Sheila Lennon and Tom Matrullo have both prodded me relative to blogarian ethics. I’m still manically busy working at the job that does pay me, but by way of quick summary and response.
Sheila says
I am typing in the newsroom of a mainstream major metro daily where no payola is allowed. None. I sometimes leave at night with giant bouquets sent to the society writer or the restaurant reviewer, reporters who are not allowed to keep them under our stringent rules.Reviewers may keep the books, cds and software they review. They may not sell the overflow; these are offered in monthly "book grabs" open to the entire building. We are monkish about preserving not only our objectivity but avoiding the appearance of impropriety. It's why you can't get rich in journalism.
When I wrote a column about gadgets for a paper, co's like IBM used to send me pretty valuable items - without even an initial call from a PR person. Just flood the mail with stuff. The system seems to presume that bribery works.I believe heartily that bribery works, and in my line of work I see constant examples of human frailty and corruptibility. These do not surprise me. (And I take Sheila’s allusion to reportorial “monkish” behavior in the very best sense.)
But there’s a significant difference between expecting paid reporters to decline gifts that would engender a confllict of interests, and expecting unpaid bloggers to decline gifts that actually cohere with their interests. (The Happy Tutor asked, the other day, if this isn’t what Gonzo Marketing is about?)
“Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?” I doubt that I’m writing to any millionaires—certainly not the reporters among us—but the Tutor’s relentless flogging of every pretension to purity and high-mindedness ought not anesthetize us to the truth behind the rod: that we’re scrambling around, trying to make ends meet, doing what we can with limited resources. If when I preached, I recommended Windows XP because Microsoft was sponsoring the sermon, I’d have a conflict of interests and would be justly reviled. If I blog favorably about Communications Inc. because they gave me a squeeze ball, a pen, and a can of mints, there’s no conflict of interests, only cheap commercialization of what readers will have thought a disinterested voice at the coffee table. That’s disappointing, but not venal—and one could certainly draw comparisons to those who curry favor and trade links in order to look bigger in the Blogging Ecosystem, or who parlay Google buzzwords into high hit counts.
To work. . . .
Posted by AKMA at October 18, 2002 07:55 AM | TrackBack