When journalists cross the line
There’s a funny old thing going on Stateside. The New York Times has published a remarkable story by Kurt Eichenwald, but it causes Jack Shafer of Slate to call into question Eichenwald’s ethics. Yet the whole thing to me sounds peculiarly American and precious.
The story is of 13 year old Justin Berry who innocently buys a webcam “hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online”. Instead he becomes a magnet for paedophiles and is lured into online pornography, making money and eventually — by the time he over the age of consent — making a living from it. As Eichenwald describes it “Justin was now 18, a legal adult. He had crossed the line from under-age victim to adult perpetrator.” The Times reporter, though, discovers Justin also knows the whereabouts of other victims and abusers. He turns him around, finds him a lawyer, gets him immunity from prosecution, and this leads to arrests.
Undoubtedly amazing stuff. But while Shafer admires Eichenwalds work, he is deeply critical of his apparent lack of journalistic ethics. He is concerned that he “appears two-thirds through [the report] to serve not as a reporter but as the legal advocate and protector of [Justin]“. He is unhappy that “Eichenwald the reporter appears as a character in the story to intervene into the adult Berry’s life”. He is worried about the precedent it sets:
Hasn’t the Times put the next reporter assigned to the online pornography story into a nasty jam? Will the just-turned-18-years-old subjects expect future reporters to 1) help get them a lawyer who will 2) assist them in becoming witnesses for the prosecution, because Eichenwald helped Berry? Will online pornographers and other allied criminals now regard reporters as agents of the state? Don’t be surprised if they start treating reporters as cops.
Eichenwald needn’t have been interventionist, says Shafer: “all of that “good” could have been accomplished by Eichenwald and the Times without rehabilitating the newspaper’s adult source or coming to his legal aid: The paper could have reported what it had learned without directly pegging its findings to Justin Berry.” He wonders in discussion with the Times reporter afterwards if “journalists stop being journalists when they become cogs in a prosecutorial wheel”, which is the argument used by the Times in defending Judith Miller in the CIA/Valerie Plame leak.
There seems to be an odd view of the world, which seems to come from the US and focus particularly on the New York Times, that journalists are somehow separate from the same ethics that binds the rest of us. They have journalistic ethics, of course, which are very laudable, but apparently not the same as what the rest of us work to. For some reason Kurt Eichenwald is berated for intervening. He needs to consider the profession at large for putting “the next reporter” in a difficult position. At some point he somehow stops becoming a reporter.
The New York Times is often said to be too staid and at the same time its journalists are expected to live in some kind of rarified atmosphere. These two perceptions are clearly influencing each other. I don’t think such a precious view of the press exists in the UK. There is too much overlap between newspapers to allow that: the Daily Mail can scream as loudly as the Sun, the Times can over-promote human interest stories as much as the Mail, and so on. All these stories are produced by journalists.
Yet the New York Times shares a city with the screaming New York Post (current headline: “JAIL ‘EM!”). I’m sure NYP journalists don’t see themselves as being so separate from the story, and I’m sure no-one expects them to be.
It’s not healthy for the NYT, or US journalism in general, when people like Jack Shafer treat it as some kind of untouchable academic pursuit. Kurt Eichenwald is a bit more realistic in his discussion with Shafer, but Shafer should know better.
