Journalists face a wide range of ethical choices beyond their decisions about whether to accept speaking fees and fraternize with the glitterati. One of the most vital realities that gets lost in today's media is a simple one: Reporters are not cops.
Since Watergate, journalists - especially the Washington contingent - have more and more assumed a law-enforcement role. It's an arrogant and unilateral expansion of the journalistic mandate. The public doesn't like it. Nor do people who study the political process.
Journalism should be a last resort - as was the case with Watergate - when it comes to legal investigations. Whitewater has dragged on interminably and inconclusively in the press, altering the political and social agenda of the country. The death of Navy Admiral Boorda earlier this year - after journalists charged he wore unearned combat medals - should have sparked major self-examination by the media. But the hand-wringing didn't last long.
Journalists are not in a position to properly investigate allegations of sexual impropriety either - like those made by Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones. Nobody (except a reporter) wants reporters making such judgments. Nor is it clear that these issues have any direct bearing on politicians' ability to govern.
Paula Jones' charges against the president should be reported. So should any trials resulting from those charges. But investigations of criminal private sexual or personal behavior should be conducted by trained investigators in law-enforcement agencies. The public should reach its own conclusions through coverage of legal proceedings, not through the often confusing and contradictory bumbling of FBI wannabes with notebooks and cameras. Isn't this the whole point of having a court system?
Before the wreckage of TWA flight 800 had even stopped burning, journalists were questioning the official investigation, criticizing the airline's handling of the victims' families, wondering if the medical examiner was competent, and passing along conflicting reports of eyewitnesses and contradictory, often loopy, theories. The same phenomena occurred in Atlanta after the Olympic Park bombing. Authorities are given no opportunity to do their work, or even mess it up, before the press hordes begin their quasi-investigations.
Journalism should assume its investigative posture on legal matters in extreme circumstances - when evidence of egregious corruption or wrongdoing surfaces, and the appropriate government agencies can't or won't respond.
Journalists aren't cops. They have no training in law enforcement. There are few checks on their power. The targets of their inquiries have no protection or right to due process, as they do when the police investigate them.
Public and private figures are entitled both to privacy and dignity, two rights routinely trampled by journalism. Reputations are valuable, and should be respected by media. Partly because of technologies like TV - and partly because of the media's growing herd mentality - journalism often becomes a literal mob, invading the lives of everyone from presidents, to families grieving over disasters, to criminal suspects like Richard Jewell.
Aside from the inherently distasteful nature of mobs, herds are antithetical to good journalism. Reporters shouldn't be where all the reporters are, they should be where all the other reporters aren't. It makes no sense for hundreds of journalists to be at the same place at the same time seeing the same thing - as in the thousands who gathered at the Simpson trial, or the hundreds penned into the White House press room every day.
The herd diminishes diversity of opinion and individual perspectives. It rarely collects new or interesting information, and reinforces the notion that journalism is an elitist and disconnected mob.
Journalism was meant to check the power of government through tough-minded reporting and fearless opinion, to encourage individual commentary, and to advance a number of social goods - including individual liberty. None of its founders ever saw the press as a law-enforcement agency. And there's mounting evidence that by behaving like one, the press damages democracy, abuses its power, sets impossible standards of behavior, drives talented people from public life, and creates a dangerous climate of unending controversy and political paranoia.
Interactivity should be incorporated into journalists' lives and work, in both old and new media. Journalists should insist that email addresses appear at the end of every column, story, or opinion piece in any format: in newspapers, on TV, or online.
Public discussions and commentary should be incorporated into editorial content. Online, public forums are integral to almost all editorial discussion. In old media, they're still shockingly rare. Public opinion remains ghettoized on newspaper op-ed pages and magazine letters columns, and barely exists on television.
Interactivity forces journalists to have contact with readers and viewers. It undermines journalistic tendencies toward arrogance, scolding, and elitism. An interactive Washington reporter might be less stunned every four years when he or she gets to New Hampshire and finds voters worried about the economy.
Online journalists are no better or smarter than their offline counterparts, but they're much less likely to be shocked by what their readers believe.
Media should embrace the fundamental principle that consumers should have easy access to journalists and the institutions they work for. Readers and viewers should also be given ample opportunity to express their own points of view. This means that journalism has to accept diminished power over information - a bitter pill. But the alternative is much worse: continue to lose the younger audience, become even less central to the civic life of the country, and deprive beleaguered citizens of the information revolution of civil, ethical media they can depend on for the truth.
