I wish journalists would come up with some professional standards and make the title licensed, like doctor or lawyer. Right now we all recognize how important journalism is but journalists themselves run the gamut from ethical investigative journalists to clickbait manufacturers. Imagine if journalists also had to adhere to the equivalent of attorney client privilege for sources.
Honestly I think it's time journalists take back some of the responsibility and importance of their roles that's been stripped by colleague and company malpractice (and the side effects of a business model twisted inside out in rapid succession), as many DO recognize their importance. But like politics any real "talk" of media quickly devolves into sports-like tribalism and never gets beyond hating the 'players' not the game itself.
CAJ particularly has done some good explanations in the past (though I haven't read it since I was forced to, in university!) https://caj.ca/Ethics
If biggest media companies were interested in upholding any ethical standards - the would have been doing that already. Allowing them to create a coalition and giving that coalition any more power would make things only worse.
The whole point of a license is to reduce the gamut of people who can practice a profession to just those people who do it the way the license specifies. In a world such as ours, and a country such as the US, it will inevitably become the target of corruption and a position of immense power over the media. Even if it could be a good idea, I don't believe we live in a world where it would be executed in a way that maintains freedom of the press.
It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.
I am on board with ethics education as a way to impart societal values. I'm pretty sure it's a component in most journalism degrees, but perhaps it should be part of early education more distinctly as well.
If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It's absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it's still up.
[1] except that one time Tiel funded a lawsuit
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/22/super_micro_chinese_s...
I must admit, the ability to sway stock prices is pretty far from what I worry about when I think of bad ethics in press, but it does happen to be the kind of thing that would make licensing prone to corruption. The money influencing that kind of corruption would be right at the door of the licensing body, just waiting for the first person to crack the door open.
It's not that rogue journalist influencing stock market is bad, it's bad, but that's not the point. What really bothers me is that that there are no mechanisms on media company level to punish or at least disincentivize faulty reporting.
We encounter misinformation on a daily basis, but can't do anything about it. We can't even notice it, unless topic in question happens to fall in our area of expertise.
My optimistic side would hope that putting education in schools about misinformation and how to critically think about and analyze journalism could at least help the issue.
The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don't have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client's back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.
If you license individuals, how do you categorize what is and is not journalism, and where do you stop? Photojournalists, blogs, for fun school magazines, local newspapers? Are radio shows journalism? Youtube channels? Do I become an unlicensed journalist if they hold misinformation? Thinking of the worst case, a corrupted governing body could quietly pick and choose who they want to take penalize for not practicing with a license, or penalize them out of existence even if they have one.
That benefits big news corps while stifling open/free journalism with risk. For one example of what I mean by that but in a different industry, I will never run a website that could have users upload media in my country, because we have no safe-harbour laws. If you are at risk of penalties, many people just won't start.
You can't expect the journalists to uphold ethical standards when the market rewards garbage rage-inducing clickbait.
How do you prevent independent journalists selling pieces to certain outlets without unfairly placing the burden on the journalist? Is it a list of proscribed publications? How does a publication get on the list? What happens to all the "good" journalists who work for an organisation when it gets put on the list?
What, exactly, is a journalist? Does it include columnists who write opinion pieces? If not, how do you prevent an outlet from running more and more "opinion pieces" masquerading as news? If you get defrocked for doing something your employer considers highly profitable, they can just rebrand you as a columnist.
What does it mean to be licensed? What does having a licence allow you to do that you can't do without one? Is this your "press pass" allowing you to ask questions at briefings? There have been cases recently when this has been revoked on a whim. Is it just to get a byline in a printed newspaper? Again, they can rebrand unlicensed journalists as runners, and print the piece under the name of a real journalist.
Journalism is not a terminal career like medicine or law. If you get thrown out of one of those professions, you lose your livelihood. There is nothing else that you are as well trained for that pays as well. You have to start at the bottom of something else. Most journalists are not particularly well paid. Former journalists can earn as much, if not more, writing press releases and advertising copy.
A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented:
* e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up,
* people are so paranoid about giving medical or legal advice they have to say things like "I'm not a doctor but... I'm not a lawyer but..."
etc.
In the case of doctors, pharmacists and lawyers,things like surgery, controlled drugs, rights of audience are easy to restrict. If you are not one and try to do the job anyway, you won't get very far.
As a client, I cannot use a partitioner who is not licensed in my jurisdiction. If I have a video consultation with a real foreign doctor, they still can't write me a prescription I can take to my local pharmacist. No matter how good the doctor is, they are made deficient by not being registered with the GMC.
A journalist writes and publishes articles about current affairs. You can't legally prevent people doing that without a catastrophic infringement of free speech.
Every day, I read articles from publications from many countries. Those articles are not made deficient by the fact that they are not written by NUJ members.
Plenty of people read and believe bunkum written by people who don't even pretend to be journalists. Sticking little "licenced by..." Logo on the real stuff won't make a difference there.
But the people this is deliberately not recognising is bloggers. And to be honest, I'm seeing better journalism being done by (some) bloggers than (some) paid journalists now (not their fault - the business model for journalism is a mess, while the model for blogging is working).
But this obviously fails as seen in this instance (and many others). Companies have interests that do not align with the public's interest of ethical standards. Much like we've generally understood (but unfortunately not really everywhere) that letting other industries regulate themselves isn't a good idea, I don't think it's any different in the media.
Also an easy target to politicise, and dangerous to society if the far left/right end up running such a board and dictating that their opponents are wrong.
I see limited to no news value in publishing his name and substantial risk of harm, but I'm a frequent reader and admirer of the blog.
I think anyone who is not a sociopath would consider this proof of a “substantial risk of harm”.
I wouldn't be opposed to the story running under a fictional name, even though that would probably not be to Scott's liking either.
In the specific case though, given a really well established pseudonymous online identity, that is the central subject of the article, the marginal utility of the additional information you can check seems uniquely low. At least if the subject is just the pseudonymous activity of the author.
At the point where the NY Times is reaching out to write an article about you, I think you have likely crossed that threshold. Scott's best move would have been to refuse an interview in the hopes that it would kill the story. But even that might not have mattered. If your goal is to be both famous/influential and pseudonymous, you probably need to work a little harder to protect your anonymity.
Same problem with so-called fact-checking. It's politicized, which means it adds nothing over the chaotic political debate we already have, except a false veneer of objectivity.
This is possibly one of the easiest ways to create a police state if you make journalism "regulated" (i.e. government approved) ((or if you're a nutter, corporation approved))
There's so many instances of abuse, lying and laziness that seems low standards are common through the profession and countries.
In general I tend to see them as activist, with very few exceptions of people that tries to approach truth.
Nowadays it really doesn't matter if they write for a local newspaper or WAPO, it's just so common that your default approach should be looking at every piece as propaganda.