Privacy

One of the most frequent and most bitter complaints about journalists is that they invade others' personal lives and publicize things that people want to keep private.

Journalists respond that their job is to truthfully inform the public, and that job involves reporting facts that some might not want known.

* In deciding what private information should be made public, how do we distinguish among what the public has a right to know, needs to know and wants to know?

* Do people have a right to privacy? What sorts of people? In what situations? How about a personal need for privacy?

* Are there any useful suggestions for handling issues that arise in this highly sensitive area? (Yes, there are!)

Remember that "rights" involve laws -- the concept of rights is essentially a legal issue.

The public's so-called right to know is far more limited than you might think. It applies to our right to access info about what the government is doing. Examples of such legal rights include open records and open meetings laws, court transcripts (usually), and (most) police records.

How about the right to privacy? It has been identified only in the past 100 years … and keeps changing as our culture changes. But the courts have said such a right does exist and can be violated in four ways:

* Intruding into seclusion or solitude.

* Publicly disclosing private, embarrassing and irrelevant facts.

* Placing someone in a "false light."

* Misappropriating someone's name or image for personal advantage.

Ethics, which involve responsibilities rather than rights, are a better bet in privacy decisions.

People do have a need for privacy. Patterson and Wilkins say this need comes from two aspects of our lives, as individuals and as members of society:

* As individuals, we need space for personal development. We cannot discover who we are, who we want to be and what is important to us if we are under constant observation.

They offer (by way of contemporary philosopher and ethicist Lou Hodges) a nice explanation of our "circles of intimacy," a way of thinking about who can know what about each of us. When outsiders penetrate to the inner circles, we lose control over information about ourselves -- our privacy has been invaded.

(I would add that we especially need privacy at times when we are most vulnerable, such as when we are dealing with grief. The SPJ guideline of "minimizing harm" relates directly to this need.)

* As members of a free society, we also need privacy as a shield against the power of the state.

A government that knows everything about us is a government that will be readily able to control us ... even when that is "for our own good."

But citizens of a self-governing democracy also have a need to know. And journalists have a responsibility to meet that need.

We need to know what our institutions and the people who run them are up to so that we can make informed decisions.

When trying to decide what info should be made public and what should remain private, need to know offers the most compelling ethical argument for journalists trying to decide what to publish and what to withhold -- how complete a version of truth to provide.

How about what people want to know?

That rationale is far less ethically defensible (common though it is in practice).

Deciding what info to run based on considerations of what your audience wants to know often leads you to make financially motivated decisions. They may or may not be ethical ones.

Here's something that's not in the book -- some suggestions of things to think about for journalists faced with ethical decisions related to privacy. These come from Garrett Ray, a friend of mine who taught a media ethics course at Colorado State University for many years:

* Accept that "rules" are seldom the answer.

There are too many exceptions, special circumstances and additional factors to consider.

* Recognize that as long as you work as a journalist, you are going to hurt people. Telling the truth inevitably will do that sometimes.

* That said, the Golden Rule is a good one to follow here. (Rawls' "veil of ignorance" serves the same purpose in this context.)

Think how you would feel if the story were about you. Is there a way to ease the pain for someone else, just as you would want your own pain lessened?

* Remember why you have that First Amendment protection.

It's because you provide info that helps citizens make good decisions. It's not a license to gossip.
* Avoid weak excuses, such as "it's news" or "people are interested."

As the gossip value of a story rises, your privacy threshold should rise along with it.

* Similarly, watch out for the "everyone else will have the story" excuse.

Don't let a competitor make your decisions for you. Someone else's decision to be unethical isn't any reason for you to be unethical, too. (As my mama used to say, just because all the other little lemmings are jumping off the cliff, you don't have to leap with them.)

* Keep your particular community in mind.

For instance, a town's size makes a difference in the effect a story will have.

* Consider your options -- all of them, or at least as many as you can think of.

Your choices go beyond running a story or killing it, as you've learned from working through Bok and the P.B.

* Respect everyone's privacy. No one should have to live under a 24-hour media spotlight.

Much of what public officials do is news. But not everything is. Nor is how their family members act.

* Protect the weak and the victims.

Some people merit special protection. Invading their privacy can be a form of violation, even if the same act wouldn't be as harmful to those better equipped to defend themselves.

This week's chapter from The Elements of Journalism isn't specifically about privacy -- but it is about tabloid and talk TV, so maybe that's close enough!

The central theme is that journalism should serve as a civic forum -- a place to talk about important issues of the day. (Remember the Hutchins Commission again: The media should serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism.)

But in the current media environment, talk has devolved into argument. And argument is polarizing -- it makes seeking consensus and reaching compromise, essential components of democracy, very difficult.

The authors offer four defining features of what they call the "Argument Culture" (a topic they explore in more detail in an earlier book, titled Warp Speed):

* Talk is cheap. Literally.

Good journalism, in contrast, is expensive.

Guess which is more tempting to produce?

* Newness becomes valued over expertise.

Energy, attitude and extremism made good television. Good journalism? Not so much, at least not the last two.

* Despite the volume (in quantity and loudness) of the public discourse, the scope of topics actually is narrowed.

Important topics, especially broad issues that are difficult to talk about, tend to get ignored. As a result, we are losing our ability to identify and address a common set of shared problems:

"The mass media no longer help identify a common set of issues.

"One of the most distinguishing features of American culture -- the potential of the nation to summon itself to face great challenges as we did facing fascism or Communism or the Depression -- now becomes doubtful" (Elements of Journalism, p. 141).

* The penchant for talk has grown into a penchant for polarization.

The perpetual food fights make problems seem unsolvable. Most of us get frustrated and go away.

These four attributes of the "Argument Culture" -- less reporting, a devaluing of expertise, an emphasis on a narrow range of hot stories, and the oversimplified and polarized nature of debate -- ultimately disenfranchise most of us.

Democracy as shouting match simply drives us away. Again, the impetus for compromise, vital to a functioning democratic system in a nation as vast as ours, is lost.

The media are not exclusively to blame for this. But they're not blameless, either:

"Unless the forum [of public discussion] is based on a foundation of fact and context ... the debate will cease to educate; it will only reinforce the prejudgments people arrive with.

"The public will be less able to participate in solutions. Public discourse will not be something we can learn from. It will dissolve into noise, which the majority of the public will tune out" (Elements of Journalism, p. 145).