The Ethics of Muckraking

Back at the beginning of the last century, most of the news available in the world was transmitted through the use of newspapers, which in turn meant that most of the information available to people about current events in the world were controlled by a handful of powerful men who owned the papers. I’ll leave the obvious comments about political and social control based on informational control to people who actually know about such things, and just focus on the business aspect of the situation – which was that, in order to sell newspapers, you had to have news to put in them. In extreme cases this led to things like William Randolph Hurst instigating the Spanish-American War (“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war!”), but for newspapers with fewer resources, this often meant going out into your local community and finding something about which you could write inflammatory stories. This process (commonly known as yellow journalism or muckraking) sold a lot of newspapers, and in later decades, a lot of television advertising and Internet pop-ups, which may be good for the economy, but remains questionable in ethical terms…

A recent example popped up in Utah, where a local news website started running a story about a billboard promoting an adult products retailer, and how “some” of the local residents were outraged about the risqué (possibly pornographic) photo featured on the sign. Now, everyone knows that Utah is a politically conservative state, and that people there (especially in smaller communities like Ogden) are not going to accept this kind of advertising the way people in Los Angeles (where such ads are common) or Las Vegas (where this would actually be on the tame side) would. On the other hand, the same article points out that the billboard does not meet any of the Federal standards for pornography, and is therefore considered protected speech under the First Amendment, no matter how much people in the area might not like it. The real point, I think, is that there doesn’t seem to have been much of a story here until the local news station started splashing it across the airwaves – and over the Internet…

Now, obviously, the rights of the station to drum up news on a slow news day are also protected by the Constitution, and no one is suggesting that they shouldn’t go out and ask people about the issues of the day – or even that they shouldn’t make up a few issues when there aren’t any worth asking people about. But the move from trying to rile up a few people about something that might be offensive to local sensitivities to advocating censorship of things the people running the station (or buying its advertising time) don’t like is a very short step indeed, and at the end of that road lies madness. The people running the station may only have intended to spice up a slow news day with a billboard featuring a scantily-clad female model (which we should note they didn’t have any problem with showing on television repeatedly), but the potential for things to spiral out of control as a result is disturbing on several levels – especially in a time when fanatical belief systems can and do give rise to actual violence…

Or, to put it bluntly, is it ethically acceptable for a television news program to increase its viewership and enhance its price for advertising time by artificially creating public controversy where none previously existed? Or should broadcasters (and other news channels) limited themselves to simply reporting the events that happen, and risk losing money, bankrupting their owners, ruining their investors (in the case of publicly-held companies), and destroying dozens or hundreds of jobs because there was nothing worthwhile to report on a specific day, and their viewers instead tuned in to the Playboy Channel or the Lingerie Football League?

It’s worth thinking about…