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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 24, 2007
Journalistic ethics
There are circumstances in which journalists must make important moral and ethical decisions, to serve the common good. A good example came up this last week in Austin, Texas. A little boy was accidentally struck and injured by a car, during a “Juneteenth” celebration. A passenger who stepped out of the car to see how badly the boy was hurt, was beaten to death by a mob that formed spontaneously.I have been unable to find any report in the mainstream media that identifies the race of either the murder victim, or the perpetrators. It’s an ethical principle you’ll find in any contemporary media style book. Discerning readers could anyway figure it out, from the Hispanic name of the victim, and the occasion for the crowd. Had the victim been black, and the mob been white, however, I daresay the ethical principle would have been overlooked, and the fact trumpeted in banner headlines. This was the case when, in the early 1990s, for instance, video of white Los Angeles police beating a black Rodney King was shown repeatedly, with excited and misleading commentaries, during and after the trial of the former, even though the race riots this triggered across North America were reasonably foreseeable. Any plain and logical ethical principle can be twisted, once ideology comes into play. In this case it is “political correctness,” which holds that e.g. “hate crimes” can only be committed by white people, “spousal violence” only by men, “religious intolerance” only by Christians, etc. In my experience, both direct and indirect, reporting is routinely adjusted to confirm and illustrate these imposed stereotypes. Yet, even though the decision to selectively report the event in Austin was “politically correct,” I agree with it. No public good would be served by stirring up racial animosity between America’s black and Hispanic communities. The issue is a more crucial one in reporting from abroad, from places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where we have troops on the ground, fighting for cause against some of the most cruel and bloodthirsty monsters it has been the misfortune of this planet to house. The recent journalistic uproar, in Canada, about the fate of enemy combatants our troops have captured, once transferred to Afghan jails, or the international outcry about Abu Ghraib, or periodically about incidents at Guantanamo, are among the more breathtaking examples of media-triggered hypocrisy. In almost every case, the journalists only find out about the irregularities from the military, and then only because the military have been doing something to stop them. So the only purpose served by sensational reporting is to assist the enemy in his propaganda. Journalists in previous generations would have all but ignored such stories, out of the moral sense that even the truth should not be made to serve evil. But they were not the kind of “urban intellectuals” who dominate the trade today. Paradoxically, the effect of e.g. the New York Times putting Abu Ghraib on its front pages for many months in succession, was to reduce the allied propensity to take prisoners. A further paradox: this was not a bad thing. Since military people tend to be far smarter than urban intellectuals, they adapt tactically on many levels while the intellectuals are still mouthing the same old malicious clichés. From the reports I see from the field in Afghanistan in Iraq, it is clear that our soldiers have learned the importance of trapping and killing ALL of the Jihadis. For an escaped terrorist will go on to kill many more defenceless civilians; and a captured terrorist is likely to become a cause celebre for the media. Fortunately, the media are loath to report when we or our allies succeed in killing terrorists, for fear it may make our soldiers look competent or even heroic. Unfortunately, they respond quickly to rumours of "collateral damage." More than one soldier has estimated to me, that for every civilian life saved in crossfire in Afghanistan or Iraq, ten are lost in sucker-punch terror strikes further down the road. Moreover, civilians who remain in the line of fire are generally those who are helping the Jihadis, and if they live will continue helping them. So it makes humanitarian sense not to be too fastidious in the selection of explosives and angles of fire. It just doesn’t make “good optics.” To be plain, I am not against selective reporting, any more than I am against moral and ethical clarity. I am against the kind of selective reporting that can only serve the evil, at the expense of the good. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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