Overnight, the global to-and-fro between journalists and media institutions over social media came home to Canberra with the attack on the ABC’s policy (and, in particular, a since-deleted tweet from its gallery star Laura Tingle) by unelected Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson.
Trouble is, institutional social media policies in journalism are the application of the corporate human resources aesthetic to the integrity of the craft. They exist to protect the organisation, not the journalist.
Right now, that to-and-fro is playing out in the predictable blow-ups over how to cover the Israel-Palestine conflict in the age of social media, long seemingly approached with one big question in mind: can we just get through this without getting the organisation into trouble?
But this time around, that cautious do-no-harm (to the old media brands, at least) approach sits at odds with the demand for a journalism of moral clarity from the craft’s emerging generation and, in this case, from the usually excellent journalists on the ground in the region. And it’s crashed into the emerging reality: in most cases the brand of both journalism and of many individual journalists is stronger than the old media.
We can see the old approach in the attempts to pressure ABC and SBS reporters to remove their names from a letter urging media to “do better” in covering the conflict.
Old-style v new journalism
This time, in far-off Arizona of all places, that old-style pandering crashed headlong into the new journalism when the wire service, Associated Press, terminated a probationary reporter, Emily Wilder, over (still unidentified) social media posts. Wilder, a former member of Students for Justice in Palestine, had been targeted as “anti-Israel” by Stanford College Republicans, amplified across the right-wing noise machine.
The craft exploded. Journalists tweeted in support. Wilder’s union at AP (and the broader News Guild) called for her to be reemployed. More than 100 AP reporters signed an open letter to management protesting at failure to protect staff from online harassment. “Bad faith, not bad tweets,” Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in Thursday’s paper.
By Friday, AP management, still reeling from the Israeli missile attack on the building housing their Gaza office, was in damage control, admitting to “mishandling” the dismissal and promising to protect staff against online harassment, but stopping short of reemploying Wilder.
Although AP says she was terminated over tweets in the three weeks she was working for the wire service, the only relevant comment seems to be a May 17 tweet:
‘objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim. using ‘israel’ but never ‘palestine,’ or ‘war’ but not ‘siege and occupation’ are political choices — yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased
It was a practical application of ethical thinking — perhaps even “moral clarity” — to a complex conflict.
The same day that AP was apologising to its staff, The New York Times brought its own moral clarity to the conflict with front-page thumbnail head pics of 64 of the 65 Palestinian and two Israeli children killed in the conflict, headed “They Were Just Children”. It was an idea picked up from Israel’s Hebrew-language Haaretz the day before.
Critical stance
Haaretz (like digital start-up news media Sikha Mekomit or Local Call) has long taken a critical look at the occupation. (Late last week, Haaretz dived into fake news from both the Israeli government and Hamas, including the now notorious fake tweet from the Israeli Defence Force that its forces were on the ground in Gaza.)
But The New York Times? That’s groundbreaking. The long-term (now retired) director of leading Jewish human rights organisation the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, tweeted that it was “blood libel of Israel” and he was cancelling his subscription.
Both the AP and the Times remain strong news brands — perhaps among the strongest in the world today. But the Arizona blow-up shows how vulnerable even the most venerable can be if they fail to grasp the imperative of the moment.
Traditionally media thought they could best mitigate the risk by simply avoiding it. Getting a hard time from the outrage engine? Move the target on. Keep them away from controversial issues. Cover it up. Avoid “damaging the institution” (as former Washington Post editor Marty Baron said about perceptions of bias in the context of a sexual abuse survivor reporting on sexual misconduct).
Trouble is, as AP discovered, in the social media age, journalists have decided that the integrity of the craft is more important than the brand of the institution.
Use, lack of use, of language is important. ‘Calling a spade a spade’ can be refreshing. Calling out the Catholic Church and other Christian Churches for failing in their duty is usually not an attack on Christianity, just as an attack on the behaviour in the name of Israel or Zionism is not usually an attack on Judaism.
An attack on Morrison behaviour, in a tweet last year, for cutting money to the ABC, leading to staff redundancies, by Laura Tingle, does not threaten the integrity or impartiality of the ABC and does not require her losing her job.
Signing an open letter saying media in Australia, should ‘lift its game’ and report the Israeli/Palestine situation with more, balance, honesty and accuracy should not lead to an instruction from their media employers to remove their signatures from the letter.
We are Australian, we stand up for, and fight for, the right to protest injustice, exploitation, inequality etc.
Our Governments and our Institutions need to reflect on and ‘dial back’ their tendency to Authoritarianism,
Your penultimate sentence suggests that you haven’t been keeping up on current events in this country.
Larrikanism died during when HawKeating force fed a gullible working class that there interests were identical to the boss class.
The Rodent continued that fallacy and told every tradie that they were thrusting entrepreneurs and the unemployed were bludgers living off their sweat.
The ABC people have been undercover for years now, especially in reporting the genocidal war in Occupied Palestine.
Great piece as ever on a truly epochal shift in the core epistemology of journalism – the DNA, the workaday stuff of it. The banal atom-level power of…word selection, sentence construction, paragraph structure, management of proper nouns, titles, descriptions of abstract ideas (my ‘loss’ being your ‘death’ being his ‘casualty’ being her ‘murder’), quote compression, data harvesting, election of sources and comment, headlines, story placement, allocated space and broadcast time. It’s as if Journalism is only belatedly realizing what novelists and poets have always known: everything – everything – depends on what words you choose to use. That’s all there is to telling stories, even – maybe especially – those that have images and sounds attached to them. (A picture can just as easily tell a thousand lies as truths.)
This is an incredibly complicated moment of disruption in the way human beings communicate en masse, and it’s pretty admirable (and more than a bit relieving) to see some Journalists at least finally putting their tradecraft where Journalism should always be: at the front-line of day-to-day information collation, summation and distribution techniques. Trying to figure out a new framework that, yes, still does ‘minimum harm’…but to that hoary old platitude ‘the truth’. I think Israel-Palestine is an apt – maybe historically inevitable – material landscape in which to have a go. This is where humanity more or less learned to tell stories in the way we still mostly do today. ‘Journalism’ is a weird kind of epistemological hybrid, really: part detached non-fiction, part passionate empathetic, imaginative, speculative fiction, part objective history, part gonzoided-up hyper-empiricism (a bomb observed exploding up close is very different to one observed clinically in the lab), part bureaucratic record-keeping, part chicken-entrail sifting…all wrapped up in a fudged omniscient God third person-ish surity.
Personally, I think the J Writer has a sh*tload to answer for.
But mass information technology has finally – for the first time since she wrote, anyway – caught up to and is now outpacing human epistemological expedience (and cunning) again. Precisely as the sacked reporter says, even if you ever could, you certainly now can’t pretend that selecting an otherwise-banal label like ‘conflict’ rather than ‘occupation’ in the context of a reality like Israel-Palestine isn’t profoundly (and maybe fatally) preemptive of any shot at an ‘objective, detached truth’. We’re all journalists now, which means that everyone’s competing narrative can more or less jostle to grab exclusivity over that tossed bouquet on an equal footing, meaning it will just get shredded in the scramble, leaving no-one more (or less) legitimately engaged with it as a result, and certainly not eventually married. But the clincher is that no-one can pretend any more that their choice of words – whichever it is – doesn’t in turn feed back into the material reality, and affect it.
It’s an incredibly complex moment in which the epistemological fudge of ‘journalistic objectivity’ is in its death throes – and so obviously the ‘old school’ will resist and hate it, as it resists and hates Teh Interwebz, the chief murder weapon. Because that deceitful, featherbedding phrase – ‘journalistic objectivity’ – has underpinned the greatest vocational and thus moral free ride in information history. And in doing so, I think that across the Mass Meeja Age – which probably began around the Industrial Revolution, and certainly by last century was in full flight – that free ride has in turn, if not outright facilitated then at the very least acquiesced in, excused, sanitised, de-sensitized us all to…more material world inhumanity and barbarity than any other mode of story-telling in human history.
I have no idea how Journalism and journalists can or should navigate the next decade or so of epistemological disruption, chaos and re-invention. Only that we really, really need the best of them to throw all their talent and trade-craft at the problem, and prevail. My instinct has always been that what really defines ‘truth’ is authorial anchoring conviction, not content. So for all the obvious complexities and problematic pitfalls of the ‘moral clarity’ approach tentatively and imperfectly advocated out here…I think it’s the only viable way to go.
If we lose the art of talking with each other – and extending each other’s words good faith as we do, until we have clear reason not to – then Humanity is f**ked, even if we manage to survive climate change.
Great article, as ever – eyes unwaveringly on the truly key crisis of our crises-crammed times.
Choice and number are important, Jack. You should use “epistomology” a whole lot less.
Oh, auds. You still don’t get it, do you.
Every time you write an epistemologically anonymous comment, ‘epistemologically anonymous person of no epistemological interest or account in the Information Age whatsoever’ (new handle for ya!)…you just advertise your own epistemological irrelevance and underline one of the main epistemological points I’ve been making for a couple of decades now.
Also, you help me argue the epistemological case for a viable way ahead. Let’s try this:
I’ll stop using the word that so scares you – and hell, sling you or your fave charity a thousand bucks, too – if you declare your real human identity and use it here at Crikey comments henceforth. Come on, join the human conversation, ‘just another Teh Interwebz anonymous non-person’! It’s fun.
And like moi, shorely you’re not ‘SO INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!!!’ that anyone cares what you fart out here. Are you?
Otherwise, ‘audioio’…your words and time and effort simply don’t carry any epistemological weight. So you could probably…find something much better to do with them, I imagine?
If something is worth hearing, it’s worth the sayer putting their name to it. Rule #1 for the new epistemology. Only way through this epistemological mess.
PS: epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology epistemology…chortle…
Wot can I say, auds?! HPS major, man. To the bloke with a hammer…but you know, in here, everything kind of ‘is’ an epistemological nail. Until we’ve finished building it right, anyway.
Send me a SAE when you want that dough. 5/18A Ballast Point Road Birchgrove. Or give me a call, 0429 690 261. Cheers mate, & warmest regards.
“Trouble is, as AP discovered, in the social media age, journalists have decided that the integrity of the craft is more important than the brand of the institution.”
Thats got to be joke right ? The word integrity & journalism has never really been relevant. Julian Assange would be home in Australia now if there was integrity ! Not talking about Crikey below but the MSM in general.
John Swinton, preeminent New York journalist, at a press banquet, in the year 1880 .
There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press.You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
“News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” ― William Randolph Hearst.
On ABC related attacks, and specifics of social media use, maybe those doing the attacking could be asked what comparable benchmarks exist and how do they apply, across the board, not just the ABC?
Nowadays we have not just MPs but right wing libertarian conservative journalists spraying agitprop and other -ve verbiage constantly via Twitter etc., but when the ABC and/or anyone in the PS dares to express a private opinion, all hell breaks loose?
Interesting how white conservative libertarians in our ‘diverse’ media e.g. NewsCorp, 9F and 7WM bang on about freedom of speech for themselves while society should be ‘quiet Australians’?
Supposedly empowered Australians have become meek and afraid of words, but even more afraid of media proprietors promoting autocracy for citizens.