Undercurrent

This week I participated in a conference about “media accountability systems” (or MAS) at the University of Kalmar, Sweden. MAS covers all kinds of ways that media organizations, editors and journalists can be held accountable by the wider society for what they do. The “systems” range from the well-known – self-regulatory ethics rules and guidelines, councils that handle complaints from the public – to the less widespread institution of readers’ ombudsmen, and further to media journalism, media-critical blogs, organizations working for the interests of media “victims” etc.

One of the most interesting presentations was held by Steven A. Smith, the editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. Smith was one of the editors working on and defining civic journalism (or public journalism) in the 1990s.

Smith has introduced a whole range of measures at the newspaper to increase transparency about how journalists and editors work – how they choose and report on stories, how they present them etc. The goal is to involve readers in the newsmaking decisions and to engage more directly with the community. The most radical or at least original of these initiatives is the webcast of daily news meetings. Sort of like letting readers (and competitors) move close to the newspaper’s crown jewels, right? Other web initiatives include inviting bloggers to discuss the paper’s coverage. I’ll return with more on Smith’s ideas in a later post.

Several readers’ ombudsmen from some of Denmark and Sweden’s most influential media held presentations and debated their experiences. Recurring themes: readers react very positively when they can get in touch with a real person at the media. As simple as that. Often their job is to explain how reporters work. For example the pro et contra of difficult ethical questions. News decisions are often plainly difficult to understand for the audience. “Many see journalists as powerful – as decisionmakers. Therefore there’s a lot to gain in credibility for journalists who dare to enter into a dialogue,” the ombudsman of Swedish Television (SVT) Claes Elfsberg said.

At the Danish newspaper Politiken the readers’ editor Lars Halskov invites bloggers to review the paper. Seven bloggers alternate over a period of two months.

Several of the ombudsmen and -women said that the clearest effects of their work could be noticed within the media organizations themselves. Journalists gradually become more aware of the audience and the need for real dialogue.

The story of Jacques Chirac’s interviews with journalists from the New York Times, the IHT and Nouvel Observateur this week highlights in an almost painful way some of the worst aspects of continental European journalism. As told by the Times reporters, Chirac and his staff called the reporters back to a second interview, retracting the crucial, controversial statements about Iran, the atomic bomb and Israel from the first interview. Note the details: The 19-page “transcript” of the first interview with the controversial parts deleted and even a statement added that Chirac didn’t utter. As the Times notes at the end of the article:

The attempt by Élysée Palace to change the president’ls remarks in a formal text is not unusual. It is a long-held tradition in French journalism for interview subjects – from the president to business and cultural figures – to be given the opportunity to edit the texts of question-and-answer interviews before publication.

The same tradition exists in Germany, probably also in many other countries. In an episode a few years ago, then German foreign minister Joschka Fischer had a lengthy conversation with a group of Nordic correspondents. On leaving his office, Fischer’s staff told the journalists that they weren’t allowed to quote a single sentence of what he’d said! And they were told in clear terms that no rebellion would be expected or tolerated.

Could “globalisation” kill this embarrassing tradition? Prospect Magazine’s French election blog ponders the Chirac case and notes that the ridiculous attempt by the Elysee palace to spin the story as “anti-French US journalists attack France” failed miserably.

Very ambitious headline for this upcoming conference in Kalmar, Sweden in March. I’m looking forward to participate, and I guess the goal must be to contribute one of those 120 ways! I think it makes sense, as the organizers have done, to include blogging – and other genres of user-controlled publishing – as one distinct way among many to increase media accountability. For me, it will be exciting to learn about other tools for achieving the same end.

Obviously bloggers are influencing the media already: Correcting factual mistakes, protesting against perceived bias, holding the media responsible for breaches of ethics – but the potential is much larger than what we have seen so far. Established media who systematically combine the different tools of media accountability (public editors, for example) with an an active, real dialogue with users with, can come a long way. But how many media really do that today?

Thanks to Andreas and his link to a NA24 comment piece, I found back to this lost piece of news about the launch of the government’s long-awaited MinSide (MyPage) web portal. More about that later, when I can find the pin codes to log in. The point here is how the government buried this interesting piece of news by presenting it a) very close to Christmas, b) on the heels of an avalanche of other policy initiatives etc, and – the final nail in the coffin – c) the same day as the mother of all news stories in a petrokingdom broke.

As for b), the Friday before – I mean, Fridays are for hiding stories, right? – the government issued over 40 (!) press releases, and at least four of them contained interesting/important stories. Clearly, all the bureaucrats badly wanted to get some paper off their desks before Christmas. Somehow it’s sort of comforting to have a government so obviously lacking in spin doctors…