PressThink: The Abyss of Observation Alone

The Abyss of Observation Alone

"You should have answered," the sniper says to the correspondent. "You could have saved one."

There is a story I heard once about the press in Bosnia. I tried to verify it numerous times with people who might know, but I never succeeded. (Possibly I will with this post.) My informants always told me they knew of things like it that had happened in the former Yugoslavia.

Let’s say then that it is not a true story, but a fiction about a journalist set in Sarajevo sometime between April 2, 1992, when the Siege of Sarajevo began, and February 29, 1996, when it was declared over.

During the siege a correspondent from a Western news agency is contacted by an intermediary, someone he knows, who has an offer: to go out one night with Bosnian Serb snipers and see for yourself what they do.
A deal is struck, and he accompanies the men to one of their perches in the hills above the city, where they train their rifles on civilians, who might be trying to cross the street. This is where the siege “happens,” in a sense. This is the action itself.

“Come here,” says one of the men, after he has located a target. The sniper motions to take a look. The reporter, who in his own mind had come to see, leans over and peers for a second or two through the lens of the rifle.

He sees two people who think they are out of range standing in an alley, completely vulnerable. That is when the sniper, retaking the lens, says: which one, left or right?

This alarms the reporter. “I have no answer to that,” he says. “I didn’t come to be involved in what you do.” The sniper throws back his head to laugh, and returns to his rifle. There is a pause. In two quick bursts he kills both people just seen through the lens.

“You should have answered,” the sniper says to the Western correspondent. “You could have saved one.”

That’s the story I heard. As I said, I don’t know if it ever happened, or if it did, whether it happened that way. Maybe it’s a story told about journalists in every war, and only the details change. What I do know is that, treated as parable (not a truthful account of what went on in the hills above Sarajevo one night, but a fiction invented from shards of fact) this story, which I have not been able to verify or forget, is about something very real and alive today.

It is the problem of publicizing evil, and of when you become a part of things by observing them.

The reporter went “only” to observe. But the sniper changed the observer into a culpable person, a participant in the criminal siege of the city from above. This was done against the journalist’s will, and so a kind of mind rape goes on within the prism of the story.

Back home, in a moral zone he can recognize, the reporter can always say: “the sniper intended to kill both of them anyway, so I had no role…” but in fact a truthful correspondent will always know that the man may well have been speaking truthfully when he said, “you could have saved one.” Those who have the power to kill, arbitrarily, can also let live on a whim, an act which equally enhances their power.

Show me what you do is the clearly implied contract for the climb into the mountains with the snipers. (And they delivered on their end.) That explains what the reporter thought he was doing: witnessing a terrible reality that nonetheless should be told to the civilized world. Sniping against civilians is a war crime, and he will be a witness to how it happens.

And of course criminal gangs and killing squads everywhere have their ways of making newcomers and by-standers into instant accomplices, because when everyone around is spread with guilt that lessens the guilt of each one. This too may explain why the reporter was brought there.

Finally, there is the moment where he peers into the lens. The abyss of observation. But the fatal step into moral involvement has the appearance of a further form of inquiry: come see what I see.

Should we turn our eyes from what bad men with guns do? Refuse to see as they see? In one of the great works of Sixties Journalism, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which is about a reporter trying to think clearly in Vietnam, there is a passage specifically about this:

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.

“You had to be able to look at anything.” This is the kind of reasoning on trial in my fable.

“Don’t look into the face of evil, you may be changed by it.” As far as I know, correspondents don’t have any kind of rule like that.

When I have told the story to people a first reaction is usuallly, “That was a crazy thing to do. He should never have agreed to go.” But what grounds would a professional news person have for dismissing the opportunity to see how the criminal snipers above Sarajevo operate? It’s part of the siege, often called the longest in the twentieth century, and the siege is responsible for the reporter’s presence in Bosnia to begin with. How can the snipers not be a part of the story?

To me it is plausible to imagine a Western journalist “going out,” because there are no clear grounds for not going. There are clear grounds for not taking bribes, for not making up quotes. But not for this.

Nor would the fruits of “snipers at work”—video footage, for example—be shunned by the global marketplace for news and documentary. On the contrary, a value would instantly be placed on it and once the uplink is made the video would start moving (and publicizing evil.)

Which might be exactly what a faction among the Bosnian Serb forces wanted.

There would be many reasons to go, if journalism alone, or let’s say professionalism in news, is permitted to supply the values. And if the marketplace does it, no problem. One goes, gets video of the snipers, gets a story, gets paid.

I believe there are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional “role” that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don’t trust journalists. They don’t trust that abyss.

These are themes playing through a disturbing and penetrating article I missed the first time, and recently came across by Robert D. Kaplan, who writes for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Balkan Ghosts, a book with its own controversies. The article was first published in the Atlantic (Nov. 2004), but here appears in the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review Online: The Media and Medievalism.

Among the many ideas he develops is that CNN’s identity is “cosmopolitan,” and this explains its clash with Fox— more fully than categories like liberal and conservative.

Still, CNN—-and in particular, CNN International-—cannot be defined simply as a left-wing network. Look at the latter’s exotic female anchors, so chic and exquisitely made-up. Rosa Luxemburg never looked like that. CNN International is a global cosmopolitan network, just as Fox News is an old-fashioned nation-state network gaudied up by the latest technology (and because the meatloaf world of the old nation-state will remain feisty for a few decades yet, Fox has hit a gold mine2).

By a “global cosmopolitan network” Kaplan means an inchoate ideology at CNN giving a trans-national identity to the news workers the network employs, who come from 50 different countries. Sort of like a clerisy, which is a parallel he develops. Their global professionalism can correct for all the biases of the individual nation states, or so it is felt among believers in the ideology.

We find something like this in the words of Eason Jordan, who recently resigned as CNN’s Chief News Executive and Senior Statesman. In a 2002 interview he described the kind of cosmopolitan ideal that Kaplan treats as a darker force: the ideology of the stateless media professional.

Jordan is asked: “How does CNN see itself or ‘brand’ itself—- are you an American network, or do you see yourselves as regionalized or international?”

We certainly tailor our programming for the marketplace; most of CNN’s consumers live outside the United States. A great deal of our programming originates from outside the United States. Many of our journalists come from outside the United States. The reality is that we are a US-based news channel, but that doesn’t mean we’re American in perspective with our international service. In fact the person who oversees all our international outlets is not an American at all, he’s British, and we hired him from the BBC several years ago.

When Jordan says with confidence “we’re not American in our perspective,” he means that CNN has transcended its roots in the system of nation states, and now stands in a sense “above” that system. Having said what the network’s perspective isn’t (it isn’t American), he has no intention of describing what it is. Kaplan calls this “a new realm of authority akin to the emergence of a superpower.”

In a way it’s the view from the sky box. I have also called it the view from nowhere. But instead of floating above the two political parties in the United States, above “left” and “right,” CNN International floats above the nations themselves. Kaplan thinks this is dangerous. He might have examined what Eason Jordan said in ‘02:

There are more than fifty nationalities of journalists who work at CNN International producing that service. If we were to move CNN’s base to Egypt maybe they’d say we’re Egyptian—you have to be based somewhere. It’s the people who produce the channel and the people who provide the reporting who are really responsible for it, and those are people from all over the world, the very best journalists and program makers we can find. No matter what CNN International does, as long as CNN’s headquarters is in the United States people are going to say, well, it’s an American service. But the reality is that it’s an international service based in the United States, and we don’t make any apologies about that.

“It’s an international service” is what worries Kaplan. He argues that the “new realm of authority,” which is media authority, works through the device of exposure, an idea he revives from Samuel Huntington’s work in the 1980s. “As secrecy became synonymous with evil in the late 1960s, exposure was elevated from a mere technique to a principle,” he writes.

Exposure is the particular terrain of the investigative journalist. It is the investigative journalist who has inherited the mantle of the old left, whatever the ideological proclivities of individual practitioners of the trade. The investigative journalist is never interested in the 90 per cent of activities that are going right, nor especially in the 10 per cent that are going wrong, but only in the 1 per cent that are morally reprehensible. Because he always seems to define even the most heroic institutions by their worst iniquities, his target is authority itself.

Kaplan thinks “politicians are weaker than ever; journalists, stronger,” one generalization of his that does not apppy at all to Washington under George W. Bush. He makes a lot of the fact that “journalists are not bureaucratically accountable for their views.”

He adds a key observation about unearned virtue when he says of journalists: “transcending politics is easier done than engaging in them, with the unsatisfactory moral compromises that are entailed.” He thinks the news tribe has become less moral but more moralistic. He says it is anti-heroic because, like the old Communist movement, it is less invested in the nation state:

During World War II American soldiers and journalists belonged to the same crowd-pack, so news coverage was more empathetic. It made heroes of American troops when the facts so demanded, which was often. American troops have changed less than American journalists have.

If that’s true it could help explain (along with other narratives Kaplan does not mention) why trust in the news media seems to have eroded so much lately, and why “their credibility is under assault as never before,” as Howard Kurtz put it recently.

Kaplan’s essay veers at times into an anti-Sixities rant, and seems to have been written about an era of centralized media power that is in many ways ending. It has other defects and I am not endorsing it all when I say: read what Kaplan wrote and argue with it. It sounds nothing like most press commentary of the day. But it sounds a lot like my fable.

Michael Herr, who like the late Hunter Thompson is a Sixties figure, said something in the part I quoted from him that crashes the ethical system of mainstream journalism, turning it upside down: You were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. It was a lesson he learned from covering Vietnam.

That’s not the way most journalists think; they say pretty much the opposite. For example: We’re not responsible for what we saw in campaign 2004, only for what we did in reporting it. That’s common sense in the profession. Herr contradicts it. So, in a way, does my fable.

To wrap up, I give you Michael Getler in his current column for the Washington Post:

The ombudsman’s perch is an interesting spot from which to watch all this angst unfold. The attacks on the mainstream media, and the attempts to undermine them, are indeed escalating. More and more e-mails have a nasty, threatening, ideological tone.

From their perch, the ombudsmen of America all report this escalation, but they do not report much progress in the hunt for ideas that would explain it. I suggest that, when there is a moment, they look into the abyss of observation alone.

After Matter: Notes, reactions and links…

Robert D. Kaplan, The Media and Medievalism. Kaplan bio.

For an in-depth and detailed review of events see The Siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995, by U.S. Army Major Curtis S. King, part of a casebook on urban warfare.

The urban area contained virtually all of the types of terrain and structures that are found in most modern cities. However, the truly dominant characteristic of the city was the ring of mountains surrounding it, placing the city in a bowl visible and vulnerable to anyone who occupied the rim of high ground on the outside edges.

Matt Welch at Reason’s Hit & Run: Kaplan’s Phantom Menace. (Dec. 8, 2004)

I’ve always admired the dour, big-sweeping, heavily book-literate international correspondetry from The Atlantic’s Robert “don’t forget my middle initial” Kaplan, author of such influential bummers as Balkan Ghosts. Lately, he’s been turning his unhappy attentions to the media, writing at least one interesting column that pointed out the great class divide separating American journalists and soldiers.
But this Policy Review media-bash, linked favorably by Andrew Sullivan and others, is a festival of absolutist hyperbole, historical overstretch, and flat-wrong analysis.

Welch notes that Kaplan makes many dumb overstatements. I agree with that.

Laura Rozen in Salon interviews and profiles Robert D. Kaplan.

Andrew Cline at Rhetorica: “A question occurred to me yesterday while reading a book called Taking Journalism Seriously—a brief, recent history of interdisciplinary academic research in journalism. I found myself wondering if journalism has become absurd.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at March 1, 2005 12:24 AM Print

What a confusing mishmash!

You start out with a pretty good discussion of journalistic ethics(that might have lead to a discussion of ethical pitfalls of blogging -- although traditional journalists have an ethical basis for not intervening in "evil", bloggers do not. How will bloggers respond when they observe someone on "their side" doing something wrong? Of course, at least with the right-wing, the answer is already revealed; they will ignore it, excuse it, or cover it up. The left, on the other hand, definitely holds their own accountable. Witness the reaction to Zephyr Teachout's (about as "progressive" a person as you will find) smear of Kos from the "liberal" community. )

We then seque into an entirely relevant discussion of Michael Herr's reporting --- Herr's experience in Vietnam gives him an entirely different perspective.

But then we veer off into an examination of some tract generated by someone affiliated with a far-right wing "think tank", the Hoover Institute. (You know you are in wingnut land any time the name "Richard M. Scaife" shows up on the list of members of the "Executive Committee".) Unfortunately, Jay doesn't bother to clue us into the fact that the author is writing to advance the wingnut agenda---its not until the very end of his discussion of Kaplan that he notes that "Kaplan's essay veers at times into an anti-Sixities [sic] rant", which is really what his essay was all about.

In essence, Kaplan's essay is an apology for absolute chauvinism in media. When an author starts from the assumption that there is something inherently wrong with journalism from an "internationalist" perspective, why bother taking his criticism of the media seriously? Kaplan obviously thinks that the function of journalism is to disseminate state propaganda, rather than provide readers with an objective view of a given situation.

Which raises the question, why is Jay Rosen treating this wingnut mouthpiece as if he was credible to begin with? It does appear that Jay himself is promoting a chauvinist media --- he presents no alternative explanations, yet cites the utterly compromised Howard Kurtz (I mean, look at who Kurtz is married to, then explain what the hell he is doing pretending to be an unbiased media critic.) No doubt Kurtz gets mentioned because he is part of Rosen's inner circle of "bloggerati".

Michael Herr has established that one of the central premises cited by Rosen here, that "American troops have changed less than American journalists have" is utter nonsense. The issue is not changes in troops or journalists, its changes in American foreign policy (from a semi-isolationist state to a nation intent upon establishing global hegemony) that resulted in "changes" in journalism. This change in the thrust of US foreign policy demanded a change in the perspective of journalism from "chauvinist" (an isolationist foreign policy justifies to a very large extent state-centric coverage of foreign affairs) to "internationalist" (when a nation starts throwing its weight around the rest of the world, journalists have a clear responsibility to ensure that the citizens of that nation are fully informed about how that nation's actions are being perceived.)

Jay wraps up with a quote from the Washington Post's ombudsman that does not seem to bear any relationship at all with the rest of the piece. The only reason I can come up with for its inclusion is "blogrolling"---if Rosen mentions Getler, there's a good chance that Getler will mention Rosen in print very soon, increasing Jay's visibility and the marketability of his efforts (like his forthcoming book....)

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 1, 2005 9:33 AM | Permalink

Let me provide a different perspective, as a young, educated, and newly conservative weblog reader:

We should look for simple, working explanations whenever possible. As an engineer I am wary of people performing "intellectual onanism" instead of looking for the simplest working solution. As a musician I am sympathetic to your expressive needs. However, they may be getting in the way of your problem solving skills in this case. Let me advocate a simpler view of the media situation.

In law, we have an adversarial system. We all agree it is better at exposing the facts then having one or more "disinterested, obejctive" judges. We all know what sort of garbage that evolves into almost immediately. In science, advances are made in an extremely competitve atmosphere, with experts unabashedly dividing into hotly contesting camps over competing theories, working to advance their pet theory for sometimes decades until massive evidence finally appears (examples: ice age geological cycle, ongoing back-and-forths in anthropological history, current debate on climate). Scientists are not "objective" in their emotional attachment to theories, only in their evidence standards, and some scientists do go to their graves refusing to admit they were wrong. In technology nothing is clearer than the relationship of competition to advancement - look at competing microchip architectures. Those architectures that are bought into on a large scale have more money and effort put into improving them, and with intense competition they will improve as fast as possible. Superior technologies that fail to attract buy-in will stagnate -- but superior and successful technologies also tend to stagnate in the absence of competition.

So has it occured to the intellectual jerk-off community that competition might be the key, and only relevant, issue to the changes in the journalistic world? Instead of looking at the amorphous cultural / political / identity politics of this or that part of journalistic culture, it makes more sense to say: media stagnated from lack of competition for about 30-40 years. That pattern is being reversed.

Let's try some problem solving: look at an ACTUAL broken aspect if the system: the contemporary journalistic wisdom has been wrong lately on many important issues, such as, oh, let's say or likelihood of success in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Instead of grandstanding about motivations and identities, let's be simple about things. In the last election, Bush won by nearly exactly the margin predicted by the major polls leading up to the election. The main stream media all decided to believe in exit poll results that they should not have believed in, leading them to be surprised when Bush won exactly as expected. Many web columnists, whose arguments I trusted, were so certain of the falseness of those early exit poll results that they were offering BETS to the mainstream media!

Well, I thought: HELL THATS A GOOD MODEL. So I looked on tradesports.com, saw that Bush-Win contracts had fallen from 66 (accurate market reaction to the real polls) to 33, and I jumped in and bought a bunch of contracts. When Bush won the contracts expired at 100, and so I made a 200% profit. This is the sort of event that changed my perspective on journalistic fact-finding, and I BET it would work for the electorate at large as well.

I think this is the model: In the long run, americans are tired of media that are always freaking wrong, and we would like people to put their money where there smug liberal mouths are. Mark Steyn has many times bet his continued pundit career on the out come of a prediction. Since the beginning of the War on Terror, he has not been wrong. While not every journalist can be Mark Steyn, he is onto something. He makes every prediction as if his career would be decided by the objective outcome of his predictions. I think it has focused his mind.

Eventually I think it will be common for most news-watchers to bet on the outcomes of media predictions. This will naturally create an economy where every pundit and organization has a constantly evolving scorecard. This will turn the hidden media reality (NY Times predicted failure in recontructing Germany, sympathized wtih Stalin, coverd up forced famine in Ukraine...) into the common, everyday media reality in a natural and surprisingly abrupt way.

And i will be willing to BET, that this level of natural accountability for being wrong will become the resolution to the problem of a post-nationalist but primarily post-modern media that does not respect facts. Because, finally, careers will ride on it.

Marc

Posted by: Marc Siegel at March 1, 2005 10:37 AM | Permalink

Let's see if we can further this thought experiment, feel free to disagree:

The sniper, who travels everyday with the premeditation to murder civilians in order to terrorize and besiege a city, is committing an internationally recognized immoral act. The sniper himself may be amoral, in a sociopathic sense, or immoral in a way that he is fully aware of his crime.

This war criminal makes an offer to a journalist that supposedly operates with a professional ethic.

"Come watch what I do. Witness my crime. Behold my power and tell my story, increasing the reach of the terror with the telling of it."

No, not all that is explicitly made obvious to the reporter. And yes, the offer is made by an intermediary not the sniper himself, but is the reporter curious about the motivations of the invitation? Should she be? Is she a player?

What motivation does the sniper have not to kill the reporter as well? He does have one, he does not kill the reporter and the reporter must believe there is a reason she will not be killed by someone who has demonstrated no problem killing civilians.

What professional ethic compells the reporter to put herself in the care of this sniper and travel with him with the intent to passively witness a war crime? What professional ethic would give her the expectation that she is a non-entity, a ghost in corporeal form, detached from the implications of the sniper's actions and her own, existing in metaphysical space - despite occupying physical space next to the sniper in his perch - from which she can view from nowhere - despite looking through the sniper's scope at his intended victims.

The fatalistic question posed by the sniper to the journalists is almost superfluous by in a way seals the deal. Don't just behold my power, don't just watch, but experience it. "which one, left or right?" It could have even been, "Which one first, left or right?"

The power of life and death Ms. Nowhere, exercised arbitrarily, with the intent to terrorize - choose, participate, get the full experience so you can write about it.

Participate so you can experience it and write about it, isn't that why you're here? Why else would you come?

And flagrantly, because there is a contract between this reporter and the sniper based on the reporter's commitment to passivity, to non-judgmental amorality, to journalism's professional ethic.

But Jay's thought excercise does not really end there. Now, the reporter must write the story. It would be unprofessional not to. And she must adhere to certain journalistic principles in telling the story. The anonymity of the sniper, perhaps. The anonymity of the location, his perch. The euphemisms of militant or guerrilla. And so on ....

And to pander, or not, to what audience? Isn't the market for this story international? Won't it have the same terrorizing effect and engender sympathies and outrage around the world, for and against?

Like I said, feel free to disagree.

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 2, 2005 12:34 PM | Permalink

I have no idea if it's intentional on your part, but there's a very Talmudic flavor to the question of observation and responsibility, and there's also quite a parallel between what you note about war criminals having an investment in involving reporters, and reporters having an investment in involving their audience. What would you say to the notion that at least some investigative reporters, the ones Kaplan describes as fueled by moral outrage, are intent on bringing their audiences into that circle of guilt, but with the opposite intention? that is, imposing guilt on the audience as a means of breaking a silence instead of sealing it?

Posted by: weldon berger at March 1, 2005 2:46 AM | Permalink

You may be aware that a similar story involving a journalist and a sniper appeared in V Schlondorff's movie "False Witness", set in Beirut in 1981.
In the movie, I think the journalist says "Stop that immediately" to the sniper who lowers his weapon and does not shoot. Thats my recollection anyway.

Posted by: TonyP at March 1, 2005 8:41 AM | Permalink

It is the problem of evil, and of when you become a part of things by observing them.

I agree, but I'd take it a step further. In your "parable", when the journalist knowingly goes out of his way to witness a war-crime, without lifting a finger to prevent it, he becomes an accomplice to that war-crime and should stand at tribunal right beside the sniper who pulled the trigger.

Posted by: SteveC at March 1, 2005 11:20 AM | Permalink

Jay’s story of the journalist and the sniper describes a failure of imagination on the part of the sniper, obviously; and less obviously but no less lethally on the part of the journalist.

An abyss, Jay says. Yes, a void in the brain and heart where imagination should reign. I am talking about moral imagination, the acts of empathy and sympathy, the higher reasons we read novels or go to plays, which is to feel for a few fleeting moments what it’s like to live inside another’s skin.

“A refusal to see men and women as dreams and dots,” is what Walt Whitman asked for in journalism. How about that as a masthead motto?

Journalism lost a lot when it severed its connection to literature. Individual journalists lost a lot when they bought into the idea that their highest powers as people lay in their becoming mere conduits fashioned to channel streams of holy facts from the complex world to simple-minded readers.

There certainly were good grounds for the journalist in Jay’s story to decline to travel with the sniper. They just were not journalistic grounds, which is journalism’s problem.

The journalist in Jay’s story is a moral nullity. He had no concept that to see is to do. That seeing is in itself active not passive and binds one inevitably into the web of human interconnection and responsibility. “It took the war to teach it,” wrote Michael Herr, “that you were as responsible for what you saw as you were for everything you did.”

Plenty of journalists – Hemingway, Herr, Hedges, etc. -- have learned this as individuals. It inevitably makes it difficult for them to continue doing their journalism in the same old way. Often they forsake journalism for literature to get down the full story – the full truth of the story – as they see it.

There is another way, which is for journalism to open more to literary style and conventions. This gets us into the tangled matter of literary journalism which far from being an exhausted topic has hardly had its surface scratched.

Journalists need to write more from their imagination, conscience, and responsibility; but readers have to learn how to read this way as well. At the moment this all falls on deaf ears in American newsrooms and living rooms.

But perhaps not on the Internet. Perhaps not on blogs. Perhaps not in the new forms of journalism now being created.

Because blogs are written mostly by freelancers as opposed to company men and women, it’s possible they are a place where conscience and imagination can make a stand.

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 1, 2005 12:10 PM | Permalink

I'm 90% certain that there was a controversial instance of a reporter looking through a sniper's rifle down in Sarajevo ... can't remember if it happened exactly like that.

As for Kaplan's essay, I criticized some aspects of it a couple months back. Basically, he ascribes to the media powers it does not have, lets his revulsion of consumer culture get the best of his analysis, and makes several absolutist statements that his own personal experience contradicts. And yet he's interesting, as always (at least to me).

Posted by: Matt Welch at March 1, 2005 12:25 PM | Permalink

There are inherent ethical contradictions in the professional ethos of the amoral observer.

It is an impossible, and wrong, ethic. Journalists do judge. They make moral judgments, even if it's to judge news value based on moral reprehensibility. And they should.

An ethic that says, "I'm not here to judge." is an ethic based on amorality. But it is also inherently unethical and immediately makes the journalist vulnerable to compromise.

It makes it impossibe for journalists to raise questions of whether this questionable act is moral when they have refused in the past to describe blantantly obvious acts of evil as immoral.

It makes it impossible to be a watchdog of your own government, if you proclaim a cloak of amorality based on an international view from nowhere.

It also allows journalists to avoid the difficulties of ethical dilemmas faced by their news subjects by creating one for themselves.

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 1, 2005 12:42 PM | Permalink

Mark Siegel: "The media stagnated from lack of competition for about 30-40 years. That pattern is being reversed." Agreed. Is everything else not worth talking about, the province of... ah, I have the phrase right here... "the intellectual jerk-off community?" Is that what a young, educated, and newly conservative man sounds like?

I like your idea of a reputation system for journalists based on their success in making predictions. It has potential. So might other ideas for how to create a reputation system for journalists as "sellers" of news, views, reports and assessments.

That's very interesting what you say about Steyn putting his career (reputation) on the line that way-- making predictions.

Is there a list online of Steyn's predictions that came true?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 1, 2005 2:37 PM | Permalink

> an offer: to go out one night with Bosnian Serb snipers and see for yourself what they do.

A reporter-voyeur is a voyeur, not a reporter.

In the end, nothing is "news" but what is useful. Nothing is "useful" but what civilizes. And what "civilizes" isn't abdication of understanding what civilizes.

That doesn't leave you blind to understanding others. Seneca (50 A.D.) always read the opposition -- either to learn to do something better or to learn to defend against something. But one can learn about others short of participating in their violence.

Last November, I wrote about "Concentric Circles":

... all we are about is manufacturing civilization, for our own safety's sake.

Posted by: sbw at March 1, 2005 3:45 PM | Permalink

It's an interesting story, but what if the Sniper had decided not to kill either of the people because the journalist wouldn't choose? The journalist cannot know ahead of time the result of his actions. He can do one of these things:

1) Make no choice which could result in 0-2 deaths
2) Choose one which could result in 0-2 deaths
3) Choose both which would result in 0-2 deaths

Ultimately the Sniper pulls the trigger; he's made the choice to kill, and his decision is what kills them. The journalist is in no position to affect the outcome of the situation short of grabbing the gun and shooting the sniper, or shooting the two people himself.

Having said that, his ability to act as an observer, to catalog what this sniper did does provide him an ability to affect the bigger picture. He can share that story, talk about how coldly calculating and inhuman this sniper was. He can talk about how tragic it was to see these innocents being gunned down. In that, perhaps he can help bring actions that end the opportunity for these snipers to do this.

Posted by: Steve at March 1, 2005 4:35 PM | Permalink

On the PressThink home page it says, "We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media." That means keeping the conscience from being absorbed by The Machine.

William Hazlitt has a couple of apropos quotes.

He says: "We have been so used to count by millions of late, that we think the units that compose them nothing; and are so prone to trace remote principles, that we neglect the immediate results."

Hazlitt also echoes Stephen Waters' comment above: "The boundary of our sympathy is a circle which enlarges according to its propulsion from the center – the heart. If we are imbued with a deep sense of individual weal or woe, we shall be awe-struck at the idea of humanity in general."

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 1, 2005 6:16 PM | Permalink

Hi Jay, thanks for your response.

"the intellectual jerk-off community?"
...
" Is that what a young, educated, and newly conservative man sounds like?"

Frankly, yes. There is a difference between people who have a natural distaste for un-testable theories and un-representative models, and those who don't. Analyzing the hypothetical feelings of a journalist in the above fable is interesting in a literary or narrative sense, but not in an investigative sense, right?

"I like your idea of a reputation system for journalists based on their success in making predictions. It has potential. So might other ideas for how to create a reputation system for journalists as "sellers" of news, views, reports and assessments."

So now we are talking about an area where there has been a lot of experimentation and research done -distributed trust matrixes, communities and webs of trust. The challenge of distributing and rating software created by any source on the internet has caused the software community a great deal of consternation. The same challenge is faced on large-scale weblog systems like Slashdot.org, in terms of allowing users to rate the value of other user's comments.

In other words, this is now an engineering question versus a social sciences blab fest. I am proposing that by "creating a market" on the outcome of predictions (I know, the Conservative's answer to everything...), you force the rational behavior to the desired goal (accuracy), and everything will flow from there.

Seeing how you are a successful and well-recognized academic in the relevant field, perhaps you'd be interested in lobbying NYU or your peers to fund an experiment in this area?

One example is the CIA threat-matrix assessment stock market program that was canned for political reasons ("You want to bet on where terrorists will attack?!"), but that was understood to hold huge promise for sifting the relevant details from the sea of noise in intelligence gathering. Other examples include tradesports.com for use in predicting election and sports results, etc.

As to Mark Steyn's predictions, diligent google work shows that columns are kept in pay-only holes after a week (no long tail there, right?), but may I suggest you email Mark Steyn about his predictions and offeres to quit on failure directly? I imagine he would be very tickled to finally discuss such a thing with an academic authority on journalism.

Thanks again for the response,
Marc

Posted by: Marc Siegel at March 1, 2005 6:20 PM | Permalink

"Blab fest." I love it. So open in your contempt.

Of course, you're in the blab fest.

You're right, Marc. The hypothetical feelings of a journalist in my made-up fable are a long, long way from an eningeering problem, or a scientific investigation. They are meant to have perhaps some literary or expressive value, but nothing "harder" than that. Plus, they are woefully untestable.

Alternatively, they might make you think.

No online list of Mark Styn's streak of successful predictions? That is hard to believe. He's one of the most popular columnists on the Web. Plus, his run of correct predictions must have something to do with the liberal orthodoxies he's not victim to, right? That too is a subject of intense interest online. You would figure someone would put that together...

Here is what you say about the exciting area of adapting what's known in reputation systems to the problems of rating journalists as information providers: "Seeing how you are a successful and well-recognized academic in the relevant field, perhaps you'd be interested in lobbying NYU or your peers to fund an experiment in this area?"

Now really, Marc-- is that how young conservatives do things? Ask somebody to give you a grant for it? Depend on the intellectual jerk off community to support the work?

Build it yourself if you think it's a good idea. (I do think so, by the way. Potentially profitable too.)

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 1, 2005 6:58 PM | Permalink

Jay -

Obviously I struck a chord with you to be getting this level of needling!

The project i suggested to you was just that, a suggestion you may enjoy exploring or just thinking about. I will make a bet with you if you would like that we will end up in that direction anyway regardless of whether you or I take part in it, but I am too busy to work on that project myself now.

The deeper level of what I am trying to criticise in your post, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that in trying to examine "what is wrong with journalism" or "what is wrong with the media", you present essentially literary modes of thinking. The only thing that I can see is actually wrong, is a strong level of factual and predictive inaccuracy that falls along very predictable ideological lines in some areas, but in others (technology, law, medicine, or any professional area) are just randomly-scattered acts of ignorance.

I am just saying there IS a simple answer, and its not a head scratcher, its tying market economics to predictive accuracy, and we can be a part of it or not, but it will happen eventually. If you look at (as I do) the intelligence community as being the public sector military research end of the journalistic industry, then the fact that the intelligence community already knows that the answer lies in that direction implies that eventually it will trickle to the private sector as well.

I appreciate the humor in calling me a socialist and everything, but are you not the academic on the cutting edge here? By making a post about it, or examining the topic yourself, you would then be contributing to making it happen. Journalism discussion as a way to make things happen.

About Mark Steyn's columns archive:
Thanks John Lynch for finding that, it didnt come up on Google, I only found the actual archives of the Chicago Sun-Times, etc., which are pay-per-view for old columns.

Not being paid to be a media researcher or commenter myself, I won't crawl through all of them to make a tally myself. But I bet you $36 (which I will pay via mailed check or PayPal if wrong) that Steyns accuracy will be greater than 95% on claims he explicitly stakes his career/reputation on.

Again, I want to strongly suggest, that if you included this challenge as part of a post on the predictive accuracy + market economics issue, then probably someone with the time and interest will actually do this for you. That is how a lot of the software running your weblog system was likely written, and it is a great use of your "pulpit".

Thanks
Marc

Posted by: Marc Siegel at March 1, 2005 9:27 PM | Permalink

Strike a chord? Many readers do that, yes. In your case, Marc, I simply don't think that being a young conservative or a believer in science entitles you to also be a jerk. And saying things like, "Has it occured to the intellectual jerk-off community that competition might be the key?" is being a jerk. If that's a chord, consider it struck.

Second, when you write:

Let's try some problem solving: look at an ACTUAL broken aspect of the system: the contemporary journalistic wisdom has been wrong lately on many important issues, such as, oh, let's say or likelihood of success in Afghanistan and then Iraq.

you are, apparently without realizing it, making statements that are of a literary and expressive nature at best. After all, I am betting you don't have any ACTUAL knowledge--like a study, real data--that would show in some verifiable and scientific way a.) what "contemporary journalistic wisdom" was on, say, Afghanistan, b.) what portion of it was predictive, c.) what those predictions said, and d.) how accurate they were given the way event turned out.

Such work is done. It's called content study.

But you didn't do any content study before dropping on us your fake fact about journalistic wisdom in Afghanistan being "wrong." What you have instead is a personal impression or perhaps it is a conviction: journalists were wrong about Afghanistan. Maybe you have in mind a few columnists who were.

I don't know why you're so confident of your impression, and why you mistake it for real knowledge, but usually the reason people do that is that everyone does it in the intellectual jerk-off community to which they belong.

Oh, and I agree with you: a reputation system for journalists as suppliers of information and analysis will be invented, whether we do it or not.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 1, 2005 10:53 PM | Permalink

Ye gods.

Marc, this is only my impression, but there are people in fields where prediction has much more impact than it does in journalism who do quite well on iffy records. Money managers and stock analysts come to mind, as do people involved in the spectacularly unsuccessful prediction of the post-invasion events in Iraq. It seems a bit unfair to me that Paul Wolfowitz can get away with predicting, against all available evidence, that the war would be self-financing while you want some poor five-figure schlub of a journalist to go down in flames for lesser sins.

SBW: If the journalist can bring the audience to the point that they're sitting beside him doing nothing as the trigger's pulled, isn't that a contribution to the advancement of civilization? I don't want to get too metaphysical here, but in that instance his job isn't so much to report what happened as to extrapolate his own guilt for not intervening into the larger guilt of a failure of civilization. That seems important to me. J'accuse.

Posted by: weldon berger at March 2, 2005 3:38 AM | Permalink

It is a good story.

Here is a little thing I wrote about the same subject, a while ago:
---------------------
See the TV action news reporter.
Report, report, report.
He's a man of action!
Always trotting the globe!
Ever ready to stand by when disaster strikes
or war ravages a country
or a plane is hijacked
or a criminal is caught.
Heroically he stands around a dramatic event
-- well, perhaps not too close --
-- maybe a few miles away from it --
-- or in a neighboring country --
and tells us what we are watching on the TV screen:
"As you can see, we are still waiting for the plane to land."
"As you can see, we are still waiting for survivors to be found in the wreckage."
"As you can see, people are starving to death all around me."
Sometimes the reporter says:
"Damn it, I can't just stand here and blab! Let me give the rescue workers a hand."
Kidding!!
The action news reporter would never do that.
He's too busy telling us what we're already watching.
-----------

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at March 2, 2005 4:59 AM | Permalink

You might find this interesting.

Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace were confronted with exactly this question. Jennings struggled with it; Wallace did not.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 6:02 AM | Permalink

As somebody who comes from the area, I have heard several versions of this story. Main elements are probably true to some extend. In fact, there is a Macedonian movie partially based on this particular premise called Before the Rain. The film’s main character is a photojournalist. You and your visitors may be interested in it.

Posted by: Bojan at March 2, 2005 8:33 AM | Permalink

and Wallace made the right decision.

One must keep in mind that, in the example cited, the Kosanese allowed the journalists to participate under the assumption that they would act as impartial observers of an alleged atrocity committed by the Americans. The American journalists, in other words, are being treated as non-combatants by the Kosanese, and for the journalists to betray that agreement would endanger all journalists.

The ambush would have occurred regardless of the nationality of the journalists in question --- if correspondents from a "neutral" country were involved, would they have any responsibility to prevent the ambush?

Finally, there is the practical aspect of the benefit of the reporting on the ambush --- the US military would be given a golden opportunity to learn more about the tactics of "the enemy" because of this report, and as a result present a loss of life of other soldiers.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 2, 2005 8:34 AM | Permalink

Hi, Steven. Yes, I was aware of that confrontation (Wallace, Jennings, and the military on PBS) with a similar question. In fact, I am partially responsible for its ubiquity.

James Fallows featured the episode in his book. This was after I told him about seeing it on television years earlier. We were seated next to each other at a Washington dinner, and spent much of the meal discussing this program. I told him I had taped it because I found it so interesting. He asked me to mail him the tape; I did and it became a key part of his book, Breaking the News.

Now it's a famous story among critics of the news media, even though it's just a thought exercise, a hypothetical-- like my story.

However, the situations are not quite the same. The key moral choice in my story is the decision to accept the invitation in the first place. Once the journalists agrees, the other events are set in train. What looks like a "neutral" choice-- see for yourself, get a close-up view, be a witness, go with them to observe--is something other than what it seems.

The intellectual puzzle (for a journalism professor) is: where would the reasoning come from for the journalist who decides that he should not go into the hills above Sarajevo to observe?

Steven writes: "Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace were confronted with exactly this question. Jennings struggled with it; Wallace did not."

Not really. Here's Fallows describing the choice I am talking about:

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening's panel, better known than William Westmoreland himself. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace of 6o Minutes and CBS. Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading, the North Kosanese had agreed to let Jennings and his news crew into their country, to film behind the lines and even travel with military units. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, Jennings replied. Any reporter would-and in real wars reporters from his network often had.

"Any reporter would." And during the show both Jennings and Wallace agreed-- they would go.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 2, 2005 8:56 AM | Permalink

Jay, you went to great lengths in describing the manner in which the sniper "involved" the journalist in the shooting of innocent victims---and virtually every one of the comments on this thread has focussed on the ethical/moral responsibility of the journalist as a result of that involvement.

Thus it is unfair of you to criticize Steven for providing another example of the kind of ethical/moral conflicts that everyone else here seems to be focussing on in response to your original post. Maybe it was not your intention to have your post interpreted the way it was; indeed, maybe you erred in using the example you cited to make your point (shades of Eason Jordan!). But don't blame Steven for what he did.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 2, 2005 9:33 AM | Permalink

Weldon: SBW: If the journalist can bring the audience to the point that they're sitting beside him doing nothing as the trigger's pulled, isn't that a contribution to the advancement of civilization? ... in that instance his job isn't so much to report what happened as to extrapolate his own guilt for not intervening into the larger guilt of a failure of civilization. That seems important to me. J'accuse.

I doubt it. Literature is the vehicle for projecting possible futures. It's how we practice how to respond.

Jay: The intellectual puzzle ... is: where would the reasoning come from for the journalist who decides that he should not go into the hills above Sarajevo to observe?

Is the journalist's job to observe or to understand? There is a difference and the latter is more useful.

Is the journalist's job to convey? You cannot convey if at first you violate the sympathetic contract with the reader.

And where is the sympathetic contract with yourself? Oh. Forgive me. I know. "I was only doing my job."

Posted by: sbw at March 2, 2005 9:42 AM | Permalink

re: the differences between the Bosnia Sniper and Kosanese "thought exercises".

In the Kosanese example, you can make the argument of journalistic impartiality witnesses a military event (ambush) between military forces. The exercise is over the ethic of loyalty and an instructive excercise if not always seen by everyone as a dilemma.

That's not true of the sniper excercise. The targets are civilians. The act is a war crime. In this case it is not a question of impartiality but amorality. A different exercise. There is no ethic of amorality. What is the dilemma?

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 2, 2005 10:31 AM | Permalink

but how does one understand without observation? It is one thing to say "snipers from the other side are reported to be killing innocent people" and a completely different thing to say "Snipers from the other side ARE killing innocent people." The only way that you can say with absolute assurance that the side killing the innocents is "the other side" is by observing them in the act of killing.

This is where the true value of journalism lies --- journalists can act as the eyes and ears of the general public---and that public is much wider than just the public that consists of "our side". Bushco has shown how easy it is to simply lie about a given topic, and get "he said/she said" coverage out of it. Absent first hand accounts, "the enemy" can claim that "our side" is killing the innocents -- and "impartial" international reporters will present it as a "he said/she said" issue.

In other words, the (actual and potential) audience for "American" journalism is far wider than just the USA, and only if American journalists do not engage in chauvinistic reporting will that journalism be considered credible by the wider audience. IF "our side" is the "good side", and "our side's" reporters provide an "internationalist" view of a situation, then the international audience is far more likely to support "our side."

But you are not doing your job if you pander to the prejudices of your audience -- journalists who worry about "violating the sympathetic contract with the reader" wind up sugar-coating (or avoiding) unpleasant truths that an electorate must confront if it is to make informed decisions in a democracy.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 2, 2005 10:43 AM | Permalink

Several people, including weldon in this thread, used the word "talmudic" for my story, and it's meant to have that kind of effect. There is no simple way to interpret it, and no single meaning. (Although many dispute this, for they have The Answer.)

Rather than throw up our hands at the disputes we find when we discusss it, the story invites us to trace very closely the logic of how things move from little step A to little step B, and so on... right up until the devasating result.

What I am trying to show you is--and you can hurl any tomato you want at me for playing professor in this post--that if the reporter can get there, to the perch with the Serb snipers above Sarajevo, by making good journalistic decisions and using sound intellectual principles, then we have a problem. For look at the result we have reached.

If you are a good, professional observer then you will become a participant in the evils of the day as long as they are encoded as news.

Or: journalism and its ethics, professionalism and its higher goods, are both radically incomplete moral systems.

Which raises the question of what they are missing. Thus: the abyss I refer to. And the perch that was an abyss.

Again, there is no single interpretation possible. There is no single side of the story. It has as many entry points as the besieged city of Sarajevo, where we once had a Winter Olympics.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 2, 2005 11:33 AM | Permalink

One more thing... have you ever felt that disorienti ng effect of traveling to another place where the people look different and you turn on your television to the local news and there's a person who doesn't look different or the same, but like a third category: televisual, the anchorman look. The look from nowhere. There's a moral system that goes with that sculpted nowhere everyman pretty boy haircut anchorman look. We should not be surprised if it turns up empty.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 2, 2005 11:41 AM | Permalink

journalism and its ethics, professionalism and its higher goods, are both radically incomplete moral systems.

not in the least. You ignore the role that truth and knowledge play in the development of moral systems.

The reporter in the "sniper" story is not really morally compromised by what he has done, because he is not in any real sense a participant in the deaths of those shot by the sniper.

Without reporters willing to observe, and report on, the very real face of evil, we are left with only an approximation of that evil -- and are very likely to "fill in the blanks" based on our own prejudices. I want that reporter to accompany that sniper, because I think its important to know what motivates him, and how he perceives himself. Without that reporter, we are left with explanations like "They hate us because of our freedoms"; when in fact "they" may hate us because we killed and maimed their parents, children, brothers and sisters. The sniper may be motivated to kill "innocent civilians" by the fact that his completely innocent sister was raped and murdered by "the other side" --- and although that does not make it "moral" to kill civilians, it does legitimately change the sniper from some embodiment of evil to a flesh and blood human being.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 2, 2005 12:47 PM | Permalink

Jay, I don't think the two cases are fundamentally different.

There's an old saying: To refuse to make a decision is a decision.

There are similar observations here: In some circumstances, a refusal to take sides implicitly is a decision to take one side.

If a reporter tries to be "uninvolved" and helps one side distribute its agitprop, are they actually helping that side?

Where is the dividing line between "observation" and "collaboration"?

I don't believe it is possible to be uninvolved. I think that "journalistic detachment" is a pleasing myth that journalists tell themselves as a way of feeling noble and salving their consciences.

Perhaps the difference between you and me is that you are a professor of journalism and I am a student (perhaps a dilettante) of military science. What I know is that publicity is just as much a weapon of war as artillery, and reporters who "get the word out" for insurgents in asymmetric military confrontations are aiding those insurgents, because publicity is the most important weapon for such insurgents.

By trying to remain disinterested, by refusing to make a judgment, by trying to treat both sides equally, journalists implicitly help such insurgencies, and must therefore accept the ethical and real consequences of doing so.

By refusing to make a decision, journalists are in fact making a decision. The problem I see is that journalists try to deny they are doing so.

I do not say that journalists should never observe and report about such insurgents. What I say is that when they do, journalists must be aware of the consequences of doing so, and understand the moral burden they bear for doing so. I do not think most journalists accept their responsibilities; instead, they seek absolution and redemption in the myth of "journalistic detachment".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 1:31 PM | Permalink

When I was a kid, I was a pacifist. (I was a lot of things when I was a kid.) When I told other kids I thought it was always wrong to kill, they hauled out the standard challenge: what if you're in the front line behind a machine gun and the enemy is charging you?

That always troubled me; when I was a kid I never had an answer. It took me years to understand that challenge and to come up with the right answer: If I were a pacifist and I found myself in such a position, then I have already committed an immoral act and am already stuck with the moral consequences of having done so. The answer is that I should shoot, or accept that by refusing to do so I let my fellows be killed. Both answers are wrong, but that's not because of the decision to shoot or not shoot.

It's because I made a decision earlier which led to me being in that place and time, facing that decision.

I would put it to you that the reporter being asked "Left or Right" is in exactly the same situation. To answer or not answer at that point are equally bad choices. The reporter is indeed morally culpable for the situation, but ethically speaking their real immoral act came earlier when they consented to place themselves in that situation.

It is not the case that the decision to choose or not choose "left and right" is the ethical issue. The ethical issue is why the reporter consented to be in there in the first place.

If a reporter makes the decision to accompany such a sniper, they must accept the possibility that their presence may lead them to be morally entangled in the events as they unfold.

If they refuse to include that as a consideration in their decision as to whether to accompany the sniper, they reveal that they are fundamentally unethical. They cannot hide behind claims of "journalistic detachment"; just by being there they are attached, not detached.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 1:38 PM | Permalink

The reporter went "only" to observe. But the sniper changed the observer into a culpable person, a participant in the criminal siege of the city from above. This was done against the journalist's will, and so a kind of mind rape goes on within the prism of the story.

That's an interesting transition from a consensual act to "mind rape". It deserves more attention.

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 2, 2005 1:46 PM | Permalink

Jay's question is: "Where would the reasoning come from for the journalist who decides that he should not go into the hills above Sarajevo to observe?"

Since this is a moral dilemma, the obvious answer is that the reasoning would come from a moral system of some kind.

The question then is, does journalism provide that moral system?

In 28 years as a journalist, the only system I ever learned for arriving at moral answers in the newsroom was "if it's legal, we can do it."

In other words, in newsrooms the law itself is used as the definitive moral system.

So is the law a good enough moral system for journalists? Or does journalism need something more -- a more complete, a deeper, moral code incorporated into the profession?

Medicine has such a code,the Hippocratic Oath, which includes not only "Do no harm" but also "Give no deadly medicine to any one if asked," "Give no medicine to induce abortion," and "With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art."

How come journalists don't have a moral system that picks up where the law falls off? Do we use the law merely as a moral crutch?

How about the Golden Rule? If the journalist was one of those people in the alley, would he want a journalist up in a belfry to observe him through the riflescope of a sniper, and then to stand by passively as the sniper squeezed off two shots?

How about the Ten Commandments as a moral code?

How about our own Stephen Waters' "Simple Wisdom?" (http://swaters.rny.com/)

How about Marcus Aurelius?

How about secular humanism?

How about the Talmud? ;-)

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 2, 2005 1:48 PM | Permalink

I have a question for the folks in this thread.

I have a hunch that understanding the faculty of sight not as something passive but rather as something active -- as active as pulling a trigger -- is a critical point here.

I think of Jesus saying "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

As a man seeth, so is he?

Somehow Michael Herr's insight is a key: “It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for what you saw as you were for everything you did.”

Does this strike a chord with anybody?

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 2, 2005 1:56 PM | Permalink

Doug, journalism uses "journalistic detachment" as their ethical principle. Journalists are present, but not involved, and hence do not face ethical questions.

My opinion is that this is baloney. It is not possible to be present without inherently being involved.

The problem is not that journalists have no professional moral system, the problem is that the one they have is ethically bankrupt.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 2:10 PM | Permalink

Sisyphus, where's your take on the amorality of an observer arise from? A truly amoral observer would either have picked someone to die to see what happened, or pulled the trigger himself. Is a reporter who watches a publicly sanctioned execution amoral because he doesn't push the button if he supports the death penalty, or doesn't attempt to interfere if he opposes it?

What you're proposing, it seems to me, is that any reporter who witnesses an act he finds morally reprehensible is obligated to interfere. Should Helen Thomas have attempted to strangle the president when he announced the invasion of Iraq?

Should the reporter who opposes the death penalty simply refuse to observe its imposition? Should the reporter who opposes war crimes simply refuse to observe their commission? Should reporters who opposed the invasion of Iraq have used their positions as embeds to sabotage military equipment or propagandize the soldiers with whom they traveled? Should reporters who supported the war have grabbed a gun and fired it? Should the cameraman who taped the killing of an unarmed, wounded insurgent have tackled the soldier who pulled the trigger, or grabbed a gun and helped, depending upon his moral take on the situation?

I'm as offended as anyone by the tendency of reporters now to report opposing sides of an issue as inherently equal out of some misguided interpretation of objectivity. But there's nothing in the story of the sniper to suggest that's what the reporter did.

SBW, maybe I was unclear: what the reporter did was provide civilization with an opportunity to prove itself. Civilization was doing exactly the same thing as the reporter, standing by and watching as war crimes are committed. His job is to make civilization aware of what it ignores and offer that entity the same choice he was given.

Posted by: weldon berger at March 2, 2005 2:14 PM | Permalink

Steven, how about in investigative reporting? Reporters are in no way detached in these cases which are considered the highest achievements in journalism. Investigative reporters, and the newspapers and TV networks behind them, target wrongdoers and relish nailing them to the wall.

Yet when a reporter does an investigative piece, it's been my experience that the ultimate yardstick for a culprits "wrongdoing" is ultimately the law. Did the culprit break a law?, is always the first and last question that reporters and editors ask. If not, the reporter has a hell of a time getting his or her story into print.

I can't recall the reporter's name, but she won a Pulitzer a few years ago for a series of stories on prison rape. After she won the prize, she gave interviews explaining the hell she went through in the newsroom, initially trying to get her editors to care even a little bit about the story, and later to publish it.

My point being, she chose a story of moral wrondoing that was outside the system of the law to provide an easy answer. As a result, she had to fight twice the battle in the newsroom to get her story into print. Detachment may be the professional code many times, but not always.

Moral indignation is a driving motive in stories at the pinnacle of the profession, yet it's not a morality that goes very deep it seems -- no deeper than the law.

Ya think?

Posted by: Doug McGill at March 2, 2005 2:26 PM | Permalink

Doug McGill,

Just to add to the fun, here's a possible military example for being responsible for what you see:

Situation: CPT Smith is the team leader for the Task Force Black Advance Party Communications Team as part of Operation Restore Democracy (Haiti, 1994). The primary focus of the planning for this mission is to provide communications support to the Special Operations invasion force under Plan 2370. On September 18th, Rules of Engagement for both invasion and permissive entry (under Plan 2380 – Uphold Democracy) are briefed to the invasion force. Under Plan 2380 ROE, U.S. soldiers are permitted to use deadly force in defense of (U.S.) life and property, but are not to interfere in Haitian law enforcement activities. CPT Smith interprets this to mean not to interfere with Haitian police activities. On September 19th, the invasion force is informed that the operation would be conducted as a permissive entry. CPT Smith and his team mount helicopters with the rest of the invasion force and proceed from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Upon arrival at the Port-Au-Prince Airport, the communications team exits onto the public street in front of the airport to gain roof access to the building. A large crowd of Haitian civilians had gathered across the street from the airport. U.S. forces are separated from the Haitian civilians by hastily employed concertina wire. Three Haitian policemen are attempting to disperse the crowd by beating the on-lookers with switches and batons. The Haitian policemen are otherwise unarmed. The intensity of the beatings leads CPT Smith to believe that the Haitian civilians would be injured if not fatally beaten. Looking around, CPT Smith identifies a Haitian police officer that seems to be in charge and approximately 6 other U.S. soldiers on his side of the concertina wire. The Haitian officer has a holstered side arm; the U.S. soldiers are carrying M16s. CPT Smith is the senior officer at the scene, the Task Force Commander is inside the airport, and the requirement to establish communications is immediate.

Is there an ethical dilemma? Possibilities:
* Violate Rules of Engagement to protect Human Rights/Life
* Postpone mission accomplishment to protect Human Rights/Life

(I also shared my thoughts previously at Pressthink, on Michael Ware's embedding with Iraqi insurgents here, here, and here.)

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 2, 2005 2:29 PM | Permalink

Weldon: His job is to make civilization aware of what it ignores and offer that entity the same choice he was given.

Too small a view.

His job -- and each of our jobs, as individuals, groups, journalists -- is to manufacture a framework of morality out of absolutely nothing but our experience... and to do it again and again for each and every generation. It isn't God-given, although some believe it to be so. Whether it appears God-given or not, we are the ones who buy in to it and who convince others to do the same, for our own safety's sake.

Steven den Beste astutely reminds us that the real choice occurred before the choice given by the sniper.

Posted by: sbw at March 2, 2005 2:35 PM | Permalink

weldon berger,

I think journalists should make a moral decision in the situations they face and act upon those decisions - even, if as SDB points out their decision is not to act or even to decide.

I think the examples you give bely an unseriousness in your approach, so let me change the sniper situation to one I consider analogous.

Hypothetically, a reporter is invited to observe the gang rape of a minor child by UN officials, agrees to tag along, and one of the group of men asks the reporter, "which one of us do you want to go first?" Outraged, the reporter refuses to chose, then dutifully observes the rape and reports it.

Posted by: Sisyphus at March 2, 2005 2:40 PM | Permalink

Doug, all categorical statements are subject to exceptions. I make no claim that every journalist, every second of their working life, invariably cleaves to the principle of journalistic detachment.

I claim that many do, much of the time, and that usually the reason they do so is not because they occupy the moral high ground but because they are attempting to avoid the ethical burden of their acts.

"I'm a journalist, thus I can and should observe what happens without getting involved or making any moral judgement about what I see" is a crutch, a way of ducking the issue.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 2:43 PM | Permalink

Let me get to the point. In Jay's thought experiment, does the journalist commit an unethical act, and if so when?

My contention is that the journalist did commit an unethical act when the journalist decided it was possible to accompany the sniper without risk of facing any ethical issues.

By deliberately choosing not to choose, the journalist chose wrongly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 2, 2005 2:58 PM | Permalink

The way I read the "parable," the journalist should suspend his abstract thinking, not worry about what's right and what's wrong, or what his responsibility is as a journalist, and reach out with his emotional capabilities and try to intuit what the sniper's reaction will be to whatever answer he gives. If he's correct, he may save a life — if not, he's at least tried to save a life. I knew a young woman once, who, walking through a park late at night, was confronted by a man who threatened to rape her. The words that came out of her, spontaneously, were "You don't want to do that" — and he walked away. She intuited the right thing to say.

As to "unearned virtue," it is true that governing is difficult, and that insofar as it is difficult, those who govern deserve our fellow-feeling. It is also true, however, that those who seek to govern usually have mixed motivations — to seek the public good on the one hand, and to seek personal power, and/or the power of some minority they represent (ideological faction, business, ethnic or religious group, etc.) — i.e, a vested interest. It is, ideally, the role of journalists to "keep the bastards honest," to keep a check on self-, or narrow vested interest in government. To call the practice of this "unearned virtue" strikes me as bizarre. Journalists should be pointing out the failings of government.

I would argue that trust in the media has been failing for two quite different reasons:

(1) instead of acting as a check on government, journalism has degenerated into "gotcha" and "horse-race" coverage. Journalists have allowed themselves to be absorbed into the political process, since these are precisely the concerns of politicians themselves. The average citizen could care less about these things, and can see that journalists have joined the game, rather than standing critically outside it.

(2) as they have become better paid, journalists have lost touch with the lives of much of the population. "Homelessness," important though it may be, is primarily a concern of the well-off; the concerns of the working poor, and the working class itself, are ignored. Those who are ignored become bitter and angry. Rush Limbaugh is able to exploit that anger because the press ignores it.

And as to where Kaplan comes up with the idea that 90% of things are going right — what world does he live in? Certainly not this one.

Posted by: Bob Ludlow at March 2, 2005 3:59 PM | Permalink

Bob Ludlow: "Journalists have allowed themselves to be absorbed into the political process ..."

If that's problematic, then are there other processes that journalists have allowed themselves to be absorbed into?