Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the stability needed to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago—and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion a falsehood.
H. L. Mencken, The True Immortal, Smart Set, October, 1919
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Edward R. Murrow
The recent events surrounding Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida once again raise the question of what constitutes a responsible Press. It would appear that the entire controversy surrounding Mr. Jones’ declaration of retaliatory Koran burning was manufactured by an un-holy alliance of Mr. Jones himself and an irresponsible Press that should have known better than to have paid attention to Mr. Jones. While I could care less about Mr. Jones and his beliefs, I care very much about the standards used by the Press in reporting “news,” especially in this time that we call the Information Age.
The post-Jones Saga commentary has focused more about how a head of steam built up around the event, rather than upon whether the Press should have reported about it in the first place. To my knowledge, there has not been a public discussion among the Press about the standards and ethics of reportage as applied to the Jones Saga. For that matter, to my knowledge there is little, if any, discussion among the saner members of the Press over whether there should even be shared standards and ethics of reportage. While such discussions may well be taking place within the ivy covered halls of journalism schools in our major universities, there is distressingly little evidence that these discussions have translated into anything more tangible than class credits for those partaking of the courses where the issues were debated.
While Mr. Jones clearly has responsibility for manipulating the Press for the purposes of enhancing his own notoriety, the question, plainly put, is why did the Press fall for the ravings of a single man who is either a lunatic, a headline grabber for purposes of self-aggrandizement, or both?
Mr. Jones is the pastor of a church of approximately 50 people in Gainesville, Florida, which, in turn, is a city of less than 125,000. Mr. Jones recently became the center of the world media’s attention when he threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks as a protest against what he sees as Islamic terrorism. Somehow, this insignificant man of less than stellar intelligence, operating from a base not usually thought of as the Paris, London or Rome of Florida, became, for one brief, morbid moment, the center of an international clash of religions and cultures that featured Presidents, a Secretary of Defense, Generals and general outrage. He could not have done it without the Press, for if he had acted without the benefit of a spotlight, his yard signs would have been nothing more than a local joke rather than a municipal embarrassment, and the actual Koran burning (had he even bothered to undertake it in the absence of publicity’s glare) would have been nothing more than an unfortunate footnote in the “Local News” section of the local Gainesville newspaper.
The first question that members of the Press should be asking themselves is why did they fall for the line this charlatan was offering and turn it into a news story in the first place? The second question they should ask themselves is why, after falling for it in a small way, did they subsequently allow it to escalate into an international crisis?
One could also ask why many of our politicians fell for Mr. Jones’ offering once the Press decided to give it legs, but I will let someone else deal with that issue. Suffice it to say that there are times when I truly wish for a national politician with the plain speaking ability of Harry S. Truman. Harry, were he still with us as President, would surely have reduced the Jones Saga to a non-event by saying something publicly to the effect of why was anyone listening to this nut in the first place. Present day politicians lack the courage to engage in plain speaking. For them, vote counting is far more important than telling it like it is.
Instead of asking itself the questions posited above, The New York Times, in a recent front page article, decided to focus instead upon a reasonably detailed recitation of the series of events that led to the September, 2010 weekend when Pastor Jones, in a state of highly inflamed self-importance, flew off to the Times’ hometown with full expectations of being interviewed and lionized by the self-same press corps that he had so shamelessly manipulated into having to interview him in this last sorry segment of a Saga that should never have been. Despite the evocative title of its article (“Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role” – to be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10media.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=Terry%20Jones&st=cse)
the article discussed only the chronology of the media’s role and failed utterly to explore the ethics of the media’s involvement.
Well, in fairness, perhaps “utterly” is too strong an adverb. The very last paragraph of the article did, in fact, read in its entirety as follows:
The episode has given rise to at least a little soul-searching within news organizations. Chris Cuomo, an ABC News anchor, wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter, “I am in the media, but think media gave life to this Florida burning … and that was reckless.”
Sadly, insofar as I am aware, it seems as if something as insubstantial as a Twitter quotation is as close as the Times – or any other major newspaper or journalistic organization in this country – has, as yet, come to a self-examination of their role in this sorry mess. From afar, I can hear the sounds of significant amounts of spinning going on in the cemeteries where Mr. Mencken’s and Mr. Murrow’s graves are located.
The article did contain a brief discussion of the announced refusals of several news organizations, in advance of the threatened burning, to broadcast pictures of burning volumes of the Koran. This paltry discussion began by noting that the Associated Press had declined to distribute such pictures, giving as its reason its “policy not to cover events that are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend.” Why shouldn’t this policy apply equally to written reportage of the Jones Saga just as it should to the pictures of burning holy books? Who knows, since the article never thought to raise that issue. The Times’ own editorial staff could only manage the following:
“A picture of a burning book contributes nothing substantial to a story about book-burning, so the offense seems entirely gratuitous,” Mr. Keller continued. “The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.”
I have to point out to both the A.P. and to Mr. Keller that there are the seeds of a viable journalistic standard and ethic here, and it is high time that journalists got together and figured one out. If the freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish, if a responsible journalistic organization should refuse to report upon events which are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend”, and if, as is true in the age of the Internet, news flashes around the world faster than Superman’s speeding bullet, then why can’t the Press arrive at a shared set of standards and sense of ethics about what is appropriate to print and what isn’t? When the broadcast of “news” of this kind can result in harm and even death to innocent people around the world who are simply going about their daily business, shouldn’t the Press consider its obligations to exercise its powers responsibly?
For those in the Press or elsewhere who will immediately conclude that I am trying to suppress reporting and deny free speech, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe strongly in free speech. I believe equally strongly that Terry Jones has a right to spew his hatred should he wish, just as much as I believe it is the right of various organizations who believe in a wide variety of disgusting ideas to march in public. In my experience, these kinds of actions usually secure the type of attention they deserve – a local mild reaction of dismay that such things can happen “here,” and a nearly universal dismissal of the disgusting ideas by means of a collective head shake of disbelief that anyone could be so stupid as to believe such things in the first place. Only by bottling up these actions can you give them a mystique and an accompanying credibility.
In fact, should the Press simply defend its role in the Jones Saga as an exercise of freedom of the press, they will be doing nothing more than engaging in the use of shibboleth as red herring. No one engaged in a serious intellectual discussion about the role of the Press in the Jones Saga is going to argue for curbing freedom of the press. While I understand that there are those in positions of power of the caliber of Mr. Ahmadinejad who might well argue for curbing the power of the press in general, note that I said that no one engaged in serious intellectual discussion would raise the issue. Mr. Ahmadinejad lacks intellectual capability and certainly can only be taken seriously because he has somehow managed to usurp a position of authority in a country of importance. While I could have well understood Mr. Ahmadinejad having a private tete-a-tete with Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones’ ensorcellment of the Press is simply incomprehensible.
Trumpeting that freedom of the press is an essential freedom that cannot be denied when faced with a call for journalistic standards and ethics would be nothing more than an excuse for a collective unwillingness of the Press to examine its own soul. The failure of the Press to find an ethical center – or to even begin the debate over what such an ethical center might look like – is astonishing in an age where “information” flashes and rattles around the globe in nanoseconds and is likely to be instantaneously elevated to the status of “Truth” by a credulous populace. And, if my belief that the Press is mostly composed of people predisposed to be gossip mongers holds any merit (see my prior posts on this topic), the more sane members of the Fourth Estate have an obligation to the rest of humanity to develop such an ethical core and an agreed-upon set of reporting standards and to set an example for the many members of their profession who feel that gossip is news. The Press is an inverted profession in the sense that while most professions suffer mightily from the actions of a few rotten apples who prove an embarrassment, the Press suffers from the actions of a super-majority of its members, since only a minority of its membership seems to have any real sense of the obligation that accompanies the unbridled power to publish that most civilized nations accord it.
The Jones Saga can still be put to good use, notwithstanding the sordidness of its occurrence. If the Press can simply acknowledge to itself that it has the power to seriously inflame international tension in the Information Age by publishing stories which are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend”, then it ought to be able to come up with standards and an ethical code that will allow it to responsibly discern when events are newsworthy and when they are a mere attempt to manipulate attention. Not every challenge need be accepted; not every crackpot’s pronouncements are worthy of being force-fed to the public.
Personally, I would have preferred never to have made the acquaintance of Mr. Terry Jones. While I defend his right to speak in Gainesville, I equally defend my right not to listen to his ravings here in Humptulips County – or anywhere else, for that matter. I find his ideas offensive, his rhetoric wooden, his thought processing ability questionable and his mutton-chop mustache deplorable. If the Press is going to develop an ethics code which will allow for the featuring of nutcases on international news streams, at the very minimum please be certain to give us, your loyal reading and viewing public, nutcases with at least some sense of style.
