This New York Times story about blogging ethics (or lack thereof) is fascinating largely because of what it doesn’t include which is a discussion of common journalistic practices which, unfortunately, some amateur commentators seem to have adopted.
The gist of the article is that Wal-Mart has beens ending PR e-mails to some bloggers. Some of those bloggers then lifted sentences word for word from the PR e-mails without attributing them to Wal-Mart.
Very stupid. But no more stupid than the countless hundreds of news stories I read every month in the mainstream media which are little more than rewritten press releases. A major offender here, for example, is the BBC’s science coverage. Some scientist will publish a study in a journal and his institution or employer will send out a press release about it. The BBC will then typically rewrite the press release and pass the story along as if it were original reporting. When they rewrite press releases many newspapers will at least note that any quotes in the story come from a press release or prepared statement. Not the BBC — if you don’t know any better, the stories make it look like BBC reporters interviewed the researchers.
The really sad thing is that too often the BBC and other outlets rewrite the press release incorrectly. This becomes very apparent whenever such items include statistical data. Since most reporters don’t seem to have the first clue about statistical matters, their rewritten versions tend to be all over the place, so a 100 percent increase in risk from eating mercury-laden fish might become a 10 percent increase in one paper and a 1,000 percent increase in another.
They’d have been better off, usually, just to run the press release as-is, but presumably they don’t consider that real journalism while simply rewriting and parroting the press release back to the reader is.
One of the mini-ethical dilemmas I’m faced with regularly is people offering me stuff. If I write about a book that looks really interesting or a piece of software that looks really cool, inevitably the publisher will drop me a line asking if I’d like a complimentary copy for evaluation.
I used to get lots of free stuff that way when I was doing freelance entertainment writing. Record companies bombard newspapers with free copies of new CDs, and I’ve got literally hundreds of CDs in my collection thanks to those experiences.
Today, I reject all such offers of free stuff. It is nice that companies offer, but it’s just not worth it in terms of credibility.
The New York Times also mentions a press event Wal-Mart is trying to put together to invite bloggers to attend. I am very skeptical of such press events and would not attend them. On the other hand a much bigger example of this is how newspapers, including the New York Times, fall all over themselves to cover Steve Jobs’ latest commercials — er, product announcements. Apple coverage tends to be a fanboy production that is just barely above the quality of a sports team’s home announcer.
