Dangers of deception

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 8, 2006

WEVE been working journalists for more than 40 years, and like most of our professional colleagues, we believe our job is to clarify not confuse, to play straight with our readers and listeners, not deceive them.

But every mainstream media outlet is under enormous pressure these days from declining audiences and advertising revenues. And that makes it very tempting to bend old rules and ignore inconvenient principles in the name of reclaiming lost customers.

Two major media players, the Los Angeles Times and NBC News, have recently faced these temptations. But they reacted very differently.

The Times swiftly dumped a columnist, Michael Hiltzik, who posted anonymous comments on Web sites praising his own work. As the paper stated in an editors note: Employing pseudonyms constitutes deception and violates a central tenet of The Times ethical guidelines: Staff members must not misrepresent themselves and must not conceal their affiliation with the Times.

In the case of NBC, the newsmagazine Dateline set up two stings. Through Internet chatrooms, men were lured to houses in Florida and Ohio, seeking sex with underage partners. Once there, they were filmed by NBC cameras and arrested by local cops.

Instead of being dismissed for their deception, the NBC employees were praised for boosting the ratings of their flagging show, and certainly nabbing child predators aids society and attracts viewers. Producer David Corvo argues that the value of the story (and presumably the value of the ad revenues it produced) outweighs some of the journalism traditions weve followed in the past.

In our view, however, the Times did it right and NBC got it wrong. Its almost never proper to dismiss journalism traditions, no matter how good the story or how high the payoff. And each of these cases is worth a closer look.

Times columnist Hiltzik confessed his sins, but his defenders said it was all OK, that everybody creates fake IDs on the Internet, that the outdated conventions of the mainstream media dont apply in cyberspace.

Times editors dont see it that way, the editors note asserted. The Web doesnt change the rules for Times journalists.

The editors are right. The Web is an enormously valuable tool, and we roundly applaud the fact that individual consumers have so many more choices today, including choices that bypass the mainstream media. But as those choices expand their reliability declines.

Bloggers can say anything they want, without the traditional checks of editors, producers and lawyers, and thats fine, as long as readers know what theyre getting and proceed with caution. But readers of the L.A. Times, on the Web or on paper, deserve to know that standards of accuracy and openness still apply in full.

While print outlets like the Times feel threatened by the Internet, network news is facing competition from reality programming, dramas that are made to look real, but in fact are highly-staged, made-for-TV events. This is fake reality, but it sells, and newsmagazines like Dateline are in deep trouble.

Steve Roberts latest book is My Fathers Houses: Memoir of a Family (William Morrow, 2005). Steve and Cokie write for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and can be contacted by e-mail at stevecokie@gmail.com.

So their response is to create their own form of fake reality, the kind of hidden camera productions stressing sexy and sensational stories that can compete with American Idol. In fact, the Dateline series, To Catch a Predator, is specifically aimed at going head-to- head with Foxs Idol during the May sweeps.

At this point, the line between news and entertainment, between fact and fiction, has virtually disappeared. But NBCs sins dont stop there. They paid over $100,000 to an organization called Perverted Justice to help stage the stings, a partnership that smacks of checkbook journalism. And the groups head, Xavier Von Erck, told The Washington Post that he dismissed ethical guidelines in journalism as just silliness.

Is this the kind of partner NBC news really wants?

Then theres the cooperation with local police, who were alerted to the stings and hovered outside the houses to make arrests when the would-be molesters emerged. Catching bad guys is a good thing, but the price is high. NBC loses its ability to check and criticize police conduct and raises the real possibility that it will be summoned to court as a prosecution witness when these cases come to trial.

At the heart of To Catch a Predator is deception, the very sin that Michael Hiltzik was fired for committing. This form of fake reality might make good TV, or good entertainment, but it makes lousy news. The mainstream media desperately needs new ways to make money and survive, but trashing journalism traditions is not the way to do it.

Steve Roberts latest book is My Fathers Houses: Memoir of a Family (William Morrow, 2005). Steve and Cokie write for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and can be contacted by e-mail at stevecokie@gmail.com.