Second Thoughts About the New Media – why we need to preserve the ethics of the old media By Andrew Horvat BRADLEE --well shit, we oughtta be tense-we're about to accuse Mr. Haldeman who only happens to be the second most important man in America of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the White House-(beat) --it would be nice if we were right-SIMONS (to the reporters) --you double-checked both sources?-They nod. from the script of "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN" by William Goldman, based on the novel of the same name by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (prerehearsal version March, 1975) The 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men” marked a high point in popular admiration for the press in America, and, thanks to the worldwide reach of Hollywood, in many other parts of the world as well. The above passage encapsulates the message of the movie: Journalists abiding by the high standards of their craft expose power-hungry leaders who would trample on the American Constitution. Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have spent the previous seven months getting some very frightened people in Washington to talk about the break-in at the Democratic Party’s election campaign headquarters in the Watergate building during the 1972 presidential campaign. Did the President of the United States know about this? H.R. Haldeman is Chief of White House Staff so if he was involved President Richard Nixon is also implicated. In this scene a Washington Post editor asks the two reporters a question that idealized the high ethical standards of the journalist’s craft: Did Woodward and Bernstein double-check their two sources and do they know that these two sources are independent of each other? In the three decades since the release of the film, classes in journalism ethics have debated, and continue to debate, if Woodward and Bernstein acted correctly in relying on anonymous sources. At the Associated Press reporters must name their sources. Seymour Hersh, the award-winning reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969 and the abuses at Abu Ghraib jail in 2004, rarely does. Journalism ethics is a constantly evolving subject in democratic societies around the world, or so one would think. 1 There is, however, a widely held perception among the general public that media organizations, far from promoting the diffusion of news, stand in the way of citizens finding out the real truth. To such people, the commercial media is part of the problem and not the solution. In recent years many Americans have become disillusioned with their own country’s media. Such feelings are closely linked to the perception that US news organizations not only failed to act as a check on the excesses of political leaders who fomented war in Iraq, but that most seem to have willingly lent their support to the invasion. The failure of the media to champion human rights and democratic freedoms during an administration that outsources torture (at Abu Ghraib), suspends habeas corpus (in Guantanamo) and intrudes into the lives of citizens and foreign residents (under the Patriot Act) has also contributed to the erosion of respect for the media. But disillusionment with the media among Americans is not restricted to those citizens who oppose the Iraq War. According to the findings of a survey conducted in 2006 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, media credibility figures plunged between 1998 and 2006. For example, CNN which used to call itself the must trusted source of news can no longer make that claim. In 1998 42 percent of respondents stated that they believe all or most of what the cable news channel reported. By 2006, that ratio had fallen to 28 percent or roughly the same as CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and a mere three percent above Fox News. The Wall Street Journal, which was the most trusted name in print media in 1998 with a standing of 41 percent fell to 26 percent by 2006. The New York Times merited a mere 20 percent. There are, of course, many reasons other than the disillusionment of politically aware consumers of news in America for the fall from grace of the traditional media in many democratic societies today. In the United States, for example, the decline in family ownership of newspapers and with it the increasing influence of corporate investors whose primary goal is maximizing corporate profit has resulted in cost-cutting and with it the firings of thousands of reporters throughout the United States. The insecurity felt by those reporters still at their desks has no doubt discouraged the kind of risk-taking for which Woodward and Bernstein are still respected today. Perhaps it is not by coincidence that we see intellectuals the world over pinning their hopes for a free, truly democratic news media on so-called “citizen journalism” consisting of blogs and Internet news sites that rely on large groups of volunteer reporters to gather the news. As Wikipedia, an icon of the “new media” maintains in its entry on that subject, “…the people are deciding that in the 21st century the news is too important to be left to the media. [Stanford law professor and cyberspace observer] Lawrence Lessig states that this 21st century media balance is the opening up of a new kind of free 2 media (not financially, but democratically free) against the media giants who have ownership over all the current forms of media.” This pattern is especially evident in South Korea, probably the world’s most wired nation, but somewhat less true in Japan. In the United States, however, the traditional print media is in retreat but (as mentioned above) for reasons that are probably only partly related to the advent of the Internet. But whatever the particular circumstances of each of these three societies, the advent of “citizen journalism” raises serious and sometimes disturbing questions about human rights and democratic values. In South Korea and Japan, serious abuses by Internet news sites and blogs are being reported. Although journalists like to point out that reporting is a craft that can be learned by anyone and not a profession requiring long years of training, testing and certification, the unfortunate fact is that “citizen journalists” rarely bother to acquaint themselves with even the most rudimentary rules of reporting, to say nothing of the kind of journalistic ethics idealized in “All the President’s Men.” Checking the accuracy of facts and statements, calling multiple independent sources, protecting the rights to privacy of ordinary individuals (i.e. persons who, unlike politicians or entertainers, are not public figures), adhering to a neutral vocabulary of attributive verbs (e.g. “said” and “stated,” versus the negative “claimed” or fawning “pointed out”), writing only what one knows for certain and resisting the temptation to praise or blame are the old-fashioned virtues still stubbornly adhered to by the majority of reporters working for the much maligned traditional media in the US and most democracies. Although there are many notable exceptions, by and large bloggers and “citizen journalists” regularly break these rules with impunity, raising serious questions about whether the Internet-based “new media” might not be a double edged sword, allowing on the one hand new voices to be heard, but at the same time undermining principles of journalistic ethics. It is these principles of fairness which, when adhered to, have given the media the moral authority needed to play a positive role in politics in democratic societies. Let me now turn to some examples of “new media” excesses from South Korea. I am using the cases from South Korea for three reasons: 1) I am acquainted with the details of two of the three stories and personally know the two victims; 2) The phenomenal growth of the new media in South Korea is in part the result of government policies resulting in an unusually high level of Internet connectivity via broadband; and 3) South Korea is a post-colonial society where there is a widely acknowledged tendency, especially among so-called progressive elements to place a higher value on nationalism than on individual rights. For all these reasons, South Korea offers opportunities to reflect on certain ethical challenges posed by the new media, especially as large numbers of postings – at least at the present time – are being made anonymously. 3 Case One: In May, 2002, Fred Varcoe, at that time sports editor of the Tokyo-based Englishlanguage Japan Times, mentioned in his curtain-raiser for the Japan-Korea World Cup Soccer Tournament that during his first visit to Seoul some 20 years earlier he had been propositioned by a prostitute. That reference would become the subject of a column by Ms Bae Eul-sun, who writes regularly for OhmyNews, a Korean on-line news site. Her piece, which took exception to Varcoe’s reference to prostitution in South Korea, triggered an avalanche of postings by OhmyNews readers which eventually resulted in the British sports writer’s dismissal for, among other things, “insulting the honor of Korean women,” a somewhat ironic reason given that Varcoe’s wife is Korean. For some readers of OhmyNews, however, that fact offered an opportunity to send anonymous death threats to Mrs Varcoe. To be fair to OhmyNews, the demand to have Varcoe dismissed came not from Ms Bae but from the massive number of postings in response to her column. OhmyNews has an estimated daily readership of 3,000,000, which is higher than the daily circulation figure of any South Korean newspaper. Moreover, it should be noted that in 2002 Internet News in South Korea received the second highest credibility rating in the Korea Press Foundation’s survey; newspapers received the lowest. South Korean diplomats made two visits to the publisher of the Japan Times, urging him to respond positively to the outrage of OhmyNews readers. The paper’s publisher, a Japanese businessman eventually caved in when the website of his Korean subsidiary company became the target of anonymous e-mails. The above example of frontier justice on the Internet is by no means exceptional in modern day South Korea, where as of 2004 some 25 percent of the population was a broadband subscriber. This compares with a ratio of about 13 percent in the US and 15 percent in Japan. The figure for Germany was 8.4 percent. One might argue that Varcoe’s article was off color or perhaps inappropriate as an introduction to a World Cup destination but seen in retrospect it hardly contained anything so outrageous – or inaccurate – that it justified the author’s dismissal from his job. Varcoe successfully sued The Japan Times for wrongful dismissal but to this day he has not been able to obtain either a correction or a retraction from OhmyNews. When Varcoe confronted OhmyNews founder and editor, Oh Yeon Ho at a press luncheon in Tokyo last year, Oh refused to comment on the case. Case Two: 4 In April, 2007, Pak Yu-ha, professor of Japanese literature at Sejong University in Seoul found herself the target of Internet vigilantes demanding she be dismissed because of a statement she made in Tokyo at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan where she had been invited to speak on the gap between Korean and Japanese views regarding the “comfort women,” a euphemism for the thousands of women from the Asia-Pacific region forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military prior to 1945. A significant portion of the “comfort women” were recruited from the Korean peninsula. Professor Pak’s sin was to state that not only Japanese but also Koreans participated in the recruitment of “comfort women.” Her statement, carried in a short report by YTV News, a South Korean cable channel, unleashed yet another torrent of hate mail, this time on Yahoo’s Korean language site. Professor Pak was able to keep her job at Sejong University only by vehemently and repeatedly denying what she had said in Japan. Are these two examples peculiarly Korean or do they point to some universal quality of the new media on the Internet? Are Koreans particularly hot-headed and hardhearted or do all human beings harbor within themselves qualities that allow them to mete out instant punishment to those who dare to sully the reputation of their country, or transgress some social norm? To be sure, there may be particularly Korean elements to these cases because both deal with issues related to national pride. In Korea’s postcolonial political environment, references to an unpleasant past – periods of economic weakness or national subjugation – can trigger violent responses if they clash with dominant narratives of noble suffering and heroic resistance. These examples would be peculiarly Korean if they were restricted to issues related to contested aspects of Korea’s recent history. But the truth is that the Internet has become the stage for anonymous denunciations of Koreans by Koreans for the most trivial reasons. Case Three: Three years ago a puppy dog owned by a young woman did in a Seoul subway car what puppy dogs all over the world do before they are house trained. Embarrassed, the young woman fled from the scene at the next station leaving behind an unhappy fellow passenger to clean up the doggy’s mess. Another passenger captured images of this event on his cellular phone and put them on an Internet site. One of the young woman’s acquaintances identified the girl by name and it was only a matter of time before she became known all over Korea as the “Dog Poo Girl.” As a consequence the young woman was unable to make an appearance in society and reportedly had to interrupt her education. I cite this last example only to prove that excesses on Internet sites are not totally linked to politics or national pride and that there is an aspect of the new media which is 5 inherently dangerous for the very reasons that it was once welcome: 1) it allows for direct exchanges between people without intermediaries; and 2) it is totally free, or, in other words, it is unmonitored and therefore fosters not only the free exchange of ideas but also makes it possible for people to act irresponsibly. When the subject is “dog poo” and the victim is a college student, the incident seems hardly worthy of mention and yet all three cases have something in common: the punishment we human beings mete out on the Internet anonymously is out of all proportion to the “crime.” An article in bad taste results in an editor losing his job; a reasoned comment, factually correct but politically not so, brings public condemnation to a distinguished scholar; a chance act of indiscretion forces a young woman to interrupt her education. Whatever sins one might want to ascribe to the traditional media’s owners, publishers, editors or reporters, they have never been so quick to anger and so eager to mete out punishment to people they have never met. Have we leaped ahead technologically only to slide back to the customs of the crowd at the Colosseum, all too eager to give a thumbs-down to some hapless victim dragged out into the arena? Perhaps South Korea is different from other environments in that the traditional media is tainted by association with authoritarian regimes and entrenched elites many of whose members made their fortunes during colonial times. Democracy in Korea was won by a group of social activists who protested against military-backed governments whose allies were large industrial conglomerates, owned by families who also control newspapers. But perhaps, it is just such an environment that offers us an opportunity to see the dark side of the new media. And for that reason, maybe it gives us a chance to think about how to tame the new media and turn it into a tool of the democratic process and not the harbinger of media anarchy. Seen from the perspective of a former journalist, someone who has worked for newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, an obvious downside of the online media is its thirst for feedback. Every online news site and every blogger has a “your views” box at the bottom of the page for visitors to leave their responses. The greater the number of postings the more popular the site; the more animated the discussion, the happier the Internet entrepreneur. In essence, it is as if a newspaper were to allow its Letters to the Editor page to determine the news. It is an undeniable fact that for many visitors to Internet news sites, the opportunity to leave a posting – perhaps an outrageous one – has become a great way to get a quick, adrenalin high. The slow reasoning of op-ed columnists is giving way to the hot-headed instant messaging of a digital mob of anonymous posters. 6 The new media in Japan has been somewhat slower to develop than in Korea but perhaps faster than in the United States. OhmyNews and its imitators have grown in Korea largely as a result of disillusionment with the country’s conglomerate-dominated print media. In Japan, newspapers and their affiliated broadcasting companies continue to enjoy a remarkable degree of public support and market dominance. Although criticism of biased reporting in the traditional media is commonplace, readership remains the highest of any democratic society and faith in the quality and reliability of news from traditional news sources is high. Newspapers, however, are reluctant to print letters that disagree with editorial policy, so, perhaps for that reason many Japanese have turned to blogging. With nearly 9 million bloggers, the individually-managed news site seems to have become a Japanese specialty. In fact, a number of reporters working for traditional news outlets have been encouraged by their employers to blog so as to attract more readers. Tsuruaki Yukawa, a reporter who follows IT trends at Jiji News Service manages a blog with the full backing of his employer. Last April, his site was inundated by personally critical mail messages upbraiding him for interviewing a young woman who appeared to have sympathies with the controversial Aum sect whose members staged acts of urban terrorism in the 1990s in which several people died. Responding to the criticism, Yukawa removed the interview from the blog but he still faced a barrage of personal abuse from anonymous posters. It is interesting to note that professional journalists continue to debate the acceptability of anonymous sources while elements of society who seek a new media through which to communicate unimpeded by intermediaries show no hesitation to carry out their work anonymously or else under assumed names. While the traditional media in many countries and in many eras can be taken to task for failing to live up to its responsibility to readers, one cannot help feeling nostalgic for the democracy-sustaining traditions of professionalism adhered to by the now much maligned intermediaries. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from working at a traditional wire service back in the days of teletype machines was to ask the epistemological question, “How do I know what I know?” How sure can I be of my facts? I wrote a bulletin once about a trading company executive who was reported by the local media as having committed suicide by jumping from the window of his office in downtown Tokyo. His firm had been the agent of an American fighter plane manufacturer which had been involved in a bribery scandal. My editor called me in to his office and asked if I had interviewed the dead executive and if he had personally told me that he was going to take his life. He then said, “Perhaps he was pushed. Maybe he leaned out the window too far.” 7 In other words, for me to say he had committed suicide was to make a statement I could not prove. My editor changed my first sentence to say that the man had “plunged to his death.” We mentioned the probability of suicide but were careful to attribute that conclusion to “police sources.” Much is said about how the Internet creates a new democratic medium free of intermediaries and yet the intermediaries, for all their sins, represent a repository of the tradition of a craft. For example, a newspaper may have carried a report of the Dog Poop Girl in Seoul but no self-respecting reporter would have disclosed the girl’s identity. Why? Because she is not a public figure. Therefore, prying into her private life is a violation of a basic human right. As for the case of Fred Varcoe, Ms Bae Eul-sun who wrote the critical column that resulted in Varcoe’s dismissal never once called the British journalist to check if her understanding of his column was right. Was Varcoe invited to respond to the column? No. As for Professor Pak, nationalist history-denying hot-heads are not known for being patient listeners. Perhaps Yahoo benefits more from fanning the flames of a dispute than in acting as an intermediary and promoting understanding. As if the danger signals of eroding professional standards were not enough, Indy News, the site of the US anti-globalist movement takes the trouble to tell us just how its philosophy challenges the high standards of traditional journalism. Its home page states: “Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.” Passion? Yes, when I joined the Associated Press, we had a passionate commitment: It was to be dispassionate in our gathering and dissemination of the news. I rather doubt that my editor would have described what we were doing as providing “tellings of the truth.” We were not in the business of marketing narratives. Are we on the verge of Internet mob rule? Will we see the emergence of a new Inquisition thanks to the elimination of intermediaries? The answer lies in our ability to transfer to the Internet the high ethical standards of the best of traditional journalism. 8