gatewatching

I’ve had to be away from my computer since Friday, as I’ve been entertaining visitors. When I came back the last thread had been transformed out of all recognition. I thought that rather than address everything that had been said there with further comments, and in the light of further posts at The Content Makers and LP, it might be good to post anew.

Over the last few days a mysterious piece of woodwork called the “journalists versus bloggers frame” has kicked around a fair bit. What motivated my original post was, in part, a desire to trouble an idea that seemed to be doing the rounds that comparisons between bloggers and journalists were necessarily uninformative, even misleading - “out of court” as I said initially. I elaborated on this in comments in the last thread. While I don’t think it’s the only lens through which practices of blogging ought to be viewed, I think there are times in which it’s perfectly legitimate and relevant to compare the actions of bloggers and journalists. There are circumstances in which the actions of bloggers and journalists overlap sufficiently for the comparison to be informative. This is one of them.

What’s at issue is a very specific question: when is it right to publish details of someone’s identity, knowing that revealing this information may have damaging effects on the the reputation of the person concerned? This is an ethical question with implications for the practice of anyone engaged in publishing information. My answer to the question is: the appropriate time to name someone publicly is after you’ve had some solid confirmation of the person’s identity, and ideally this should be first-hand confirmation.

In the example of the Quadrant hoax, prior to confirmation, some bloggers named Katherine Wilson as the hoaxer in posts, or allowed her to be named in comments threads, or reproduced and elaborated on others’ speculation with a few careful disclaimers. In my view, the actions of these bloggers were either flagrantly unethical or disingenuously so. Had they been wrong - which was entirely possible - there could have been legal implications for some of them as well. I’m afraid I just don’t accept that a combination of Internet breadcrumbs and guesswork constitutes confirmation. And I don’t think finessing the chronology can change the fact that names were named without any solid confirmation.

As I said initially - and I’ll do it again here - journalists are trained and practiced in using very simple, cheap and accessible means for confirming things prior to publication. They ring people and ask them to confirm or scotch the rumours they have heard, and the guesses they have made. Margaret Simons has confirmed that she was called in this case when people couldn’t get Wilson’s contact details. I think bloggers could take something from this as, on the whole, they didn’t seek confirmation, and none of them picked up the phone.* Hence the comparison. By the way, I think it’s a comparison that, if heeded, has the potential to keep some bloggers out of some very hot water.

I think Margaret presents the key question with admirable succinctness in comments on the last post here:

<blockquote>But surely some comparisons between the two are valid, when both are engaged in making factual assertions about real people.</blockquote>

Pretty simple, I would have thought. So simple that attempts to avoid the comparison in this instance begin to look like sophistry.

I’m not at all persuaded by Mark’s argument that, really we need to know the motivations of bloggers before we can make this kind of observation, or make ethical recommendations. He says in comments to the last post that bloggers often don’t really see themselves as “breaking stories”, and suggests that therefore, holding them to the same standards as journalists is illegitimate. He also suggests that this is sneaking in assumptions derived from the US blogosphere. But whatever you want to call it - I’m happy with “retailing gossip” as a term if that helps - in this case they were publishing things that a wider audience didn’t yet know, about a real person, with a real life. Surely this counts as “news”.

The act of circulating news more widely entails certain responsibilities. It certainly brings with it legal responsibilities, and for mine it brings a serious ethical burden as well. That goes double for bloggers who are aware that they have a sizeable audience. In that sense, it really doesn’t matter what a blogger’s self-definition is. Their self-definition may be self-serving. (On the other side of the coin, think about how you felt when you heard about John Laws defining himself as an “entertainer” for the purposes of the “cash for comment” inquiry.) What’s at stake, rather, is weighing the possible effects of their actions.

The problem with “doing more empirical work before jumping into the pond of normative judgements” is that empirical work never ends. Mark’s perfectly happy to make normative judgements about the actions of journalists on his blog without having perfect access to their motivations and intentions. And fair enough, in my view. In researching blogging, as Mark noted elsewhere the other day, one methodological challenge is that the field of inquiry is itself dynamic. Who is blogging changes constantly, as do their reasons for blogging. Calling for more empirical work in the face of a clear-cut example like this amounts to a call to defer ethical reflection forever. The research Mark proposes - depending on how it’s framed and who’s doing it - may be intrinsically valuable, but there’s no reason to think it’s going to be of any help in deciding questions like this. And there’s no reason to think that ethical reflection is illegitimate in the absence of such information.

Similarly Margaret’s call for us to define our terms more closely could well have useful outcomes, but that won’t change the facts of this case as she outlines them in the quote above. News was published without confirmation. A better definition of “journalism” in the light of the recent expansion of the online public sphere would be fantastic, but I don’t think it would change my view on what happened in the Quadrant incident. Nor would it change my view that the bloggers who published can be compared unfavourably with the journos who attempted to check things properly.

The questions arising from all this are legion. For me, there are a few very important ones I’d ask of people who criticised my last post. If we can’t make ethical claims about specific, situated events like this, when ought we make them? If you don’t want bloggers who are publishing news to be held to the same standards as journalists, what alternative standards do you suggest? If Wilson’s identity wasn’t news, what was it?

I have to say that I’m surprised that people feel I need to be reminded that there are different kinds of blogs, doing different things. More than once I’ve been pulled up for “generalising” about the blogosphere. That’s fair enough to an extent - it’s undoubtedly true that many bloggers who discussed the hoaxer’s identity did not do so until it had been solidly confirmed by Margaret. So much the worse for those who didn’t wait. And of course, there were many other political bloggers who didn’t address the hoax at all. Still, I’d like to see research that defied my sense - taken from this and other incidents - that very few political bloggers hew to standards and methods for confirming news that are at the same level as those of run-of-the-mill journalists. In any case, I would have thought a glance at this blog’s archive would have demonstrated that I’m aware of the diversity of political blogging in Australia, as would a look at my record of publication in this area. None of this changes my view that when bloggers are publishing news, their practice overlaps sufficiently with that of journalists for comparisons to be made.

A last word on anonymity. For mine, the ugliest incidents in the short history of Australian blogging have involved those moments when the identity of those who would have preferred to remain anonymous online have been revealed without their consent. When a person is using anonymity as a screen for threats, harassment and bad behaviour, such revelations may be justified. But in those circumstances they should be justified, clearly and publicly. In some quarters, “outing” anonymous interlocutors has become a sordid kind of sport. I would have thought bloggers who were aware of this history would have been more sensitive than most around issues of anonymity, and more careful than most in revealing what they knew before it was certain. In general, I’m excited about the way in which the blogosphere has enlivened political discourse in this country, challenged a complacent media industry to do better, and assembled vibrant communities for political discussion. But the single greatest disappointment to me in this case has been the cavalier attitude displayed towards “outing” the hoaxer. Bloggers who have been around long enough should be more circumspect about doing this without good reasons, or at the very least they should have waited for better evidence.

*The creditable exception of Don Arthur’s attempt to confirm Wilson’s identity via email was noted in my original post, and in comments I made on the thread beneath it.

PS - I have to return to entertaining, this time involving travel. I’ll ask someone to monitor the thread, but I won’t be able to respond to comments until tomorrow morning.

blogging, ethics, media blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, media