know-how and a decent-sized pile of finances can set up shop as a media outlet without needing to own a printing press. But a printing press is permanent and once something is published and distributed, its content is set in stone.
Human error is inevitable and factual errors, along with falsely-attributed quotes, do happen. In the face of screw-ups, major or minor, the only option for traditional media and books is to print a retraction or apology in the next issue or remove the offending facts from the next edition. The Internet and e-books, however, are trickier terrain.
The ability of large numbers of people to scrutinize and fact-check through more content than ever with relative ease is counterbalanced by the fact that pulling a piece offline, whether it’s put out by a respected outlet or a small-time blogger, is a simple process that leaves relatively few traces.
Taking back your word
Awkward retractions after mind-boggling mistakes or outright inventions can do tremendous damage, both to the people involved and to society at large, if the article in question manages to sway public opinion. Stephen Glass was a young reporter for The New Republic, an American newsmagazine, in 1998 when a Forbes investigation found that he had simply invented large portions of many of his stories. “Hack Heaven,” a cover story on a band of teenage hackers that would have raised the eyebrows of anyone with a basic knowledge of computers, slipped past the magazine’s myopic editorial staff, despite being almost one hundred per cent fiction. They later were forced to issue a lengthy and contrite mea culpa.
In May 2006, the National Post’s front page loudly announced “IRAN EYES BADGES FOR JEWS,” leading to a piece explaining that Iran’s parliament had passed a law requiring all religious minorities to wear insignia, which led the author to draw parallels with Nazi Germany. However, the piece relied on the statements of an opinion column by Iranian author Amir Taheri and the paper did not corroborate them with anyone in the Iranian government.
What would have happened if the two publications were online-only? Would they have, red-faced and facing the prospect of serious damage to their reputation, merely taken the offending pieces off their site, thus out of reach of the majority of the readers, making them disappear into the black hole of the Internet?
The New Republic had serial fabricators like Ruth Shalit before Glass and has had further fabricators since—most notably the infamous “Baghdad Diarist.” Would they be able to escape questions into the scope of their misdeeds that could only be asked by having access to the source material?
Similarly, would the National Post have been able to spare themselves the humiliation of their subjecting their unreliable sources on the Iran story to close scrutiny by “disappearing” the piece, allowing it to drop off most people’s radar screens?
Archiving in
the 21st century
Even though the more eagle-eyed in the audience would have been able to save local copies of the pieces, that would not make them as authoritative as print. Not even the Adobe PDF format, favoured for its utility as an archival format, is immune to tampering. A variety of freely-available programs, among them PDFEdit, make the process a snap.
Organizations that fulfill similar goals, such as the non-profit Internet Archive with their Wayback Machine at archive.org, are not entirely immune to the long arm of litigation either. In 2002, the Church of Scientology successfully used legal threats to get the Archive to remove stored copies of a variety of sites critical of their organization. Also, unlike government archives, the organization is an independent non-profit that lacks a legislative mandate. It will probably be around for a while, but just how long is up in the air.
Paper books might seem like they are the last vestige of permanence, but e-books are beginning to dent their dominance. Amazon’s famed Kindle e-book reader has brought e-books to the verge of widespread mainstream success, with entries from its catalogue making up 12 per cent of the retail behemoth’s book sales. When you buy a Kindle book, though, the book is not your property but, as the terms of service succinctly put it, is “licensed [and] not sold” to you. Amazon, on the section of the Kindle site devoted to wooing prospective publishing houses, hypes the fact that publishers can “push” updates to the user without intervention—remotely correcting errata and adding or retracting passages, leaving no trace of the text as it was originally purchased.
Ethics in the digital age
The implications of the electronic black hole for journalism ethics are potentially transformative. Ethics in general, and journalistic ethics in particular, continually evolve in response to circumstances and the realities of the surrounding media landscape. Even the fabled virtue of journalistic objectivity is a fairly recent invention, born out of partisan excesses and advancing technology. Before the raft of mergers and newly-adopted policies of independence that swept newspapers in English Canada and other mainly anglophone countries in the early 20th century, newspapers were openly owned by political parties, partly because in the pre-radio age, no other communication channel existed that allowed for unfiltered partisan speechifying.
Objectivity never took hold to the same extent in the
Quebec francophone press, wrote Kathryn Jane Hazel in The British Journal of Canadian Studies, because the turbulent social and political climate in Quebec saw journalistic objectivity informed more by a social conscience and a desire for activism than a taste for dispassionate chronicling of the facts.
“It is corporate policy for all of Canwest’s media holdings to face up to their mistakes in an honest, open fashion. It is also the right thing to do journalistically,” wrote National Post editor-in-chief Douglas Kelly in a lengthy apology that appeared five days after the Iran article ran. Whether such words will even need to be penned in the future is a question that will demand the attention of lawmakers, historians and journalists for quite some time. The web has potential to change the practice of journalism on a fundamental level. Let’s hope it’s for the better.
The Link Volume 31 Issue 01