Poor & Honest

Yesterday at Slate, Jack Shafer
claimed that “the best place to judge journalists is on the printed
page.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say… if you’re
judging them on their journalism. But that was not the point of his
article—which purported to follow up on an “anonymous tip” regarding
the speaking fees of New Yorker writers. It seems that someone out
there feels that New Yorker writers shouldn’t take money from anyone
but their employer, evidently because it compromises their professional
neutrality. The tipster wanted Shafer to judge whether writers should
take speaking fees, and Shafer sort of deflected—for the right reasons,
in my opinion.

I’m not sure why Shafer persists in sourcing this
“tip” to an anonymous person. It’s hardly a secret that many
journalists do all kinds of moonlighting, and it’s silly to pretend
that their little jaunts to the lectern—or the NPR studio, or the CNN
set—aren’t going to have something to do with their area of interest
and expertise.

It seemed strange to me that Shafer would insist
on attributing the charge of calumny to this anonymous source when all
you have to do is scan your TV guide, or your local University
bulletin, to catch up on who’s having their bread buttered on the
public circuit. But it becomes clear that he’s siding with the
particular writers his “source” tells him to check out—The New Yorker’s
Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, who are friends and colleagues
of Shafer’s. In other words, he wanted to reassure his powerful friends
on the other end of the ethical microscope that it wasn’t his idea.

Still,
it was a nice essay regarding the ethics of journalism. But the answer,
to us, is significantly less complex than Shafer makes it out to be: If
money compromises journalists, then we shouldn’t pay them anything,
ever. Journalists, like anyone else in any other profession, need to
worry about job security and the value of their personal stock, and
taking a multi-channel approach to reaching your audience is good work,
if you can get it.

Now, that is a much different proposition
than being paid by a subject to write about him, her, or it—which is
that bright red firewall you might have noticed between a piece of
journalism and a piece of advertising. In my view, the media
marketplace does not need the ethics cop that Shafer declines to be. In
fact, I believe it is slightly condescending to think that readers are
too stupid to sort out advertising from editorial content; they
recognize catalog copy from magazine copy.

(This, by the way,
does not mean readers automatically prefer editorial to advertising the
way editors and writers think they do— they just know the difference,
and are capable of enjoying both. Nor does it mean that we should
therefore get lax about distinguishing advertisements from editorial
material, where there is any possible confusion—if that is something we
care about. We do. Not everyone does.)

Not
long ago, I was reading the letters of Harold Ross, the founding editor
of the New Yorker. I was struck by the fact that Ross frequently
exercised his authority even over the advertising side of the magazine.
He was pathologically skeptical of all advertising, considered it a
necessary evil, pored over the advertising copy, complained if he felt
it didn’t comport with the magazine (he was famously squeemish about
ads for toilet paper) or if he felt it made dishonest claims, and even
occasionally nixed advertisements. (Imagine that happening today.) But
if you look at copies of the New Yorker from that era, you instantly
understand why Ross worried so much about it: Advertisments in the
thirties and forties were almost always narrative in form, and were in
many cases almost indistiguishable from the editorial copy adjacent to
it. While there are many contemporary examples of ads like this that
intentionally try to blur that line, I guess it is a blessing in
disguise that ads today have become so strongly image- and logo-driven.

Is
this nervous Nellyism a relic of a bygone era? I think the issue
remains, but has been simplified considerably, for one reason: This is
only an issue if you make it one, if you build your business on a
particular value like “neutrality.” If you are at the top of the
journalistic food chain, through either luck or hard work or fiat, you
will not be forgiven for the sin of putting personal gain ahead of your
employer’s integrity. In other words, you self regulate. Of course, if
your employer has no integrity, then it’s no foul.—The Editor in
Cheese