Journalistic integrity

For some reason, I seem to be thinking a lot about journalistic integrity recently. More specifically, I think about the issue that some journalists don't seem to have any integrity at all. If I were being mean, I would add "just like politicians" - but then that would just be mean.
:)

Anyway, you can find the article that prompted today's rant here. Before, reading any further, please click that link and read the article.

If you are familiar with the video game Mass Effect, then you may be thinking whether this is a genuine article or not. I will admit that my first reaction on reading the first couple of paragraphs was that this was sarcasm in full flow. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it isn't sarcasm and is a genuine post about how this guy views video games in general and Mass Effect in particular (full disclosure dept - I am a huge BioWare fan and highly enjoyed playing Mass Effect. In fact, if you run a search on both of my blogs, you will find several references to this game).

I actually read uninformed crap from morons babbling about video games all the time. Admittedly, most of the time, its from politicians and other professionals (say for example, lawyers) who are trying to push a political agenda and don't know anything about the video game medium. In that situation, I can kind of understand why - they are looking for votes on the back of an easy scapegoat. Similarly, I can understand why so much video game legislation is initially successful before being struck down as unconstitutional in court - after all, if a politician doesn't vote for legislation on video games, then their opponents will just use that as ammo to say that this guy doesn't care about morals or children or whatever (Think of the children!!).

Another element that video gamers have to deal with is the blatant hypocrisy of politicians when they attack video games. As an example, some politicians claim that children exposed to violent media (which obviously includes games, movies etc) have a higher risk of becoming sociopaths and hence want to regulate the sale of video games. However, you rarely see these same politicians attack the movie industry in the same way. To be fair, I can understand this as the movie industry in the US is very powerful and attacking these guys head on could result in the end of your political career.

Anyway, let me get back on topic before I get sidetracked too far.

As I was saying, in the case of politicians, I can understand why they are attacking video games. However, in the case of Kevin McCullough (the author of that post), things are slightly different. Kevin seems to be semi famous - he has radio broadcasts, appears on TV as a pundit, is a published author etc (you can find his bio here - I'm assuming he wrote that as its on his own personal blog).

I don't know if he is considered a journalist. I don't know if he considers himself a journalist. However, based on my definition of a journalist being someone who reports on the news, I do consider him a journalist.

And before you ask - when I write about news and similar events on my blog, I consider myself an amateur journalist and try to be ethical about it accordingly. Where I feel I haven't done enough research and feel that I don't have sufficient facts, I try to let you know that. I hope that when you read about news items on my blog, in addition to getting my viewpoint, you also get a reasonably balanced look at what is happening. An example of this is my recent post on Sony. I told you that I'm not a fan of Sony so that you have full disclosure of my viewpoint which may bias my comments as anti-Sony. I also deliberately included phrases like "According to the author" and "seems to be based". These words were deliberated inserted to make you pause and think about whether you were getting the full story (obviously you weren't as Sony did not, and probably never will, release any statement on this). Admittedly, I don't always succeed (see my very one sided posts about the RIAA).

So, whats my point? My point is that, as a journalist, you have a certain level of responsibility when presenting news.

First off, you should not lie. This is the big one. If I find out a journalist was outright lying, I never give that journalist any future credibility ... ever.

The second big responsibility is that you should research your topic so that, at the very least, you know what you are talking about. If you don't do this, this also impacts on your future credibility (if I know you aren't going to research your topic, why should I believe what you say?). If you don't research the topic, but rely on someone elses work, then you should make this clear and let us know what you base your "facts" on. Again, to take an example from my blog, I recently posted about the RIAA suing someone for copying music from a CD onto his computer. When I first heard about this, I didn't take it at face value. Before I blogged about it, I checked online to see if it was true. I found a transcript of the actual law filing as well as an article in the Washington Post. Based on this, it seemed like the lawsuit was genuine. I posted a link to the Washington Post article so that you readers could see why I thought it was genuine (I didn't post a link to the transcript as I felt that was too boring to ask you to read!).

Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't be wrong. After all, nobody is infallible. You could be flat out wrong when presenting something - but if you honestly believed what you said and did a reasonable amount of research before presenting, then I wouldn't hold any grudges.

Now here's the thing. Based on what Kevin wrote about Mass Effect in his column, I can only think of two possible reasons. Either he is outright lying and knowingly presenting the game as something it is not or he didn't bother taking the time to do any kind of research into this game before writing his column. Both of these possibilities highlight a distinct lack of ethics.

At this point, I should also mention that Kevin isn't the only person with such views. However, I chose to post about his column because it was the latest example that I came across while also being the most extreme example of highlighting what I consider to be a lack of journalistic integrity.