Adam Cohen writing in today’s NYT says that bloggers need a code of ethics because it’s
the right way to do journalism, online or offline. As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.
Ann Althouse, responds that “[w]e don't need your code of ethics” because bloggers are disciplined by the market:
In a sense, we're constantly getting hired and fired in tiny increments as individuals decide whether or not to click to our sites one more time. We're living on the edge. Mainstream journalists can whine and look on with jealousy over the things that bind them and not us, but they've got their pedestal and their paycheck, and we don't. We deserve to be different.
I said something like this in my Law and Economics of Blogging paper:
[E]ven without legal regulation and liability, many individual bloggers have incentives to avoid harming others. While it is cheap to create a blog, getting noticed may require a significant time investment in developing a reputation that will cause others to link to them. Bloggers have an incentive to avoid forfeiting this investment through inaccurate or otherwise low-quality posts.
I also note that
the relevant perspective from which to analyze regulation of blogging may be the blogosphere as a whole rather than individual blogs. Blogging aggregates the expertise and arcane knowledge of millions of people. Each blogger may know less than the average person employed in the mainstream media, and some bloggers may be careless or ignorant, but the truth eventually emerges from the universe of bloggers.
I therefore urge care in my paper before imposing regulation that could impede blogging's ability to spontaneously aggregate information.
But it doesn't follow that bloggers should shun the idea of a voluntary code of ethics. While the wide open market in which bloggers function ultimately corrects errors, no market is perfect, and there are potential costs on the way to eventual accuracy. Sometimes these costs aren’t just to the abstract “truth,” but to individuals’ reputations, privacy and mental well-being.
Moreover, bloggers aren’t so very different from the MSM regarding the need for an ethics code. The MSM also functions in a market and also may lose its audience – more quickly today than ever. But that doesn’t mean that the MSM should abandon or weaken the ethics codes it has developed (and all too often doesn't adhere to).
A blogging code of ethics is all about norms. Norms can be developed, policed and evolve spontaneously like everything else in blogging. Of course the code won’t necessarily be the same as that for the MSM, a single code may not be right for everybody, and efforts to develop a meaningful code may end up going nowhere. But that doesn’t mean that experimentation here should be any more discouraged than any other sort of experimentation in this inherently experimental medium.
Moreover, a blogging code of ethics has a political function. The MSM is fighting for its future. I believe that something like traditional media will survive, but its power and affluence will wane. Obviously, those who have their careers invested in it won’t die quietly. They will seek to tar and regulate the newcomers, like so many other market incumbents (think what traditional Wall Street investment bankers did to Mike Milken and his ilk). Nothing will help them more than the first blogging scandal, especially if they can point to a wild west mentality in the blogosphere.
I don’t see how journalist ethics like those Cohen points to – “be honest and fair,” “minimize harm,” can hurt blogging. The real danger is regulation, which, as I argue in my article, can do severe damage to the spontaneity of the medium. Bloggers should take Cohen’s article as a warning of the fire next time.
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