The Tweetgeist: Fathers and sons, foreign bureaus and uniforms

Bronner's son sets off ethical Times bomb

Clark Hoyt's New York Times public editor column on Sunday suggested the paper should take its Middle East correspondent Ethan Bronner off the beat because Bronner's son has enlisted to serve in the Israeli army.

The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else...

Times editor Bill Keller responded directly on Hoyt's blog:

You seem to think that you (and Alex Jones) can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can’t. I disagree...

You seem to see this as a binary choice: either we ignore the situation, because we trust the reporter, or we remove him from the assignment, because it might cast doubt on the paper’s credibility. But our rules -- and real life -- are more complicated.

Every reporter brings to the story a life -- a history, relationships, ideas, beliefs. And the first essential discipline of journalism is to set those aside, as a judge or a scientist or a teacher is expected to do, and to follow the facts...

If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.

Two of the Atlantic's star bloggers also came to Bronner's defense. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

the assumption is that Bronner...will somehow be a proponent of Israel's military now that his son has enlisted. In fact, the opposite could be true: Wouldn't it be in Bronner's best interest to write critically of offensive Israeli military operations, in order to influence events in such a way as to keep his son out of harm's way? Two, and this is a somewhat obvious point except to propagandists, reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage.

Andrew Sullivan agreed, but took Keller to task for lack of disclosure:

The test of a journalist is his work. I haven't detected a shred of bias in Bronner's pieces from the NYT on Israel and the Middle East, even though his son is now in the IDF. I agree with Goldblog on this for the most part. I do believe, however, that it should have been clearly disclosed without pressure from the outside forcing the NYT into a disclosure that clearly would not have happened without a public editor. Keeping such a potential conflict of interest under wraps - even as questions of war crimes are being debated in a military in which Bronner's son is now fighting - was a clear lapse of ethical judgment on Bill Keller's part, not Bronner's, who rightly informed his editors.

Kurtz: Why is Obama press conference-less?

Howard Kurtz ponders President Obama's long stretch without an official press conference -- it's been since last July:

It would be hard -- impossible, actually -- to argue that Obama hasn't been accessible to the media, not with his constant television interviews. The man has even done color commentary at a Georgetown basketball game. But the decision to bypass the White House press corps is no accident.

Kurtz argues that the president is ducking hard questions from the White House press corps pros. If only, Dan Gillmor retorts:

@dangillmor Howard Kurtz imagines (wrongly) that the DC press corps asks presidents serious follow up questions http://bit.ly/awJahP hardly ever

Links and tweets of note

• David Carr profiles Demand Media's piecework model. He finds that some journalists are grateful for the work, even at such paltry rates, but sounds unconvinced himself:

  Compensation and confusion aside, you can’t doubt Demand’s relevance. The company’s article “How to Throw a Super Bowl Party,” was big all week. The secret: “Buy several six-packs of beer. Keep the beer in a cooler close by so you don’t have to run to the fridge when it’s third and inches. Restock the cooler at halftime.”

  You can’t put a price on that kind of advice.

• Jeff Jarvis's "Stop Selling Scarcity" takes a deep dive into the new economics of news:

  The real story in nonphysical goods is one of deflation. Value in once-scarce -- well, once-controlled -- commodities like news, information, and advertising decline as the internet explodes creation and competition. The internet also destroys the ability of many to control distribution and thus value. But at the same time, the internet drastically increases efficiency thanks to platforms and open distribution and the ability -- no, the need -- to specialize and collaborate. The bottom line in many of these enterprises -- as we tried to show in our New Business Models for News -- is that they may be profitable, only smaller. Both sides of the ledger deflate.

• According to PR agency Edelman's "Trust Barometer" survey, trust is in very short supply indeed. For media companies, the bad news is, people's trust in the news media has dropped like a stone in just two years -- from roughly 45 percent to 25 percent (20 percent for TV news). The good news is, people's trust in their friends has dropped by a comparable amount, too!