Stop Forcing Journalists to Conceal Their Views from the Public

[cal04]

Conor Friedersdorf
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/stop-forcing-journalists-to-conceal-their-views-from-the-public/247571/

Forbidding newspaper reporters and public radio producers from being regular citizens only empowers the enemies of the press


Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran was fired from her part-time gig at WNYC, the innovative public radio station, because her boss found out that she attended an Occupy Wall Street protest. She's written about her termination at Gawker, where she wondered whether experiences like hers will "dissuade people who have jobs they want to keep from expressing their opinions." It's a disturbing possibility, but reading her story, I couldn't help but focus on a disturbing fact.

As regular readers know, Curran and her boyfriend, neither of whom I know, made a sign that displayed an excerpted phrase from an article I wrote. While Curran held it aloft in Times Square, someone snapped a photograph; soon afterward the image went viral. "I thought all of this could be fodder for an interesting segment on The Takeaway -- a morning news program co-produced by WNYC Radio and Public Radio International -- for which I had been working as a freelance web producer roughly 20 hours per week for the past seven months," Curran wrote. "I pitched the idea to producers on the show, in an e-mail. The next day, The Takeaway's general manager fired me over the phone, effective immediately. He was inconsolably angry, and said that I had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a 'teaching moment' for me in my career as a journalist."

Presuming the accuracy of this account, her boss is wrong.

For too long, managers at American newspapers and public radio stations have clung to this confused, corrosive notion of journalistic ethics -- that it is always a breach to participate in a protest or be caught expressing a controversial opinion. They talk about preventing "the perception of bias," though the model of journalism they champion is often perceived as biased, and almost never because of the activities staffers participate in during their leisure hours. There is a general argument about why this allergy to civic participation is flawed, and a specific argument about why it's wrong in this case. I'll lay them out in turn.

[valerief]

1. I guess only 1%ers have those Constitutional rights folks talk about. nt

[SoutherDem]

2. Can anyone really be neutral?

To an extent I understand a news organization not wanting their employees being political, but how can someone who is in the middle of the storm without being part of the storm not form personal opinions? And, is it fair to ask those to not, in their own time, participate as a citizen of the US? If FOX did the same thing I am not sure if they would have anyone working for them.
As far as public radio, they are so worried about being called liberal they are starting to appear as totally gutless. This year I just couldn't find the money to pledge.

[AndyTiedye]

3. These "Rules" Only Apply to those Who are Left-of-Center

Nobody gets fired for expressing reich-wing views on their own time, or even on the air.

[bhikkhu]

4. Well, I remember when you could just listen to the news

instead of listening to a bunch of asshats talking about what they think about the day's stories...

The idea that there is no such thing as objectivity, and that journalistic ethics are confused, largely comes from the RW that wants to be free to produce all-spin all-the-time news without criticism. Of course, they are free to do so, and that is what they do, but the dragging of everything else down to their level is not a goal I'd like to see.