The first article from The Blaze discusses the ethics of journalism in general. The second gets into the sneaky, selective, dishonest editing used to put NPR in a bad light. Also comments by Jason Linkins of HuffPo. I'm more interested in the O'Keefe attack on NPR than the Lila Rose attack on Planned Parenthood.
Ends vs. Means: The Ethics of Undercover Journalism
March 9, 2011, at 3:42pm, by Emily Esfahani Smith, The Blaze
Is it ever permissible to lie to get the truth? This is a perennial question of moral philosophy and religious thought, but one that also bites into the very core of undercover journalism - –an issue that’s been in the news lately, with the work of the controversial, conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and pro-life activist Lila Rose making national waves.
You may recall that Lila Rose sent undercover agents to a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Jersey. The agents, posing as a pimp and prostitute couple, taped their interaction with a Planned Parenthood rep who eagerly gave the couple advice about procuring contraceptives and STD tests for underage sex slaves. O’Keefe, below, has been responsible for many undercover ambushes. The most famous one confirmed that certain members of ACORN were legally challenged. The most recent one exposed that certain executives at NPR are mentally challenged (which, of course, is not a crime).
These undercover videos beg an important question: can you misrepresent yourself in pursuit of some higher aim? Does the greater good ever allow you to lie?
Before you answer that question, think about this example, some version of which has been debated in many classrooms across the country. The scene is Germany during World War II. You are a German, and you are hiding Jews in your attic. Knock, knock, knock on your door: it’s the Nazis. Do you lie to them about who’s inside in order to save the innocent people hiding upstairs?
Pretty obvious answer, right? OK, try this one: you’re an intrepid journalist and you know that your grocery store is selling unsanitary meat to unassuming customers. You want to expose the store -– in the name of public health and safety! –- so you falsify information about yourself on a job application to the supermarket, you don’t disclose your true profession or aims, you work there for a while, get all of the information you need about the bad meat, and then write up a story that will make national headlines. (This really happened, by the way, a few years ago.)
Or, for a more recent example: how about an atheist journalist infiltrating Jerry Falwell’s church for the purpose of writing a tell-all book about evangelicals? You can watch the author, Gina Welch, discuss the ethical dilemmas of making friends with the churchgoers, while deceiving them, below. “I felt toxic,” she said. “I was so upset about not only what I was doing but the fact that the revelation that it was morally problematic happened so late in the process.” Nonetheless, she eventually wrote “In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church.” Ethical?
It‘s a tough issue, and here’s why: journalists define themselves -- indeed, pride themselves -- on being truth tellers and truth seekers. What does it do to their credibility, then, to lie? Fred Barnes, an editor at The Weekly Standard, who has devoted his life to reporting and writing, tells me that “It‘s dishonest for anyone in journalism to pretend to be someone they’re not.”
But this is exactly what Ken Silverstein did in 2007 as a writer for Harper’s magazine. He posed as a fake businessman to reveal that a couple of DC lobbying firms are influential and amoral actors in Beltway politics. At the time, media referee Howard Kurtz threw in a flag: “no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”
Tunku Varadarajan, the editor of Newsweek International and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concurs. “Any piece of journalism which includes material obtained by a journalist misrepresenting himself to an interviewee, or by pretending to be a person that he is not, is, in my view, ethically suspect.”
Still, Varadarajan can conceive of an exception to the rule, where “information of great public import -- or some higher truth -- can only be acquired by misrepresentation.” But even then, the undercover journalist “has to be assumed to be guilty of an ethical breach unless he can make a morally convincing -- even irrefutable -- case to the contrary.”
Journalistic ethics expert Robert Steele of the Poynter Institute has created a set of six rules to help journalists make that morally convincing case. If the journalist fulfills each and every rule, then he is in morally safe waters. The full rules appear here, but they include: ”the information obtained [must be] of profound importance,“ and undercover reporting is permissible only when ”all other alternatives for obtaining the same information have been exhausted.”
With that in mind, do Lila Rose and James O‘Keefe meet that moral bar? Steele says no. Speaking of Rose’s Planned Parenthood sting, he tells me, “it was not journalism. It was an activist-generated hoax that was not credible in motive, technique nor revelations.” Journalists, he tells me, must “seek the truth and report it as fully as possible,“ they must ”minimize harm, be accountable, and act independently.” O’Keefe and Rose do not qualify on that last point, it would seem, because “independence means the journalist should not be unduly influenced by other factors, including financial interests, competition, personal beliefs, special interest groups, etc.”
Interestingly, Barnes, who took a sterner view of undercover journalism than Steele, is more lax when it comes to Rose and O‘Keefe’s endeavors. “It‘s dishonest for anyone in journalism to pretend to be someone they’re not. This rule doesn’t apply to folks outside the profession,” he told me in an interview.
Speaking of what Rose did, Barnes says, “I’m okay with it. This was undercover work done by someone not in journalism but in politics.” And he takes a similar view of O’Keefe, who Barnes says “has succeeded in exposing people that I’m happy to see exposed. Permissible in the NPR case?” Barnes asks. “Yes, for him, but wouldn’t have been for me. I wouldn’t call it journalism. It was a political hit job and a quite clever and successful one at that.”
Unethical for me, but not for thee?
Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion, agrees with the distinction Barnes draws, but notes that “my own practice is to be above board: to tell people who I am and what I want.”
“In my view,” Kimball says, “the methods employed by O’Keefe are, so far as I know, legitimate. In effect, he conceals in order to reveal.” Weighing the moral issues, Kimball adds that “the more destructive deception, in my view, is practiced by his targets [like] ACORN [which] pretended to be something quite other than it really was.” In other words: the end justifies the means. “People are skittish about the phrase ‘the end justifies the means,’” Kimball tells me, “They shouldn’t be. It all depends on the end. And, of course, the means.”
But this flies in the face of an absolutist morality that prohibits lying always. Aine Donovan, an ethics professor at Dartmouth College, says that it is “never” permissible to lie in pursuit of the truth. We, after all, live in a culture of trust. It would be impossible to live in a culture in which we never knew whether we were being lied to or not. Could there be a distinction between our professional ethics and our personal morality, though? The Poynter Institute’s Robert Steele doesn’t think so. “Honesty is a universal ethical value that applies to all of us in our personal and professional lives. We should be honest with other people about our identity and our intentions -- unless,” he adds, “there is a significant, overriding value that trumps honesty.” Think of the German hiding the Jews.
“That is not a sign of moral bankruptcy,” says J.P. Freire, an editor at the conservative Washington Examiner, speaking of O‘Keefe’s videos. Like Steele, he begins with the question of what journalism is, but Freire ends in a different place: “At its core, journalism is about serving an audience with new information in a way they want to consume it. O‘Keefe’s found his formula for it. It’s just not mine.” On his website, O’Keefe describes himself as “an investigative journalist and filmmaker.”
The need for a universal ethic that guides both journalists and activists in their professional and personal lives is needed now more than ever as the distinction between journalist and activist blurs. Antony Thomas, a British documentary maker, has spent a lot of time thinking about what he calls “citizen journalists” and has even created a chilling documentary that explores “citizen journalism.” This is journalism 2.0. It’s what happens when ordinary citizens with cellphones go out into the world and record what they see. They are not trained reporters, they are beholden to no editors, and yet their amateur footage -- think Wisconsin, Egypt, or Iran -- makes it onto YouTube, Twitter, and eventually the major national networks and newspapers.
If Lila Rose and James O’Keefe are citizen journalists, shouldn’t they be held to the same rigorous ethical standards as everyone else trying to gain a foothold in the marketplace of ideas and truth?
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The Blaze published a second article that went into considerable detail about the deceptive editing done with the purpose of harming NPR. Here's the link:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/does-raw-video-of-npr-expose-reveal-questionable-editing-tactics/
Kudos to The Blaze! Excuse me, but I have to run to the window to check for flying pigs.
And here's comment on the situation from Jason Linkins of Huffington Post:
Last week, a Project Veritas "sting" operation directed at National Public Radio cost some NPR executives their jobs. Beginning with Senior Vice President for Fundraising Ron Schiller, who was depicted on tape disparaging the Tea Party movement and suggesting that NPR should move away from federal funding (a position with arguable merit, but probably very unpopular at NPR), the fallout eventually cost NPR CEO Vivian Schiller her job as well.
That's sort of the NPR way: when one of the humans under their employ gets in trouble for expressing their opinions, everyone starts panicking and people start getting fired. Further analysis of the original video, however, demonstrates the wisdom of the old maxim, "act in haste, repent in leisure."
Glenn Beck-branded website The Blaze may seem an unlikely defender of NPR, but when the site's editor, Scott Baker, and video production specialist, Pam Key, examined the raw footage, they found "questionable editing and tactics" and reported them all out. The observations they make in their analysis include the following:
-- The video "does not explain how the NPR executives would have a basis to believe they were meeting with a Muslim Brotherhood front group," and indeed "includes a longer section of description that seems to downplay connections of the MEAC group to the Muslim Brotherhood as popularly perceived."
-- The video is edited to make it appear that Ron Schiller "is aware and perhaps amused or approving of the MEAC['s]" advocacy for Sharia law, but Schiller's "Really? That's what they said?" remark is actually made in reference to "confusion" involving the "restaurant reservation."
-- Schiller is actually complimentary of Republicans, and prefaces his criticism of the Tea Party by indicating that it's his own opinion, not NPR's. (Plenty of conservatives and Tea Party activists have averred that NPR has treated them fairly.) Baker also finds footage in which Schiller and director of institutional giving Betsy Liley express a hesitancy to disparage the "education of conservatives" and defend "intellects of Fox News viewers."
NPR's Dave Folkenflik and Mark Memmott add their own reporting to this:
Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, says to David that he tells his children there are "two ways to lie. One is to tell me something that didn't happen. And the other is not to tell me something that did happen." After comparing O'Keefe's edited tape to the longer version, "I think that they employed both techniques in this," Tompkins says.
One "big warning flag" Tompkins saw in the shorter tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented "really, that's what they said?" after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an innocuous exchange that had nothing to do with the supposed group's position on sharia law, David reports.
Tompkins also says that O'Keefe's edited tape ignores the fact that Schiller said "six times ... over and over and over again" that donors cannot buy the kind of coverage they want on NPR.
Per Memmott, Project Veritas' James O'Keefe continues to maintain that their video is "very honest." It's easy to see why: the effects of his "sting" operation manifested themselves in several public firings, so he can couch his claims -- however dubious they may be -- in the fact that NPR's response was a de facto acceptance of the video's premise.
Which is why organizations like NPR shouldn't freak right the hell out and start firing people until all the facts are known. Had NPR just waited, they'd have Ron Schiller and his perfectly protean opinions on the Tea Party headed to the Aspen Institute, and Vivian Schiller citing the Project Veritas video's content and NPR's own coverage as a demonstration of NPR's editorial integrity. But they decided to go in a different direction.
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