What might a new media code of ethics stipulate?
To begin with, reporters, writers, producers, critics, and columnists should, with rare exceptions, decline to accept payments that aren't generated by their writing and reporting. This would include speaking and public appearance fees, consultant fees, money for advising corporate, trade, nonprofit and other advocacy groups, or revenue from any group or institution we might conceivably write about.
Reporters and writers should be able to assure their readers and viewers - and more importantly, themselves - that they are completely independent, free to write what they believe, and are not consciously or unconsciously preoccupied with loss of revenue, visibility, or influence as a consequence of what they might say.
Reporters should particularly refuse payment to appear on talk shows, Web sites, panel discussions, or other forums that reduce issues to two or three points of view, promoting controversy over rational discussion. Appearing as a "liberal" or "conservative" voice week after week for cash reduces journalists to performers whose entertainment value consists of shouting down politicians and one another. It encourages journalists to take extreme and rigid positions. It suggests journalists' views can be prepaid.
When journalists do appear in public forums as interviewers or participants, the public has the right to believe they are seeking to advance truth, expand public understanding, challenge authority, or express what they believe.
Should reporters or writers choose for any reason - their right, since no ethics code could be legally binding - to accept payment for work beyond their writing, those facts should be disclosed in the form of notes or announcements alongside their work, or published or broadcast visibly and regularly by news organizations they work for. In print or digital form, this information should be easily accessible to consumers.
The essence of journalism is that reporters are fact-gatherers and observers who stand outside the centers of power. The best reporters in American life - Paine, I. F. Stone, Mencken - were outcasts, almost renegades, who disdained the trappings of power and influence so that they could observe truthfully and honestly.
Celebrity is antithetical to journalism. Reporters should rarely appear on television, give paid speeches, blurb one another's books, or allow their work and lives to be absorbed into the star-making machinery.
They shouldn't pop up weekly on CNN, which can do its own commentary. They should also avoid intimate dinners at the governor's mansion or the White House, or Bill Gates' new mansion outside Seattle. Professionally and personally, they require independence. Reporters should be standing outside the fanciest parties watching the comings and goings, not hosting them.
Celebrity blurs the boundaries between the powerful and their chroniclers. In the minds of remote viewers and readers, the reporters become indistinguishable from the people they're covering - not monitors of power, but part of it.
Celebrity corrupts journalism and commentary, and corrodes the public's faith. It distorts opinion, generates cynicism, influences judgments, softens point of view and becomes an end unto itself. The celebrity journalist is usually, in truth, a former journalist.
