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'Letters from Haiti' - should links to NGOs have been included?
Go back to: General discussion
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/world/americas/20haiti.html - Would it have been appropriate for this author to have included links to NGOs so that readers could immediately act on any feelings of sympathy or would that have been considered manipulative? I know that I would have donated had such links been available. At what point does the article change from journalism to shil?
How many people read that article in its original presentation at nytimes.com? And how many people read it on a blog, on their friends' wall, etc? And even among those who read it at nytimes.com, how many discussed it there vs. in another online community?
On the web, they say, everything's a link. Meaning that every connection that could be made between the article's subject matter and other resources is possible, simply by knowing the keywords to search. But even more literally than that, when an article becomes part of the social commons - to be passed around, commented on and informally syndicated - all those possible connections actually manifest as hypertext links added by other readers. So one question is: is it the author's role to make those connections? Could they even hope to do it well? Would the author's choice of NGOs be as relevant to a given reader as those suggested by their peers?
But the real question is about objectivity and neutrality, and that's a much bigger topic. In my opinion objective journalism is largely a myth, and I think more people are coming to that same view with the development of two parallel phenomena:
1) the conspicuous de-emphasis of the mainstream media on serious critical and investigative journalism, tending more towards accepting government and establishment reports at face value
2) the proliferation of news sources on the web which don't even pretend to adhere to a traditional journalistic policy of impartiality.
Basically, people are coming to assume by default that a given news item is coming from a biased angle. On balance I think this is a good trend, because it encourages people to approach their news sources more critically.
So while it might be kind of pointless, I don't think it would be manipulative for the author to include links to NGO's. Readers on the web have enough agency to decide for themselves how to interact with both the piece itself and any incidental shilling.
The NYTimes has a hefty brand and linking to NGOs gives those linked, more legitimacy than others. Even if that was not the NYTimes intent. Readers make connections from printed text that often was not the writer or the publisher's intent. Many readers will not do the vetting of NGOs on their own. Most will not. They'll find who has been the most mentioned and pick those.
Sure, there's no such thing as objectivity. Never has been. And you didn't need newspapers to be on the chopping block to make objectivity a think of the past. But there is such a thing as fairness. There's nothing wrong with offering names of groups that are working to help others. Those working to help are part of the story. But realize that merely listing links puts the burden on the publisher to either vet them out beforehand, just as you would any other part of a story, or put a strong warning that these have not been vetted.
Marlon, when I did a high school journalism workshop more than a decade ago, I remember that we were told to turn to the "objectivity" section of our workshop materials and then we were told to tear it out of the book. This served as a lesson that journalists are not objective and should not pretend to be. Since then I learned that the key thing is to be fair. I think it's a matter of allowing different views to make their case but in the end the information they offer should let readers determine what is truth and what isn't.
So in the case of the NGOs, there is no harm in giving the NGO info. If anything I hope it would encourage readers to explore the organizations and whether they are doing what they're supposed to do.
Some good thoughts on the above care of Jay Rosen interview on the Economist.com:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/jay_rosen_media
See the section on "The View from Nowhere."
Interesting. It occurs to me that this concept of objectivity might be an anachronism linked to that other much-eulogized anachronism: the newspaper.
In a media landscape with only a few (or possibly only one) newspaper comprising the total news available to a given reader, the burden on journalists to represent each side equally is considerable. In such an environment, bias on the part of a newspaper distorts a significant amount of news available to the public, and could have a serious effect on public discourse.
In the decentralized media landscape we're seeing emerge, the burden on an individual journalist or outlet to give an even-handed account is much less. The idea that someone would read a single story or a single publication on an issue and form a complete opinion based on that is much harder to imagine today. Each story is just a part of a larger media collage assembled on-the-fly by the reader herself.
So sure, there's some need for a sense of fairness, but much more loosely than before. You could say that with decreased power comes decreased responsibility. I don't think that eliminates concerns about media bias or manipulation on a broader scale, though.