This is rich. Here’s David Brooks, complaining about a journalist penetrating a private gathering hosted by a historical society and attended by some Supreme Court Justices:
It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up.
I’ve addressed this concept of ethics in journalism—rather the lack of ethics in journalism—before. I’m addressing it again here, now that the highly esteemed (at least in some circles) Brooks has brought the matter up.
Today’s journalists news writers and opinion personalities think it’s jake to base their pieces entirely on “anonymous sources,” leaving readers and listeners no means of assessing for themselves the accuracy of the claims made or the credibility of the unidentified claimers.
Today’s news writers and opinion personalities think it entirely appropriate to treat their anonymous sources as though they actually exist, and subsequently that they are truthful solely because the writer and personality say so. Never mind that such a source, if it exists, is likely violating his terms of employment if not his oath of office by leaking, and so is empirically dishonest at the outset. Alternatively, an anonymous source, if it exists, is hiding behind anonymity out of cowardice, and cowards will always and only say what he believes will be personally beneficial with his leaks.
Some writers and personalities think it sufficient to address those points by claiming the source is a whistleblower. They consciously choose to not provide any evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues of objection before he chose to become a leaker. Again, we’re supposed to believe the writer/personality solely on the basis of his smiling face and congenial rhetoric.
Finally, and of overarching importance, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources.
Today’s writers and personalities have long since walked away from that standard. On top of that, today’s writers and personalities, and their Editors-in-Chief, refuse today to identify the standard of journalistic integrity they use in its stead.
“Journalistic ethics.” A canonical oxymoron.