Media Ethics: Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Philip Patterson, Lee Wilkins

Exercise 7

News and the Transparency Standard
LEE WILKINS
University of Missouri
By many measures, 2010 and 2011 were very bad years for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its radio arm, National Public Radio. CPB found itself under attack by members of the Tea Party and some other Republicans for what they viewed as a "liberal" media agenda. Congress threatened to cut CBP's $320 million funding, a move that would have placed the financial future of about 50 percent of public radio and public television stations (most of those in smaller markets) in fiscal jeopardy. At the same time, the Great Recession that began in 2008 also took a financial toll; audience fund-raising activity-and corporate support-weakened.
Finances were not the only problem. These years included a series of significant controversies, beginning with the firing of NPR's Juan Williams for comments he made about Muslims that were broadcast on Fox News, where he also was a commentator. Ultimately NPR's top news manager, Ellen Weiss, was forced to resign over the incident. Just weeks later NPR's top executive, Vivian Schiller, who had come to public radio after working at the New York Times, was forced to resign after an audiotape of one of the organization's top fund-raisers, Ron Schiller (no relation), surfaced on the Internet. In that audiotape, Ron Schiller called some congressional Republicans and particularly members of the Tea Party racist, unchristian, and anti-intellectual. Schiller also said he believed that NPR and CPB would, over the long run, be better off without congressional funding support. Both Vivian Schiller and Ron Schiller were forced out.
All this came in the midst of professional successes, including a listening audience for NPR of more than 27 million people-much above those watching television network and cable news-and reporting that won every professional prize.
CPB had last changed its editorial and organizational standards in 2005, but beginning in 2009 launched a multiyear project to update those standards and to apply them to all aspects of CPB efforts-from program selection to fund-raising to news. The intent was a single set of standards that would inform best practices throughout the corporation. Executives hoped these consistent standards would strengthen ties with audience members and funders, including Congress. Those new standards were adopted in June 2011 and may be accessed at http://www.pbs.org/about/editorial-standards/. In many ways, these standards were similar to those that had informed the organization since its inception.
Those new standards included standards for the news organization that audiences know as National Public Radio. The standards were based on a normative framework for NPR's journalism and included an acknowledgment of the following principles: fairness, accuracy, balance, responsiveness to the public (accountability), courage and controversy, substance over technique, experiment and innovation, exploration of significant subjects and subsections on what would be considered unprofessional conduct, unacceptable production methods, and NPR's use of social media, particularly as a source for news stories. Third on the normative list was the standard of objectivity, which those who developed the updated standards linked to transparency in this way:
Beyond that, for a work to be considered objective, it should reach a certain level of transparency. In a broad sense, this spirit of transparency means the audience should be able to understand the basics of how the producers put the material together. For example, the audience generally should be able to know not only who the sources of information are, but also why they were chosen and what their potential biases might be. As another example, if producers face particularly difficult editorial decisions that they know will be controversial, they should consider explaining why choices were made so the public can understand. Producers should similarly consider explaining to the audience why certain questions could not be answered, including why, if confidential sources are relied on, the producers agreed to allow the source to remain anonymous. And the spirit of transparency suggests that if the producers have arrived at certain conclusions or a point of view, the audience should be able to see the evidence so it can understand how that point of view was arrived at. One aspiration implicit in the idea of transparency is that an audience might appreciate and learn from content with which it also might disagree.
Opinion and commentary are different from news and analysis. When a program, segment, digital material or other content is devoted to opinion or commentary, the principle of transparency requires that it be clearly labeled as such. Any content segment that presents only like-minded views without offering contrasting viewpoints should be considered opinion and should identify who is responsible for the views being presented.
No content distributed by PBS should permit conscious manipulation of selected facts in order to propagandize.
Individual media outlets-both television and radio-may decide whether to adopt these voluntary standards.
Does being transparent about process add unproductively to a journalist's workload?