Jay Rosen, writing with his usual brilliance about a panel on “Things I used to teach that I no longer believe,” says:

I used to teach that the ethics of journalism, American-style, could be found in the codes, practices and rule-governed behavior that our press lived by. Now I think you have to start further back, with beliefs way more fundamental than: “avoid conflicts of interest in reporting the news.” If you teach journalism ethics too near the surface of the practice, you end up with superficial journalists. The ethics of journalism begin with propositions like: the world is basically intelligible if we have accurate reports about it; public opinion exists and ought to be listened to; through the observation of events we can grasp patterns and causes underneath them; the circle of people who know how things work should be enlarged; there is something called “the public record” and news adds itself meaningfully to it; more information is good for it leads to greater awareness, which is also good; stories about strangers have morals and we need to hear them, and so on. These are the ethics I would teach first.

First, I love: “If you teach journalism ethics too near the surface of the practice, you end up with superficial journalists.” Brilliant. But I want to head off what I think is an unwarranted conclusion based on Jay’s statement that if you put together enough accurate reports, the world is intelligible. The wrong conclusion (not Jay’s) would be that we all come to the same intelligible world. Nope. The PoMos are right: Narratives don’t get built out of facts. Narratives tell us which facts matter. Within a narrative, it’s important that journalistic reports be accurate. But accuracy is not enough to bring about intelligibility or to tear down an existing intelligibility. (If, by the Law of Irony, I have in fact inaccurately characterized Jay’s point about accuracy, I preemptively apologize.)

I think Jay agrees with this, roughly, although I may be reading my own beliefs into his. So, why his emphasis on accuracy? The final item in his list perhaps explains it:

I never taught this explicitly, I said, but I am certain I believed it: reality always bites back, and there are limits to how fungible the facts are. This is one reason the press cannot be overrriden. I couldn’t say that today. The scary thing is, I don’t necessarily know what to teach instead.

Wow. The link is to a piece Jay wrote about a month ago that concludes that the White House is actively attempting to “roll back the press as a player within the executive branch.” He characterizes this, in Ron Suskind‘s words, as a “retreat from empiricism.” There is a despair in Jay’s voice that I wish I didn’t share. (It’s related to the despair you hear in mine when I talk about copyright and digital rights.) The baseline of accuracy is being ripped up by this adminstration.

In such a case, facts and accuracy taken on a new urgency. It’s not simply a matter of establishing the facts but of re-establishing that facts matter. That is an heroic job for journalists of every sort.

Is there something we can meaningfully refer to as “the public record,” as Jay says?

The Public Record (caps, singular and definite article) has become A Record Filtered by the Incumbents. We now also have a public space that is self-documenting. Now that there are also public records — plural, lower case and indefinite — The Public Record has become less authoritative, and, we hope, less authoritarian. [Tags: JayRosen media]

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