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What to the what?! Can this be true?
Today, NPR is introducing staffers to a new Ethics Handbook that has been in the works for more than a year and illustrates how the organization is taking steps to safeguard against some of the ethical dilemmas it’s faced in the past.
So, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does it uphold truth-telling and real journalism or codify cowardly FOX-emulating “he said, she said” propaganda?
Here’s what Jay Rosen has to say about it:
In my view the most important changes are these passages: #
In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.
At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.
With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute. #
Maintaining the “appearance of balance” isn’t good enough, NPR says. “If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side…” we have to say so. When we are spun, we don’t just report it. “We tell our audience…” This is spin! (Update: The new policy is already having an effect.) #
Wow. If this isn’t a mirage, it’s the best news I’ve heard all year.
28 Comments
We can only hope that reality follows the example of this “ethics handbook,” but that remains to be seen. Of course, the wingnuts will attack NPR either way.
Sorry, NPR is far gone. This is a wan cosmetic.
Agreed.
Like financial fraud, it ain’t what’s on the books that counts, it’s what gets enforced. Rest assured, NPR will continue to suck.
Trick question right?
Corporations publish guidelines all the time; seldom do they have a lot of impact when it comes down to day-to-day operations. Remember when FOX sent around a memo about a “zero tolerance” for on screen errors? That vanished like cow piss on a hot rock.
The trouble for NPR is that they’ve become such a punching bag that every story unfavorable to the right will call for a little “exception” to policy, just this once, to avoid inevitable attacks.
I read this the other day and my forst thought was that I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m skeptical though as they characterize it as “maintaining an appearance of balance” when that is empirically untrue. They have had a right wing slant. How else does NPR have a program called “a week of conservative thought” in 2006 and never a corresponding week of liberal thought? This is when I stopped listening to NPR. Dunno if I’ll ever go back.
This may just be self serving since conservatives aren’t going to listen to NPR, no matter how Limbaugh-ish they try to sound but they’ve spent the last ten years or so actively shedding liberal listeners. Like myself.
Read about this elsewhere, and commented “Trust, but verify.”
Anyone hear ATC tonight w/ Breitbart’s obit? Wretched attempt at fairness. Glossed over the damage that scumbag has done to innocent people. NPR is a shadow of it’s former self and I started listening in the late 70s.
X2
What does the doc say about bending over & spreading their cheeks for their corp sponsors & UGS payers.
ROTFLMAO!
Coatailhag from above,
When I worked on Wall St. there was a Chinese wall betw investment research & investment banking. Heh heh heh.
We’ll see.
One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Unfortunately that may include NPR.
Why not speak truthfully of the dead?
Hey wendydavis,
Been a rough day, I just couldn’t help myself. “Ms. Phoenix”
never acknowledges any responses of mine anyway, so until I reach that level in masondom here, guess it don’ fuckin’ matter much; like that’s ever gonna happen.
Fuckin’ Dyed In The Wool Democrats Anyway. Did I say all that out loud?
That we will.
We’ll hear truth….. or not.
I’ve written about this at fdl before.
I watched the coming of the CPB and NPR late in the Johnson administration. Early in the first Nixon admin, I started working in public radio – KRAB FM in Seattle. It was independent.
When ATC started,, they’d take our Seattle stories if they were cute or wan, or Seattle-ish. But in early 1973, when our news team put up the best story anyone ever created on Nixon’s air war on Hanoi-Haiphong at that time, they wouldn’t touch any version of it we re-edited for the assholes. Pacifica and the KRAB nebula (KBOO, KTAO, KDNA, WYSO and a couple of other stations I can’t remember) and places like WBAI even had a hard time with the gory details of how we intentionally cluster bombed civilians and schools and even hospitals. But they ran Air War.
ATC wouldn’t run my very even-handed interviews with officials from the PRC that I was able to get in Vancouver BC. I gave ‘em scoops and they dissimulated.
The more I listened to NPR over the years, the more I realized that, more than anything else, they killed small, community-based independent lister-supported radio, replacing it with the homogenized pap that has so well earned them the term Nice Polite Republicans.
Must be fund-raising time!
Third what Margaret said I’ll believe it when I see it. When I see the GOP try and cut their funding and Obama being Obama agrees.
Who really gives a damn whether a story is “balanced” or not, when 99% of the stories themselves are constructed to obfuscate or distract from the critical issues in the first place?
Meh.
I don’t even call NPR “Nice Polite Republicans” anymore. It’s more realistically: National Pentagon Radio.
As other commenters, above, have indicated, NPR has never particularly been all that “liberal” to begin with. In earlier days it WAS more like “Nice Polite Republicans.” True: there were *some* investigative pieces now & then that, you know, had a glimmer of truthiness to them that dealt with *reality,* which has long meant to conservatives that it’s some kind of “liberal hoax.”
Whatever…
Hate to say it, but any kind of “ethics” or so-called “attempts” to be fair & balanced simply will just pander to the 1% party line.
Conservatives have been lovingly brainwashed by Rush & his ilk to HATE NPR, and conservatives will continue to HATE it. It’s all about pushing the Overton window ever rightward. Nothing more, nothing less. The end.
Funny true story.
I went to an organizing meeting about Occupy Minnesota-Corporate Money Out Of Politics. I spoke, it was well received (I am speaking at the March 13th Rally at the Capitol in St Paul)
Afterwards, a young woman came and talked to me. She was very upset because I had mentioned the facts around Obama and his corporate corruption. She kept on about “You folks who talk bad about Obama never talk of the good he has done.” I asked her what that was. She talked of Lilly Ledbetter and Gays in the Military. I said, I agree but that is one tiny good, in a mountain of bad. I went through fact after fact. She was amazed. She then said “Well I listen to MPR and I never hear about this.”
I laughed and said “Oh you mean MPR as in Minnesota Pentagon Radio?” She blew a gasket. She went on and on about how good MPR was. When I told her about the FAIR (Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting) study which showed how NPR was just as bad as corporate media in pro-war news she really blew it. I told her that I knew journalists, who worked in MPR who agreed with everything I was saying. That MPR was corporate with a cutesy home town image. The other young woman listening agreed with me and even talked of Monsanto, Cargill and UBS banking involvement in MPR.
At each of these fact driven points, she blew it even more. She stormed off muttering how “you guys are making me angry.” There was no talking to her. No facts would penetrate.
We hope we planted a seed in her. I know of so many stories about the bias on MPR and NPR. The only ones who think they are “liberal” are Tea Part folks,, Rush Limburger and Democratic Party apologists.
Progressives know the truth about MPR
Minnesota Pentagon Radio.
As an aside, Wisconsin Public Radio is a whole different thing. I like WPR. A lot.
Robert
@#17
Hee Hee. You too eh?
Yeah, you did say it out loud.
Good old Minnesot-ah, eh?
Grin
I’m delighted that the Fire Doggies are greeting NPR’s policy statement with skepticism, but this is the same crowd that stubbornly judges Obama on his deeds rather than on his words. I hope that NPR does a better job than Obama on being true to its word and that the policy statement is not just a fig leaf.
Thanks for your post, Phoenix Woman.
What I said about the “believe when I see it” point…
Also on that point see this.