Credibility

Delegating Trust: An Argument for an “Ingredients Label” for News Products

Despite the fact that there are no secret handshakes, no Masonic rites or other esoteric indications denoting membership in the society of journalists, a bond of unexamined trust exists among them.

This bond is not a very strong one, because in the subculture they inhabit, a sceptical frame of mind is highly valued. All truths are subject to examination (or at least that is a highly-favoured conceit). What remains largely unexamined is an enormous, unmapped territory in which reporters freely appropriate the work of each other, rarely with attribution. A consensus view of the general state of the world is thus adopted without much thought about it.

Here’s a microscopic view of how it happens: a reporter reports, and other reporters notice or are assigned a follow-up. Sometimes errors are encountered. But often, in the need to “advance” the story, a new chapter is simply written, and the original story becomes a canonical piece of general knowledge.

This is especially evident when the source story comes from a respected news organization or news service, such as Reuters, CP or is distributed by a syndication network such as CBC’s ENS, or CTV’s DNS.

News editors for the most part rightly assume that if the originating producer is credible, the story is credible. One might view this as a kind of “delegated trust”, obviating the need for fine-grained fact-checking or re-interviewing news sources. It certainly saves a lot of time and money. And for the most part, this shared universe of trusting belief rarely creates embarrassment for its members.

But that alone is not evidence that this society of journalists actually “gets it right.” Since there are no other competing social structures that produce a comparable, timely, and popular stream of intelligence about the events of daily human life, the overall veracity of the news stream largely goes unchallenged. And this lack of competition – added to the tendency of journalists to trust one other – only deepens the epistemological frailties of our global news reporting network.

Unfortunately, these problems are worsening as a consequence of the proliferation of news sources and the availability of vast amounts of generic news distributed on the Internet.

Increasingly, news services such as Reuters and ITV are commissioning the work of freelancers, especially in remote areas. Who are these freelancers? What are their bona fides? As a reporter working for a small news operation, say in Prince George, B.C., can I call these freelancers to verify their sources and the validity of the people they interview? Most news managers would see this as an absurd waste of time and money. Even if the source of the material is highly reputable, such as ABC’s NewsOne syndication service, “end-user journalists” do not have the luxury or latitude to do their own fact-checking.

Non-traditional news tipsters and emerging content providers, such as bloggers and photo-enabled, mobile phone users with a taste for capturing catastrophe, add to the stew of news-like stuff. The fact is that stories are now being pieced together, quilt-blanket-style, by editors and reporters with too much to choose from and too little time for vetting.

To meet these problems, the news industry is turning to computerized Content Management Systems (CMS) to catalogue and manage these “assets” and move them into production assembly lines.

In 2000 – 2001, ABC News began developing a powerful digital media gateway, to overcome a growing bottleneck of incoming and outgoing material. Over the years it had built up a sophisticated news feed service that distributed (via satellite) raw video, cut news stories and production sheets. There were multiple daily feeds, faxes, schedules, etc. And it wasn’t just news content – networks and their affiliates also had to move advertising spots, movies, stock footage, and the like. Until recently, all of this content was analogue – which meant multiple handling by recording and transmission engineers, machinery with moving parts like tape recorders and playback decks. The machinery was very expensive to maintain, and difficult for the content people to access.

The introduction of Digital Media Gateways, like Pathfire, began to control that flood. By either digitizing analog material or creating content in native digital formats, this material was much more easily distributed by satellite and downloaded into a form where the content folk could access it with minimal intervention. The next step – eliminating expensive satellite transmission – was made possible by high-capacity networks using Internet Protocol (IP) to distribute all this content. ABC NewsOne began a test of an IP network in 2001, allowing news producers to receive the feeds directly on computers.

Instead of having to wait for a satellite feed to be down-linked, recorded by technicians, and delivered on tape at specific times, producers could access “thumbnails” of feeds (in low-resolution format) directly from their desktops, whenever the material was ready. Hi-resolution versions can now be downloaded exactly the same way.

For a reporter, the initial impact was liberating. She no longer had to wait for a fax to announce the “feed time” — when a run of syndicated stories would be transmitted by satellite and then down-linked to the control room. For there, it would have to be recorded on a Video Tape Recorder that could only be operated by a skilled technician, who would then dub it and (hopefully) call the reporter when it was done.

The Pathfire system completely collapsed this complex, news production line. The reporter could now simply wait at her workstation and see the roster of coming stories from ABC. Included would be the production details, including running time of the item, potentially a text introduction, and the names and titles of those interviewed.

Clicking on a thumbnail of an item would launch a Windows Media Player (WMP) on her desktop and a low-resolution version would play. Another click and she could route the data stream to a robot video encoder which would “fetch” the hi-resolution version, and automatically make this available to the edit suite.

The downloaded story could thus be cut apart, and useful elements included in a local version. Since most news organizations subscribe to multiple news services, digital media gateways have now made it possible to create journalistic amalgams (“meltdowns” as they were called) in which very little original material might be required.

The recursive nature of this process is immediately apparent. Since some of the syndicated material was similarly culled from a multitude of sources, the end product was really an “amalgam of an amalgam”.

Try then to trace the delegation of trust in such a system.

Currently there is no convenient way to signal to the news consumer how the material they receive was collected, no way to indicate the bona fides of the originating collector and no way to validate what has been included and excluded in the final product.

This delegation of trust is forced on the unsuspecting news consumer, with no discussion and of course, no real debate about this system. Another way to view this is to consider that, unlike the food we consume, with laws insisting on the strict labelling of ingredients and the provision of nutritional information, consumers digest our news products largely in the dark.

And yet it is possible to imagine ways to rectify this situation, without going the route of official regulation.

Good newspapers often attribute (either in the byline or in a footnote) when “files” from other sources have been used. This is a useful piece of information for the news consumer, and it is even possible, if one has a sharp eye, to discern what the file material is likely to be.

However this is a practice rarely used in broadcasting or in online journalism. According to the Law of Delegated Trust, the publisher of material gathered from trustworthy proprietary sources (such as CP, AP, UPI, Reuters, ITV, etc.) assumes that all material thus received has previously been certified as accurate according to accepted journalistic practices.

In no case that I am aware of – except for those rare times when a news syndication service has transmitted an egregious error – do news organizations routinely explain the way this works to their consumers.

The consumer has no idea that this law exists. There is no rule of disclosure that is accepted industry-wide. There is no label on news products to inform the consumer of the “ingredients.”

When there is no system to inform or disclose accepted but hidden news practices to consumers, the news practices themselves suffer, and the risk of a catastrophic “meltdown” of trust becomes inevitable.

With the increasing dependence on digital networks for the collection and distribution of news products, the industry must develop a way to certify their output, in the same way that many other industries are doing.

For example, in the lumber industry, a variety of “forest certification” measures to prevent over-logging or logging of old growth forests are being implemented by governments, end-users, and organizations. Lumber produced under strict guidelines are stamped with a seal of approval. Retailers and consumers are thus reassured that their purchases are as sustainable as possible. The same is true for organic and “fair-trade” produce.

Can news be certified? Can we include in our journalism information about the way we collect and report information? These are questions that beg a wide and noisy conversation.

Anonymity of Reporters

Anonymity has troubled journalism since its earliest days. From the beginning of “the news”, reporters have had reason to conceal their identities. In 18th century England, journalists critical of government wrote under pseudonyms to avoid being identified and charged with seditious libel. In Zimbabwe, where press freedoms have been severely curtailed by Robert Mugabe, reporters who don’t want to write from exile write anonymously. But the rise of the Internet presents new forms of anonymity for citizen journalists, and with it, new problems.

Blogger anonymity and pseudonymity

A running discourse among citizen journalists pertains to the ethics and etiquette of anonymous blogging. While pseudonyms are still widespread, the world’s most popular and renowned blogs are accompanied by author profile pages. Some j-bloggers even blog about the importance of blogging under one’s own identity.

Many citizen journalists rely on transparency as a self-checking (and peer-checking) mechanism to hold themselves responsible for their statements. Bloggers hyperlink to their source pages when they make contentious claims or refer to academic/scientific studies, so dubious readers can access and critique the blogger’s statements based on the original documentation. Anonymous writers who use their blogs for libel, slander, or hate-speech are criticized and often reviled in reputable circles of the blogosphere.

At the same time, there is a great deal of respect and tolerance in the blogosphere for anonymity/pseudonymity among certain groups of people whose confidentiality is considered justifiable by the citizen journalism community. Those include political dissidents, corporate whistleblowers, victims and potential targets of hate crimes, and domestic violence victims. Complaints directed at these individuals are much more limited, and readers tend to judge the content, credibility, and value of the blogs without raising a red flag over the blogger’s identity.

Hyper-anonymity and its abuses: Data havens

Data havens are computers or networks that compile data from anonymous contributors. In other words, data havens (sometimes called anonymizers) make computer users anonymous and untraceable and totally free to post anything they desire. That means that dissidents in Saudi Arabia and China can post complaints against their respective governments without being caught, but also that pedophiles can post their musings and seek out child pornography undetected and uninhibited.

A great deal of information has been accrued on various data havens, to the extent that they have become potentially problematic for citizen journalists seeking venues to write sensitive stories. If there is no transparency of authorship, how can the stories be trusted?

Anonymizer and The Freenet Project are two leading data havens, allowing anonymity of name, location, computer, and web-use for all their users, worldwide. Anonymizer had two advantages over its competition. First, it was created a decade ago, before web anonymity was recognized for its enormous importance. Second, it has been sponsored by the United States government as a means for political dissidents in non-democratic nations to expose human rights violations and government wrongdoing. Freenet, created and run (though the site is decentralized) by Edinburgh-based Ian Clarke, has rapidly gained popularity among free-speech advocates, because it extends freedom of expression beyond even western democratic standards and laws.

Several ethical problems arise, however, with its use. First, many citizen or professional journalists in democratic nations who strive towards trustworthy reporting struggle with Freenet’s inherent anonymity – anonymity is unaccountability. Along similar lines, Freenet as a resource provides a great deal of information, but no sources. It is often difficult justifying the use of totally inaccessible sources to readers seeking credibility and transparency.

Freenet is an enticing tool for net-savvy Internet journalists. Its mission coincides with journalists’ desire for a free press, which is often hampered by government limits and restrictions (e.g. publication bans on certain elements of Canadian trials). By transcending the law using anonymity, Freenet’s developers feel that they are facilitating and protecting “one of the most important rights any individual might have” – a lofty goal by most journalists’ standards. Furthermore, Freenet compiles potentially valuable stores of information that likely could be found nowhere else on the web. If its users develop a code – written or unwritten – for acceptable submissions to the data haven, Freenet could be one of the democratic world’s greatest developments and a huge step towards improving rights and liberties globally.

Freenet could also pose dangers to the news industry at large. As indicated in the blogging section, non-journalists have increasing power as information providers. Freenet gives unlimited voice to any obscene, dangerous, or libelous information that any unscrupulous person posts. More concretely, Freenet’s anonymity allows for vast and unchecked copyright infringements, as plagiarists cannot be tracked. The newest version of the software, Freenet 0.7, also has a peer-to-peer function for added privacy. With this system, users can limit their online conversations to only people they know and trust. This ensures that users at risk of government sanctions cannot be spied on, but it also means no one will take responsibility if a peer-to-peer group is created specifically to plot terrorist attacks or pedophilic meetings.

Peter Sommer, digital evidence expert at the London School of Economics, defines Freenet as a “lawless” arena, where no one can be held accountable for anything written.

“Ian [Clarke] is placing a powerful tool in the hands of other people. He’s like an armaments manufacturer. Guns can be used for all sorts of good purposes but you know perfectly well that they are used to oppress and kill,” said Sommer in a 2005 interview.

This assessment may be overly harsh, as guns are used solely to kill, whereas Freenet aims to empower individuals and bolster democratic principles. But the point is valid, if overstated.

In its FAQ section, Freenet addresses the potential ill uses of the service as follows: “While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom.”

If those voices overpower the voices promoting valuable information dissemination, the laudable goals of Freenet will be compromised.

Delegating Trust: An Argument for an “Ingredients Label” for News Products

Despite the fact that there are no secret handshakes, no Masonic rites or other esoteric indications denoting membership in the society of journalists, a bond of unexamined trust exists among them.

This bond is not a very strong one, because in the subculture they inhabit, a sceptical frame of mind is highly valued. All truths are subject to examination (or at least that is a highly-favoured conceit). What remains largely unexamined is an enormous, unmapped territory in which reporters freely appropriate the work of each other, rarely with attribution. A consensus view of the general state of the world is thus adopted without much thought about it.

Here’s a microscopic view of how it happens: a reporter reports, and other reporters notice or are assigned a follow-up. Sometimes errors are encountered. But often, in the need to “advance” the story, a new chapter is simply written, and the original story becomes a canonical piece of general knowledge.

This is especially evident when the source story comes from a respected news organization or news service, such as Reuters, CP or is distributed by a syndication network such as CBC’s ENS, or CTV’s DNS.

News editors for the most part rightly assume that if the originating producer is credible, the story is credible. One might view this as a kind of “delegated trust”, obviating the need for fine-grained fact-checking or re-interviewing news sources. It certainly saves a lot of time and money. And for the most part, this shared universe of trusting belief rarely creates embarrassment for its members.

But that alone is not evidence that this society of journalists actually “gets it right.” Since there are no other competing social structures that produce a comparable, timely, and popular stream of intelligence about the events of daily human life, the overall veracity of the news stream largely goes unchallenged. And this lack of competition – added to the tendency of journalists to trust one other – only deepens the epistemological frailties of our global news reporting network.

Unfortunately, these problems are worsening as a consequence of the proliferation of news sources and the availability of vast amounts of generic news distributed on the Internet.

Increasingly, news services such as Reuters and ITV are commissioning the work of freelancers, especially in remote areas. Who are these freelancers? What are their bona fides? As a reporter working for a small news operation, say in Prince George, B.C., can I call these freelancers to verify their sources and the validity of the people they interview? Most news managers would see this as an absurd waste of time and money. Even if the source of the material is highly reputable, such as ABC’s NewsOne syndication service, “end-user journalists” do not have the luxury or latitude to do their own fact-checking.

Non-traditional news tipsters and emerging content providers, such as bloggers and photo-enabled, mobile phone users with a taste for capturing catastrophe, add to the stew of news-like stuff. The fact is that stories are now being pieced together, quilt-blanket-style, by editors and reporters with too much to choose from and too little time for vetting.

To meet these problems, the news industry is turning to computerized Content Management Systems (CMS) to catalogue and manage these “assets” and move them into production assembly lines.

In 2000 – 2001, ABC News began developing a powerful digital media gateway, to overcome a growing bottleneck of incoming and outgoing material. Over the years it had built up a sophisticated news feed service that distributed (via satellite) raw video, cut news stories and production sheets. There were multiple daily feeds, faxes, schedules, etc. And it wasn’t just news content – networks and their affiliates also had to move advertising spots, movies, stock footage, and the like. Until recently, all of this content was analogue – which meant multiple handling by recording and transmission engineers, machinery with moving parts like tape recorders and playback decks. The machinery was very expensive to maintain, and difficult for the content people to access.

The introduction of Digital Media Gateways, like Pathfire, began to control that flood. By either digitizing analog material or creating content in native digital formats, this material was much more easily distributed by satellite and downloaded into a form where the content folk could access it with minimal intervention. The next step – eliminating expensive satellite transmission – was made possible by high-capacity networks using Internet Protocol (IP) to distribute all this content. ABC NewsOne began a test of an IP network in 2001, allowing news producers to receive the feeds directly on computers.

Instead of having to wait for a satellite feed to be down-linked, recorded by technicians, and delivered on tape at specific times, producers could access “thumbnails” of feeds (in low-resolution format) directly from their desktops, whenever the material was ready. Hi-resolution versions can now be downloaded exactly the same way.

For a reporter, the initial impact was liberating. She no longer had to wait for a fax to announce the “feed time” — when a run of syndicated stories would be transmitted by satellite and then down-linked to the control room. For there, it would have to be recorded on a Video Tape Recorder that could only be operated by a skilled technician, who would then dub it and (hopefully) call the reporter when it was done.

The Pathfire system completely collapsed this complex, news production line. The reporter could now simply wait at her workstation and see the roster of coming stories from ABC. Included would be the production details, including running time of the item, potentially a text introduction, and the names and titles of those interviewed.

Clicking on a thumbnail of an item would launch a Windows Media Player (WMP) on her desktop and a low-resolution version would play. Another click and she could route the data stream to a robot video encoder which would “fetch” the hi-resolution version, and automatically make this available to the edit suite.

The downloaded story could thus be cut apart, and useful elements included in a local version. Since most news organizations subscribe to multiple news services, digital media gateways have now made it possible to create journalistic amalgams (“meltdowns” as they were called) in which very little original material might be required.

The recursive nature of this process is immediately apparent. Since some of the syndicated material was similarly culled from a multitude of sources, the end product was really an “amalgam of an amalgam”.

Try then to trace the delegation of trust in such a system.

Currently there is no convenient way to signal to the news consumer how the material they receive was collected, no way to indicate the bona fides of the originating collector and no way to validate what has been included and excluded in the final product.

This delegation of trust is forced on the unsuspecting news consumer, with no discussion and of course, no real debate about this system. Another way to view this is to consider that, unlike the food we consume, with laws insisting on the strict labelling of ingredients and the provision of nutritional information, consumers digest our news products largely in the dark.

And yet it is possible to imagine ways to rectify this situation, without going the route of official regulation.

Good newspapers often attribute (either in the byline or in a footnote) when “files” from other sources have been used. This is a useful piece of information for the news consumer, and it is even possible, if one has a sharp eye, to discern what the file material is likely to be.

However this is a practice rarely used in broadcasting or in online journalism. According to the Law of Delegated Trust, the publisher of material gathered from trustworthy proprietary sources (such as CP, AP, UPI, Reuters, ITV, etc.) assumes that all material thus received has previously been certified as accurate according to accepted journalistic practices.

In no case that I am aware of – except for those rare times when a news syndication service has transmitted an egregious error – do news organizations routinely explain the way this works to their consumers.

The consumer has no idea that this law exists. There is no rule of disclosure that is accepted industry-wide. There is no label on news products to inform the consumer of the “ingredients.”

When there is no system to inform or disclose accepted but hidden news practices to consumers, the news practices themselves suffer, and the risk of a catastrophic “meltdown” of trust becomes inevitable.

With the increasing dependence on digital networks for the collection and distribution of news products, the industry must develop a way to certify their output, in the same way that many other industries are doing.

For example, in the lumber industry, a variety of “forest certification” measures to prevent over-logging or logging of old growth forests are being implemented by governments, end-users, and organizations. Lumber produced under strict guidelines are stamped with a seal of approval. Retailers and consumers are thus reassured that their purchases are as sustainable as possible. The same is true for organic and “fair-trade” produce.

Can news be certified? Can we include in our journalism information about the way we collect and report information? These are questions that beg a wide and noisy conversation.

 

Cell Journalism

More often than not, major news happens and there is no one around to report it. By way of interviews and records of the event, reporters are able to ‘re-create’ it for the morning paper. Unfortunately, there is usually not the opportunity to capture news in the making with a photograph.  But when the London Underground was bombed on July 7, 2005, photos of the event were published on websites and blogs, and made their way to the mainstream media. It was the people with camera cell phones that captured the images, not reporters.
Yuki Noguchi of The Washington Post writes that “some of the most intimate images of [the July 7] bomb blasts in London came from cell phones equipped with cameras and video recorders, demonstrating how a technology originally marketed as entertainment has come to play a significant role in up-to-the-minute news.”  The new ‘cell journalists’ who happen to be in the right place, at the right time, can then sell their photos to news sources for a price. Spy Media (www.spymedia.com), started by Tom Quinn, former president of Novell, Scoopt (www.scoopt.com), and Cell Journalist, are three websites that connect the cell journalists with the news media who are willing to pay money for action shots. This technology is becoming more popular and the quality is improving as a result. Currently, cell phones with cameras are out-selling digital cameras by a four-to-one ratio. There are estimates that camera phones may be equipped with newspaper-quality cameras as early as next year. Ethical Issues Cell journalism is a form of citizen journalism, or the process of citizens reporting news, side-stepping traditional news media, and creating their own form of journalism. For more on citizen journalism, see our section on blogging. Ethical problems faced by cell journalists include all the problems associated with photojournalism in general: the digital manipulation of images, privacy concerns, and the use of graphic images, (see photojournalism section). But cell journalists also have a new set of issues to deal with. Authenticity As photos are published on the web from all over the world, it is difficult to check their authenticity. Cell Journalist and Scoopt scan all uploaded photos and also make contact with the photographer to ensure the authenticity of the photo. In contrast, Spy Media does not pre-screen their photos. “We don’t censor,” said co-founder, Brian Quinn. “News is like fish. It goes bad quickly. It needs to be available immediately.” Traditionally, news organizations were able to ensure the authenticity of photos through a process of verification with their photographers. Even with the rise of freelance journalism, there was still some contact between the news media and the photojournalist. With the new cell journalists, however, this contact and process of verification is lost.