Thought experiment: what would American media be like if there were no considered value for truth in news reporting? I would guess it would very quickly devolve into the sort of tripe you got in the old Soviet Union, or that you get now in a lot of Third World countries where the President for Life’s agents control all media, except that it would be on behalf of wealthy oligarchies. The only time you’d hear bad news about Time Warner was when they were fighting with the Fox Network, and then you’d only hear it from the Fox Network.
It would be very hard for even an intelligent and interested citizen to stay informed in such a mess.
Though it isn’t too different from what we have now … remember how the Swift Boat lies were repeated endlessly by various media outlets who evidently didn’t have the resources to discover what bloggers on the Web had known for months?
There’s news and then there’s news. I guess I expect “news” to be facts. There’s an expectation of truthfulness, and I would argue that expectations can form obligations.
When I hear, say, “Celebrity News” I expect it to be, really, “Celebrity Spin and Gossip.” I don’t expect it to be honest, good reporting because, really, the subject doesn’t require that much diligence. Who cares if you get it wrong?
But news that could, potentially, actively harm people has its own responsibilities. If I tell a lie and someone gets dead because of it, then I bear some of that blame. Possiblity a lot of that blame. Potentially all of that blame.
Where does “regular” news fit in that scale? Somewhere in between, I think.
I don’t know if others have proposed this idea or not, but I’ve heard Randi Rhodes on Air America float the balloon that there should be a standard for what constitutes a “news” program – that is, if you want to call yourself a “news show” or “news reporter,” then you are bound to follow certain standards of accuracy and balance. Seems like a decent idea to me.
All I have to say is that we need to remember that news media consist of three parts. There are journalists who I think have an obligation to be truthful. There are editorial and opinion writers who are under no such obligation. And there are the owners who are not under any obligation to make public the journalists and editorial writers output if they don’t like it.