Row, row, row your boat...

By Stephen Nellis

Technology brings new temptations for journalists. Reaching audiences instantaneously – previously the province of only broadcast media – is at any news outlet’s disposal via the internet. The internet also brings possibilities that no one could have envisioned a decade ago: the ability to give readers a practically limitless amount of information, if they want it.

All of this means a mixed bag for news ethics. In some ways, in some ways it’ll be easier to act ethically and some ways it’ll be markedly more difficult. At the very least, technology will amplify and make salient the strengths, weaknesses and inconsistencies in the various ethical codes (or lack thereof) at play in the media world.

Let’s say we’re a newspaper and we report a fact that’s wrong. In the pre-Web days, you had a few options. You could do the right thing and put your tail between your legs and write a correction the next day. If the fact were never going to come up again in a story, you could simply remain silent. Or you could employ the favorite trick of the fine folks over at the Columbia’s evening newspaper: the row-back, wherein the newspaper corrects itself without ever acknowledging an error in a previous story, pretending as though the previous, erroneous story never happened.

Let’s say we’re an evening newspaper and we publish a story online for the lunch rush in traffic. Unbeknownst to online editors, the story has an error in it, but a hawk-eyed designer catches the error before it makes the print version of the paper and corrects the faulty fact. The online version, however, has been up for two hours and has already been read by thousands of readers, error and all. Internet publishing technology puts forth a new way to be unethical: Correct the online version of the story to make it match the print story and don’t tell anybody. If those thousands of people who read the story online choose to read it again in the paper, they’ll probably scratch their heads when it doesn’t square with what they read earlier in the day on the Web. When they go back to check the Web, they’ll see it matches the print version of the story -- and probably think it’s time to see a shrink.

(Disclosure: I don’t mean to insinuate that any evening newspaper in Columbia is guilty of anything like the above scenario.)

So here we see that the relative impermanence of digital media – there’s no way for a reader to tell if an online story has been updated – has created a new problem. We’ve gone from facing the ethical specter of a row-back to the specter of a memory hole, Orwell style. Unless readers printed out a story or saved it to their hard disk, a newspaper can play Big Brother all it wants.

Of course, newspapers won’t make the memory hole a policy. Many large metro newspapers are already acting ethically with online content by permanently attaching corrections when they occur. But the very possibility of an undetectable row-back adds new temptation, and some outlets are sure to give in. And as we’ve seen, threats to journalism’s integrity anywhere unfortunately tend to translate to threats to journalism’s credibility everywhere.

There is, however, a silver lining to the memory hole problem: bloggers. (Incidentally, there’s a fascinating blog called the Memory Hole that’s garnered significant mainstream attention.) For each new opportunity the internet opens up for new organizations to act unethically, it opens up another for a blogger to call the news organization’s misstep out before an audience. In other words, if you work for a high profile news organization and you screw up, you can count on someone catching you.

In an ideal world, acting ethically would mean acting the same no matter what the possibility of getting caught. But we don’t live in that ideal world, and that’s neither a wholly good nor wholly bad thing. The certainty of getting caught straightens you up pretty quick. To be sure, internet publishing technology opens up new ways for news organizations to break old ethical guidelines, but it also opens up new ways for those readers whom the guidelines are designed to ultimately benefit to hold news organizations accountable.