Social Media Guidelines for the Times Newsroom
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.
Is this for real or was it an erroneously early April Fools gag?
By not putting a strong policy in place (or rather, not consistently enforcing the policy they had) to avoid politics in the workplace, the brand has been damaged and the product they are selling has been hijacked.
Employers need to carefully weigh the pros/cons of letting employees participate in politics while they are representing the company. In the NFL that would include time on the field.
For the Times they judge that to include all social media use -- a clearly much higher bar brought on by journalistic responsibilities which hits at the core value of NYTs entire service.
When you work for a company, how much of your life does that company own? Do you have any rights as a private citizen at all if you have an employer? Can they tell you what to say in your off time? Can they tell you who to vote for? Whether or not to stand when a certain song is being played? Whether or not you can own a gun? Which political organizations to join? How about where to eat? Who to be friends with? What conferences and meetups to attend? Whether or not to smoke and drink alcohol? How much to exercise? When and where to pee and to surrender your bodily fluids (step over here for this mandatory drug test, please)? Can they own the ideas that you think of when you are not working, like they do in tech?
The most fascist governments in all of human history would salivate at the chance to exert this much control over their people. While here if you disobey, you are not sent to jail or killed, instead you lose your livelihood and health care, which for the poor approaches a similar end result.
If a company can make a reasonable argument for why they have a certain policy as a condition of my employment, I am willing to consider it. If I find the policy anathema to my personal beliefs or lifestyle then I'm not a compatible employee for that company and I won't work there. Rational people might decide to avoid even companies like Google and Facebook for these reasons!
Can companies intrude too deeply in their employees personal lives? Certainly. But what we're talking about here is not personal life but public persona as a representative of the company, so I think you've gone a bit hyperbolic and it undermines your argument.
We see companies firing employees for bad behavior inside and outside the office all the time. Weinstein would be an obviously attrocious example / the PyCon developers or the Google engineer perhaps more borderline examples. Sometime we laud these public firings other times we question them deeply. Curt Shilling was fired for a Facebook share.
I can't judge if these are all right or wrong, but I do believe they are legal and should be legal for a company to choose its employees based, in part, on how they conduct themselves. And we are free to judge companies on how their employees conduct themselves, and how they react to their employees conduct. How meta!
This feedback cycle is an extremely powerful force now due to social media but I don't think we can or should put the genie back in the bottle. There are various forces pushing in different directions and there certainly can be negative feedback when people perceive a firing to be unjust.
One thing is for sure, a company's reputation and brand is a lot more complex to manage when every employee is an "ambassador" and everyone is watching what they are doing/saying, and it's all recorded in searchable archives.
Maybe it would be great if more often we could separate unsactioned employee actions from the employer themselves. But at the same time people use it as a lever to exact control over what they perceive as misbehavior. When rational people disagree over what constitutes offensive behavior, and both sides expect the company to do something about it then shit hits the fan!
Same with the NFL. They got bullied by Trump, no two ways about it.
One of the more sensible precautions IMO. It's very easy to get a company or institution to acknowledge to your complaints when you pull the "Do you know who I work for?" card. Difficult to be unbiased when things go your way.
I mean–Imagine a life of constant vigilance against, for example, the corrosive corruption that sneaks in via the power of your employer's name to get your billing snafu at Comcast escalated.
And then every actual contact with the general population is just a litany of insults, attempts to tie your work to some grand conspiracy "the media" is engaged in, or accusations of taking money from the "global warming scientists-environmentalist complex".
C.f: the idea that the New York Times (first published 1851) is a CIA front operation, founded by a 1950's propaganda effort. Peddled downthreat (hopefully) with the "you're naive if you don't believe" shtick.
This sums up my feelings exactly https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/918864859537829889
Be circumspect. Cover your tracks. Don't show you're biased. Be biased in private!
Not taking official positions allows a veneer of objectivity, and gives weight to them when they do come out (on bipartisan positions clearly in the national interest like supporting the Iraq war, for example!) but really I think what this is about is allowing the NYT corporation to find justification to fire uppity journalists for the sake of 'unbiasedness' who step out of line. This directive essentially says "while you work at NYT you are banned from using the Internet", so expect it to be enforced very selectively.
Are we talking about the same New York Times, or are you otherwise having a "really good Times"?
> defending the status quo
Okay, you may be talking about small-c conservatism. As in "they're not in favour of throwing everything away and starting over as a civilisation". I don't know what "range of popularly supported views" you're referring to, but I doubt those views are as popular and supported among the Time's readership as you may think.
> like supporting the Iraq war, for example
Oh, look! It's their 16-year old mistake, where they trusted a journalist who mistakenly trusted her government sources who had mistakenly trusted German intelligence who had mistakenly convinced themselves to believe something they wanted to be true to impress their US counterparts. Who was, by the way, summarily fired afterwards.
Well yes, stating the the Times' readership is far removed from American popular opinion since the Times is by and for elites and elite-hopefuls who benefit from or hope to benefit from the status quo is exactly my point... How many in the US support universal health care? 60%? 70% How many NYT op eds have you seen in favor of it?
Not to mention the fact that the Times readership has been plummeting and continues to do so, so relying on this ever shrinking group as a barometer is questionable.
>Okay, you may be talking about small-c conservatism. As in "they're not in favour of throwing everything away and starting over as a civilisation". I don't know what "range of popularly supported views" you're referring to
I'll quote Greenwald since he doesn't like to mince words:
"If your goal were to wage war on media diversity in all of its forms, and to offer the narrowest range of views possible, it would be hard to top the roster of columnists the paper has assembled: Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman, Roger Cohen, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, David Leonhardt, Charles Blow, Gail Collins, Bret Stephens, with Bari Weiss as a contributor and editor."
With Bret Stephens as a beautiful cherry on top as their most recent and high profile hire. https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-b...
>Oh, look! It's their 16-year old mistake
A 16-year old mistake that is a 16-year-old ongoing war responsible for the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands and the rise of a horrific terror state. When the stakes are that high, you can't just brush off mistakes.
>where they trusted a journalist who mistakenly...
Nope, it wasn't a single endorsement, NYT was beating the drum for war throughout the entire buildup. They were entirely complicit in warming up public opinion to the idea, with article after article after...
In short: even when they present biased opinions as objective truth, they don't have whole meta-conspiracy around planning to do that. Nobody is writing these social-media guidelines thinking "this will better allow us to get away with presenting our political angle as objective truth" or anything like that.
It's like the test that Harvard put out that shows we are all at least a little prejudiced. I was a little surprised by my results, as I'm racially mixed. I didn't want to admit it was true but I spent a while pondering and, indeed, I have my prejudices.
You're right. It's possible (but far from certain) that the NYT folks believe themselves to be more objective than they are (or are capable of being). But a delusional belief in one's own objectivity and aiming to tamp down on public shows of bias is not the same as the implication in the comment I was replying to (which implied a self-awareness of bias that was being intentionally hidden publicly).
You might consider reading "Manufactured Consent", by Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky's thesis doesn't suggest that entities like the NYT are intentionally biased and crafty in hiding it. His thesis suggests that the basic nature of news media as we know it, the economic models, social structures, etc. inherently work in a fashion that reinforces mainstream thought and rejects challenges to it.
I think Chomsky is right. My point is that the NYT is behaving exactly as Chomsky would expect including my suggestion that they aren't consciously aiming to be biased and hide it. They exist in a broader context where they can't even see their own bias (which is common in many cases, even outside of this topic of journalism).
These major organs of the media function simply as a fourth branch of government.
...I can't see that.
The point of journalism is to be biased, no-one is neutral. Pretending to be neutral is a huge issue, because it means as a person you can't see your own biases.
There is a difference between making an effort to remain as unbiased as possible and pretending to not be biased or partisan. There is a difference between making a good faith effort at objectivity and claiming complete objectivity. Saying 'well everyone is biased so holding ourselves and others accountable to a standard of objectivity is bad and we should stop it" is a great way to make sure that the Kelleyanne Conways of the world get a platform.
I can certainly see why you might think that with how MSM reports today.
An unbiased human works about as well as an untrained neural network. But journalistic integrity requires objectivity despite any bias you might approach a story with.
This probably sounds somewhat radical in today's times, but that's largely because of how the media has changed. In my opinion that change has been for much the worse. An example of what I would consider phenomenal reporting is this [1], the New York Times coverage of Watergate, just before the election of 1972. It is pure professionalism. I have no clue what the author thinks of the situation. There are no moral or character judgements, labels, or aspersions directed in any way. There is no implication or connotation of anything beyond what is there. It is a simple clean and elegantly written reporting of information with all basic relevant facts quantified so much as possible. It is then left entirely up to the reader to survey the evidence and come to their own conclusions. It's unpleasant to compare that to the media of today.
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate-mys...
Let there be bias. Let it be clear what the bias is so readers can appropriate weigh the different reports.
Continue to be biased. No problem there. Just don't make the mistake of showing that bias too much.
> We can effectively pull back the curtain and invite readers to witness, and potentially contribute to, our reporting. We can also reach new audiences.
Don't lift the curtain too much. Or people will start paying attention to what's behind it. That's really straight from the Wizard of Oz. A Freudian slip perhaps.
But it is true in a way. To manufacture consent effectively, there has to be a minimal veneer of impartiality. Someone glancing at them in passing should be able to say "Look, the free and unbiased press at work".
If you want to watch the videos for yourself, look up "Project Veritas", and you can see the footage that likely prompted this post.
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in fact everything we post or "like" online is to some degree public.
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In fact, I'm not sure if 'post or "like"' isn't even a too narrow definition. For example "stories clicked" is probably a much more interesting metric than "likes", and we can never be sure that this data doesn't become public.
> our journalists
is used 14 times. Do the serfs go with the land, or can they have any private/personal online presence?
I get that the Times is using "our journalists" as a shorthand for "journalists employed by the Times" or "people who work at the Times' newsrooms" but this seems like an exclusion of many significant personal opinions from online spaces.
It also seems to be a shift from journalists having both a private persona and a separate public body of work to a single public persona who is always and constantly expected to be on the public stage - like an on-call physician, a well-known trial lawyer, a politician, a celebrity, or an actor.
We might expect that shift for a small percentage of the people in journalism - the ones whose names might be recognized by any reader or viewer - but do we want it for all journalists?