News Aggregators: Shining New Hope, or the Root of All Evil?

Modern journalism is in a state of panic over news aggregator services, like Google News, and while many people have already hopped on this new bandwagon it has left newspapers companies scratching their heads trying to keep up.

As newspapers continue to lose circulation, advertising revenue and are increasingly going out of business, the Federal Trade Commission has been looking at ways to save journalism. In order to accomplish their goal, the FTC has been open to public suggestion and some of the more recent ideas include: tax exemptions for news organizations, imposing a tax on iPads and other electronic devices, increasing funding for public broadcasting, and possible require news aggregators to pay news organizations for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses.

But with the increasing presence of government in American journalism comes blatant quandaries. For starters, if the government were to help fund news it would be questionable if a truly fair and un-biased news organization would even be possible. There is a clear conflict of interest between publicly funded news and privately funded news. An obvious example might include the government helping fund newspapers as long as the paper does not criticize the government in any fashion.

However, on the flip side of all these negatives are several positives. Because news aggregators use extensive, mathematically driven, algorithms, the news people are receiving is custom tailored to each users individual desires. So now people are more involved in news than ever before. Now-a-days, each person has the ability to decide what is newsworthy and what is not which also holds some potential shortcomings; such as limiting hard news that would be necessary to uphold democracy that would go un-read because it did not mesh with that particular person’s algorithm.

Personally, I do not believe that it’s aggregators that are the problem, rather, it’s the Gawker.com sites of the world, the sites that simply take news stories, rewrite them and compete with the originator without paying royalties. This is often the result of a paywall, which forces payment to view news stories.

For the time being, aggregators are only tools for casual news consumption and lack any real quality control. So now we are all forced to sit and wait in limbo to see what the future holds.

To Publish or Not to Publish: That is the Question

Truth vs. Speed vs. Accuracy

This morning I read an article pertaining to the growing phenomenon of blogs unpublishing incorrect information. Steve Myers, a member of the Poynter Staff, discusses the plight of inert information being thrust upon trusting readers, and the ramifications that coexist with it.

Myers strongly believes that in the online world, transparency is the new objectivity and the best way to keep your readers coming back to your blog is to be upfront and honest in your quest for the truth.

Nick O'Neill, blogger and founder of the site being discussed acknowledges that publishing information has value, even if time reveals that the story was incorrect. This is because the only true measure of a blog’s value is the amount of traffic through the site. The more traffic your blog gets the higher it will be ranked by Google, and the easier it is to sell ad space. O’Neill’s logic is sound in his quote, “I honestly think that publishing information reveals the truth quicker, as it creates an opportunity for others to come forward with more information,” However, Myers notes that O’Neill is actually creating an uninformed public because while he might eventually uncover the truth, the first people to read his blog are exposed to false information.

This brings up the main question of the article, is it okay to unpublish? Because unpublishing information is ripe with ethical dilemmas involving censorship, I have studies many Philosophers to determine unpublishing’s true merit.

John Stuart Mill, a British Philosopher most recognized for his work in utilitarianism, would agree with O’Neill’s rationale and agrue that while a few people are exposed to incorrect information, the majority of people will be subject to the truth via a process of criticism and exploration.

On the other hand, Walter Lippmann, an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who became highly popular for the introduction of the concept of Cold War for the first time in the world, is quite skeptical about citizens capacity for rationalizing the truth. He believes, and I agree, that people are over eager to believe everything they see. These people then take what they see and create a new opinion of the topic in question. So these people who are exposed to false information is very problematic for the general public because that one person has the potential of affecting the opinions of hundreds of others, all based off of falsities

O’Neill understands the driving economic principals of the internet by saying that, “the more content I have, the more traffic I get. So I need to publish as much information as possible,” but never says that that information has to be valid. Statements like this one would anger Robert Maynard Hutchins, an educational philosopher, dean of Yale Law School, who is most famous for his work on the Commission on Freedom of the Press. In his paper, Hutchins argues that in the old model of news, professionals were reluctant to censor each other which created problems for the press’ attempt to construct an informed public. However, today with the explosion of blogging and forums, professional standards are wildly abstract and rarely follow his Social Responsibility Theory of the Press.

His theory explains that a journalist’s first obligation is to the public, not his own blog. But still, the question remains of whether or not to unpublish false information.

According to Hutchins, the first requirement for censorship is the truth, but O’Neill still believes that by publishing something that is not true, it will force to the truth to come out. This being the case, we need to take a collection of values and principals of all the above schools of thought.

In my own journalistic opinion, O’Neill’s logic of getting to the truth satisfies Mill’s principal of utilitarianism but violates Lippmann’s concerns for a truly informed public. And if O’Neill did not remove all the old, or false, information then he would violate Hutchins’ role of censorship. I believe firmly in a journalist’s duty to build an informed public, which means unpublishing when necessary. However, this does create some potential problems once an author begins to make a habit out of this. For starters, the blog might loose its transparency of showing the readers exactly how they came to their conclusions.

The only logical solution is to unpublish the totally incorrect facts and keep the relevant incorrect facts. These relevant facts should be archived and clearly labeled as potentially false and only used as a means to illustrate transparency.

Ethical Implications of File Sharing

Brianna LaHara is a playful and curious 12-year-old honor student, who lives in New York with her mother and younger brother. She was brought up to always listen to her mother and diligently taught right from wrong. However, young Brianna has recently become target number one for the Recording Industry Association of America.

LaHara’s curiosity, coupled with her love of music, has landed her in front of a grand jury because she, along with millions of others, have illegally downloaded music from the internet. We all recognize stealing as a crime, so why as so many of us guilty of it?

File sharing is when people who are connected to the internet use programs to
download music, movies, video games, and other copyrighted and non-copyrighted electronic material from each other.

Back in 1999, Napster introduced the peer-to-peer network to the world and greatly popularized the concept of online music file-sharing. Soon, other sites like Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, Limewire sprang up and improved upon the concept. Now, people could copy and share their music with anyone who wanted it, all for free. But economics 101 teaches us, TINSTAAFL, or, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

But who is wronged by this seemingly free transfer of data from one computer to another?

For starters, the artists who dedicate their lives to create this art are greatly hurt financially because of this. Let’s not kid ourselves, everyone who makes a stand against file sharing does not do so on ethical grounds, they do so for financial reasons.

Others who oppose file sharing argue that it is not just the artist who is hurt during the online exchange; rather, the entire economy is put at risk. These people strongly believe that this environment of free media might change people’s ideals about purchasing media legally, and if no one is buying it, then no one will want to produce it. Thus, the entire entertainment industry, not just music, could potentially become a thing of the past. This collapse in the entertainment industry would cause a massive loss of jobs and leave a huge hole in our already shaky economy.

This growing phenomenon of file sharing has created some interesting ethical debates over stealing. For some odd reason, millions of people do not truly believe this is theft. But these same people know that walking into a record store and taking CDs is stealing, so what is the difference?

The difference is the disconnect in the physicality of the action. Rather than physically walking into the record store and robbing the place blind, people can be at home and commit the crime simply with a click of their mouse.

When Napster first started, there were no policies in place or ethical guidelines for how something like this should be created and successfully and meaningfully utilized. That was until the RIAA began prosecuting people for thousands of dollars per song. This scared many people away from p2p sites and back into the realm of legal downloading, thanks to iTunes.

In my opinion the main ethical principle violated is the principle of double effect, which states, “An action that is good in itself that has two effects--an intended and otherwise not reasonably attainable good effect, and an unintended yet foreseen evil effect--is licit, provided there is a due proportion between the intended good and the permitted evil,” says Dr. Robertson, professor of philosophy at Brown University.

According to this principle, file sharing is ethically unjustifiable so if we want a world full of beautiful art, then we will have to be willing to open our wallets for it.