Sue Gardner wrote:
Brian, I'm sorry: it took me _a lot_ longer to respond to this than it should have. But I've read the discussion, and FWIW here are my thoughts:
- I think it's important to first just acknowledge that
objectivity/neutrality is actually very difficult to achieve. Over time, as people we all accrue a body of information and observations and analysis that adds up to a worldview of some sort. We can _aspire_ to neutrality, but ultimately we believe what we believe. It's tough -and in some ways undesirable- to fully park our own experience when we sit down to write a story.
One instance where we're having real trouble getting balance is our Scientology coverage. The Church simply won't talk to us. According to my neighbour (who works for Het Niewsblaad and I bumped into at the Brussels protest on Sunday) said they wouldn't return his calls. The pro-Scientology people on Wikipedia who could help bring some balance to our interviews with critics are also unresponsive - or just plain unreasonable - one has been the subject of an ArbCom case on Wikipedia.
Which is of course a significant argument in favour of the collaborative approach to newsgathering. In the course of putting together a story, a conventional journalist will be influenced by a number of people: his or her assignment editor, boss, deskmates, cameraperson, vetters. But most newsrooms are pretty homogeneous, and most reporters don't have the opportunity to be much influenced by people thousands of kilometers away, or significantly younger or older, or holding radically different ideological views.
That means that Wikinews should be able to achieve a more balanced and nuanced "neutral point of view," compared with conventional news organizations. I'm assuming that's part of the point of it ;-)
When you look at the Wikinews contributor base, and resultant articles, you'd certainly form the opinion we're left-leaning. We used to have a staunch Republican on the team, but he left after an ArbCom case over edit warring where he didn't like the content of articles and abused his admin privileges to try and prevail. This is unfortunate, his sports coverage was excellent - he just didn't work well with others on items of a political nature.
Of course, as Steven Colbert said, "Reality has a liberal bias". :-P
In general, the struggle to achieve neutrality/objectivity in news coverage is IMO worth supporting; it's important and it's not easy. That doesn't mean I am against opinion journalism. But I do think that objectivity (or if you prefer, neutrality or fairness) is a core journalistic value, and should always be fundamental to a story, unless a deliberate decision has been made to do otherwise.
- Readers recognize and understand a variety of formats -book reviews and
newspaper editorials and viewpoint sections and advice columns- and the rules that are associated with them. Because those labels and rules are well-established, a POV piece that falsely purports to be neutral tends to upset people's expectations and call into question everything else about that news operation.
This comment makes me think of Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan. Which they patently aren't - at least from the perspective of a European.
- Here's a thing that might be tough for Wikinews. At CBC.CA, part of my
job was to ensure overall balance. So for example, if we ran an opinion piece that was in favour of a particular political view, we were expected to balance that by also running pieces favourable towards other views, or critical of the particular view initially espoused. We had quite a bit of flexibility in how we did that - for example, we didn't need to run all the pieces on the same day, nor did we need to ensure mathematical precision (like, 11 "pro" pieces cancel out 11 "con" pieces). But in general, we were expected to achieve, over time, a reasonable approximation of balance.
There were problems with this approach: it is a bit simplistic/reductionist (it assumes views can be easily labeled and categorized), and also it inherently supports the status quo (it's biased against minority or emerging viewpoints). But despite its flaws, it was a reasonable system that worked pretty well.
This sounds exactly like what the BBC does, and I appreciate CBC and BBC have a lot in common in this respect.
It would however be a very tough system for Wikinews to implement. I don't think Wikinews has an established 'desk' culture - the desk being the assignment editor, the quality gatekeeper, the vetter and lineup function. Without a desk that has the ability to assign/solicit/influence stories, I'm not sure how Wikinews could expect to ensure a reasonable balance of viewpoints over time.
I certainly agree that this would be a difficult system for Wikinews to implement. You'd effectively need someone tracking coverage full-time and assigning specific topics or viewpoints that needed coverage to restore the balance.
- There's also the 'rules' issue I mentioned above: the idea that POV
material is expected to adhere, more-or-less, to a variety of established conventions. Like, a restaurant reviewer is assumed to pay for his/her own food; to try to represent audience tastes more than his/her own idiosyncrasies; to not tell the restaurant who he/she is. And within those rules there's some latitude - for example, one newspaper might decide it's okay if their food critic is recognized, while others go to great lengths to protect their critics' identities. (For example, when she went to dinner, the New York Times restaurant reviewer used to wear elaborate, constantly-changing disguises.)
I think it would be a real challenge for Wikinews to agree on and adhere to these kinds of conventions. (It's hard enough to adhere to basic conventions around objectivity and NPOV.) And if you screw it up -if for example your readers find out your restaurant critic has been accepting free meals-, it's really tough to gain back the credibility you lose.
Again, I agree. I see the biggest problem with the example given on Wikinews - book reviews - is that the odds of us having two people read the book and be able to cross-check are fairly slim.
- It is also, FWIW, extremely difficult to do good POV material - arguably
harder than doing straightforward news. Mostly, because it generally requires you to be engaging and entertaining, as well as informative.
This is a case where perhaps having http://blog.wikinews.org or http://editorial.wikinews.org would be worthwhile. (A WordPress install).
- And lastly, I do wonder if Wikinews is the best place for opinion
writing. There are lots of online venues already for consumer reviews, some of which are pretty rich & pretty good (e.g., Yelp, Chowhound, Amazon, IMDB). And there are plenty of sites that offer good deep commentary on politics, the environment, science, etc. So if I were Wikinews, I might ask myself what I think Wikinews could uniquely bring to the table.
This, I will leave for others to answer. I know the aim of those who are in favour of reviews and Ed/Op-Ed pieces is to round out the project with what a newspaper would do. I was recently disgusted by a comment by Dan Rosenthal on Wikback.com where he said we were "shit", and effectively accused me personally of being a POV warrior who constantly wrote loaded interview questions and got defensive when criticised. My answer to the criticism had been {{sofixit}}, sometimes there's too many people in armchairs.
That's what I think. If you're interested in reading what various journalistic policybooks say about opinion journalism, I have links here ( http://del.icio.us/suegardner/journalisticpolicy ) to policybooks from the BBC, CBC, New York Times, etc.
Hope this helps :-)
Looks like some really good links there. What amuses me is that the sources which you cite as examples, eg BBC, are constantly accused of having a liberal bias. Personally I grew up watching the BBC news on TV and it certainly helped form my world-view. I believe they're balanced and reasonable, but those to the right of the political spectrum believe they should have their funding slashed and be cluttered with advertising. This is one of the things I highly value about Wikinews. As we have no advertisers there is nobody exerting any pressure on us to remove articles they find objectionable.
One other issue that has come up recently that almost made me do a Mike Godwin on the foundation mailing list is the accusation that we do too much coverage of WMF issues. It seems in this case we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't. One article on a major change or event related to the Foundation is seen by some as too much. None and we're not giving them the coverage they deserve. I helped get our most commented on article started early on in the fundraiser - the Webcomics story. This was a case where Wikipedia stood accused of not covering websites that had millions of readers because there were no non-blog sources. I'd wanted to spend my donation money on advertising on a very popular webcomic - Shlock Mercenary (which does have an article). The general idea was to encourage others to donate and when I asked the artist if he could help with some art for the advert he said he wouldn't run an ad even if I got artwork elsewhere. This was down to the dim view of "notablility Nazis" on Wikipedia, however when I went "Hmmm, interesting - what if we do an article?" Howard Tayler was more than happy to advertise this on the blog under his comic. We got lots of people contributing and commenting and there's a big spike on our alexa graph for that one article.
Brian McNeil