June 28, 2005
When the founder of USA Today, Al Neuharth, calls the time-tested practice of anonymous sources an "evil of journalism," what does it mean? Well, for Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, it could mean jail time. For investigative reporters, it could mean greater difficulties in uncovering the truth. And for potential scandal-breaking sources, it could mean that they'll keep their mouth shut if their anonymity can not be protected. The combination of the stain left on reporting by the likes of Jayson Blair, who falsified stories while working for the New York Times, and the recent disclosure of the anonymous source, Deep Throat, the government insider who helped direct the Watergate investigation, bring new light to this old debate. Sure, nobody wants to hear of journalists conjuring up sources to fit their story, as happened with Blair. But nobody (aside from a few top official who will remain, well, anonymous), wants to restrict the job of the Fourth Estate in digging up information that the public should know. So where do we draw the line?
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism thinks that the sudden movement against anonymous sources stems from "an attempt to tighten, to eliminate a looseness that's developed over the last 20 years," and is not designed to "make it difficult to do investigative reporting." Eric Burns of Fox News Watch thinks that this has to do with the decline in trust of journalists by the public and between fellow journalists since the Watergate days. Maybe these assumptions are true, but there remain no industry-wide guidelines concerning the use of anonymous whistle-blowers. USA Today requires that its managing editors be privy to the identity of the unnamed source before an article is published. Most local papers don't even allow anonymous sources, according to a survey done by the Associated Press. During the Watergate reporting, anonymous sources were permitted, but suspected criminal activity had to be confirmed by two alternative sources before being made public. Now, Burns feels that "What is likely to happen... is that (reporters will) have to use more than one anonymous source before they're comfortable."
Should guidelines be set? Who's to write them? How will they be reinforced? Will we ever see investigative journalists able to uncover Watergate caliber scandals again? What do you think?
Whatever happens, Ms. Miller, who's being forced to disclose her anonymous sources by US Federal Courts, said she would rather spend the 18 months in jail than contradict the promise she made to those sources.
Sources: The New York Times and Fox News
ps. Editor & Publisher has let it be known that the Sacramento Bee has been unable to find 43 'people' quoted by Diana Griego Erwin, a columnist who resigned on May 11 under speculation of fabricated sources. With problems such as these, regaining public trust is only going to become harder.
Originally posted by john burke from editorsweblog.org, remediated by yatta on Jun 28, 2005 at 04:12 PM
|
unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
[+]
About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.
|
flickr/tag/
citizenmedia
[+]
|
