A bit more about that code of ethics thing (see my last post).
One of the reasons it’s dangerous to ascribe motives to another person is that it’s really hard for any of us to understand motives, our own or anyone else’s.
Let’s go down that path, tricky as it is, and talk about the motivations that might have been at work last week as the House of Representatives considered the Free Flow of Information Act.
To cut to the chase: before passing the bill, the house watered down the protections afforded journalists who shield their sources.
Declan McCullagh has laid out the steps by which the language was modified as the bill was considered. The crucial point here (and how this relates to my last post on Citizen Journalism Ethics) is that the bill managed to exclude most bloggers from its protections. Here’s the final language:
The term “covered person” means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.
In other words, not I nor (probably) you.
Why does money make a difference? Why should those who get paid to do journalism be afforded protection that you and I don’t have?
Now perhaps I’m going to shock you by suggesting there may have been a perfectly good and sound motive at work here. Plenty of others have mentioned the crasser motives that may be at work (read the comments to Declan’s post.)
But what if… what if the legislators used money as a proxy for something else? For example, a code of ethics?
I’ll clarify. Much as they love to make laws which restrict people’s freedoms, legislators also have some grasp of the notion that those who self-police don’t need to be policed by others.
But how can we identify those who self-police? Well, generally it’s done by seeing that they belong to a group which collectively self-polices. And in the case of journalism, that would be professional journalists, who have a code of ethics, and not bloggers, who don’t.
That journalists might often ignore their own codes of ethics is not to the point. The legislators must operate under the assumption that the codes are largely observed, even if not universally. If they’d believed that such professional codes were worthless, they’d have been much more likely to treat professionals as they’ve treated bloggers.
Now comes the question that has to do with thoughcraft: If the House had meant ”professionals should be protected because they have a code of ethics which protects the rest of us from their behaving like scoundrels,” why didn’t they say so?
Well, indeed, some of them might have said so in their discussions; I haven’t read the record and just now I don’t intend to. But it’s just possible that that was what they meant even if they didn’t say so. And they didn’t say so because they knew, deep down, that to talk about journalistic ethics would open cans of worms none of them wanted to deal with.
Now what I am confident of is that there must have been some mention of bloggers in those discussions. And what I’m equally confident of is that the question of a code of ethics would have been very unlikely to come up at those moments.
Why? Because a code of ethics for bloggers is about as unthinkable among Representatives as it is among bloggers.
Here’s a snippet from chapter 10 of Thoughtcraft:
We are taught what to think by all the ways in which the community signals to us which ideas are in favor and which are not. Signaling may be very overt (”How dare you say that!?”) or less so, as when one’s statements are based on assumptions the group doesn’t share, and are consistently met with non-understanding. In many persons, these signals result in various thoughts being either “thinkable” or “unthinkable” in the context of the group.
Many of the reasons bloggers rejected the Bloggers’ Code of Conduct were intuitive. So much so, in fact, that non-bloggers, such as U.S. Representatives, might grasp them intuitively. So that, instead of explicitly naming the missing code of ethics as the reason for not protecting bloggers, the lawmakers instead chose a proxy—money, which makes a professional—which satisfied them. And which did so without opening the can of worms that lay in the question “So do journalists actually abide by a code of ethics?”
