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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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