There have been several interesting cases involving media ethics in the news cycle of late. In January, theater artist Mike Daisey’s one-man show highlighting unsavory aspects of Apple’s manufacturing processes in China was broadcast on the public radio show “This American Life.” Problem was that Daisey had made up many of the sensational details in the show, a fact that, once discovered, caused “This American Life” to run an episode-long retraction. You may have also caught the bizarre news story about Jason Russell, the producer of a viral video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, which had Russell being detained by police after he was found running around naked and yelling incoherently in his California neighborhood. Russell had also recently come under attack for playing loose with the facts. The issues and the moral quandaries they raised were summed up nicely in this recent piece by David Carr of the NYT.
It’s easy for people in this business, myself included, to rail against theater that masquerades as journalism, but this instinct is not very productive. Like it or not, traditional media has taken a backseat to YouTube videos, blogs, and podcasts. Today, everyone with a cell phone and internet connection is a journalist – that’s just the world we live in.
But while it’s pointless to fight it, it is worth stressing the fact, whenever possible, that news and information that comes from advocates with a vested interest is not true journalism. It’s propaganda. Even if it supports a cause we believe in. And it’s in everyone’s best interest to recognize this distinction.
A good litmus test for this is currently unfolding as global warming activists take the news of a poor sugaring season and run with it, blurring the lines between weather and climate, turning sugarmakers into polar bears, making complicated issues simple to suit the (albeit well-intentioned) narrative they’re promoting. In the last few weeks, I’ve read separate news stories that have told me that sugar content is lower today than it was in the 1950s due to stressed maple trees, that the sugaring season comes 11.4 days earlier than it used to, and that in recent years sap has been off flavor because of tree stress.
None of this jives with my experiences as a sugarmaker.
I’m intrigued by the hypothesis that sugar content might be declining, but before such a decline is reported as fact, a journalist needs to scrutinize the methods involved with this “discovery” and ask how you can compare sap from today with sap from yesteryear when sugar content varies from year to year, tree to tree, run to run, and always has. As far as taste is concerned, the syrup we made this year, despite the wacky weather, was as good as anything we’ve ever made and lighter colored than usual. And as to the notion of an earlier season, yes it was early this year. But here’s our first boil date and last boil date from the last 10 years:
2003: March 9 – April 13
2004: March 1 – March 27
2005: March 14 – March 31
2006: February 17 – March 29
2007: March 12 – March 27
2008: March 5 – April 7
2009: March 3 – April 2
2010: February 28 – April 2
2011: March 10 – April 9
2012: February 19 – March 17
As you can see, it’s impossible to pin down “sugaring season.” There’s no fixed start and stop date, and there never has been. So if something has an amorphous beginning and end (that varies widely from region to region), how can we make a blanket statement that it’s starting 11.4 days earlier than it used to?
In each of these scenarios – Mike Daisey’s expose of Apple, Jason Russell’s expose of Joseph Kony, and an activist’s (or misguided journalist’s) invocation of maple sugaring as ground zero of climate change – mistruths are being construed, either consciously or unconsciously, as the lesser of two evils. This justification supposes that since there is good science that indicates that global temperatures are rising, and since there is documentation that some links of Apple’s supply chain are unsavory and exploitive, and since there’s evidence that seems to indicate that Joseph Kony is a horrible human being, then a little hyperbole to bring attention to a problem is not only not bad, it’s potentially good. Daisey expressed the position this way when Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” asked him why he didn’t come clean about his Apple lies during fact checking.
“I think I was terrified,” Daisey said, “that if I untied these things that the work, that I know is really good and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care, that it would come apart in a way where – where it would ruin everything.”
On some human level, this line of thinking is perfectly understandable. If I’m telling a fish story, does it really matter if the fish was 12 or 20 inches? I mean, I caught a fish, after all. Such lies become even harder to resist when we’re arguing about something we “know” we’re right about. If a football fan, for instance, insists Jets quarterback Tim Tebow is a better quarterback than Tom Brady, who among us wouldn’t foam at the mouth and ask how you can even compare an option quarterback, with an arm that would make Garo Yepremian shake his head condescendingly, to a man who threw 60 touchdowns in a single season in 2008 (or was it 50? 2007?). Not that this has ever happened to me.
But outside of fishing and football, white, black, or rainbow-colored lies do matter, and they matter precisely because they can ruin everything. In the case of climate change, every time Mother Jones circulates a story like this, with a sensational headline, a ridiculous picture of a Japanese maple leaf, and reporting suggesting that “once-flourishing maple trees are shedding leaves too early in the season and producing sub-par sap,” a global warming skeptic gets a free pass to say: “See? These people have no idea what they’re talking about;” or worse: that the whole idea of climate change is a vast left wing conspiracy and the planet is, in fact, cooling. BS plus BS equals BS, and this whole important issue gets reduced to a partisan game of who can tell the biggest whopper.
I believe that the planet is warming up, that humans are contributing to this, and as the planet continues to warm there will be negative ecological consequences. Every time there’s an ice storm, I hold my breath, pray for my trees, and wonder if it’s a manifestation of climate change. But if we’re to build any consensus around environmental policy that seeks to address pollution and greenhouse gases, we have to speak to each other honestly. Journalists have to deal in facts, not half-truths. Activists should too if they want to be taken seriously.
Old school, fact-based journalism may have taken a backseat to populist internet reporting that blurs the line between theater and news, but journalists can still stand tall as beacons of integrity – as priests and sages in this quest for the truth.
David Carr – bless him – opened his New York Times piece with this lede:
Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater truth? The short answer is also the right one.
No.
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