Clearly, my post about a possible Code of Ethics was unclear. Let me try again. I’ll probably sound very defensive, so forgive me; I do understand that my argument may well be wrong. It’s certainly far too long. Before I begin it, let me emphasize that I don’t have an idea of what the Code might consist of, nor would I want everybody to adopt the same one. Nor would I expect the version of the Code a site adopted to remain forever inviolate. I do think it would be helpful for any site to have guidelines outlining what the blogger feels are his responsibility to his readers and (if any) his advertisers, and to make known what those guidelines are. Anyway, this is already too long, so I’ll just begin:
A bunch of people began advertising on the Daily Kos, and then very quickly pulled their advertisements, based on what Kos put on his page. That says to me that there was a substantial difference between what the advertisers thought they were paying for, and what the Daily Kos thought they were paying for. This miscommunication was, I think, on the part of the advertisers, but it clearly existed, and some sort of rules or at least guidelines would help prevent it happening often.
Journalists and news organizations have codes of ethics because their jobs force them to frequently make choices the rest of us don’t have to make. Those situations are common for journalists and not common for non-journalists; it’s not that the rules they follow would be preposterous for the rest of us, it’s that they seldom apply. Bloggers, particularly those who take advertisements, but also those who want to improve the world in specific ways, have conflicts that they often haven’t encountered before. They may not be entirely new conflicts, but they are new to the bloggers.
DKos, Eschaton, and Nathan Newman all have readers, posters, advertisers, and service providers. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on all of those for their influence (and, I suppose, for any profit which they could in theory be making). They all want, one way or another, to improve the world, and to do that, they want to increase their influence over the world. This influence can be measured in a variety of ways: page hits, mentions in other blogs or in other media, registered users for DKos, money raised for favored candidates, Google PageRank, responses to private emails to legislators and other officials, invitations to meet with other influential people.
What ways of increasing traffic to my site are ethical? Boosting my Google PageRank by posting notes on pages with high page ranks and linking back to myself (heck, I assume that’s why I’ve got a four now)? Buying ads on other sites? Trading links with other blogs? Trading a link for some technical support? Trading a link for a drink at a bar? Trading links for cash and valuable prizes? It isn’t clear to me that those answers are clear to everybody.
Another way of measuring influence is by the quality and quantity of regular readers. And it isn’t just a matter of influence, if I want my Tohu Bohu to be any good (to me or to anyone else), I have to have good readers who will post good comments. This goes far beyond a newspaper’s need to please its readers, and is at the heart of any comment-oriented blog such as mine, and far more for a site such as DKos, which depends on guest bloggers and diaries. If I offend Michael, for instance, and lose his comments, my blog is less interesting and I may well lose other readers, who come in part to read Michael’s comments, and my or other Gentle Readers’ responses to them. If BoPNews offends Rep. Mark B. Cohen, and he stops contributing, it may drive their readership even lower. If Kos has a fight with DHinMI, and they split, I may well follow DH. Which is all fine; that’s what a community is. But, given those obligations, what are the appropriate relationships? Is it unethical for me to phrase things in a particular way, to not offend Michael? Is it unethical for me to send him fresh-baked cookies (after Passover is over)? Is it unethical for me to pay him? Should you, Gentle Reader, know whether I am paying him?
I also have an obligation to my host, in this case Jed; should I somehow offend him, he would be within his rights to shut this whole Tohu Bohu down (the jerk). Jed, of course, is also a reader and commenter (and not really a jerk), so my relationship with him is quite complex, but in our case pretty aboveboard and clear. Also, Jed has an agreement with his ISP; I have no idea what is in it, as it happens, but I am bound by it anyway. Eschaton, DKos and Nathan Newman all have ISPs as well; I expect that they aren’t unduly restricted by obligations to those providers, but I have no basis for that expectation. Shouldn’t I be able to know?
As far as more ordinary obligations to my Gentle Readers, to what extent am I responsible for what I link to? First of all, the blogroll. I don’t have a blogroll, but most blogs do. DKos has 43 sites on its roll. The Democratic National Committee has 37. What are the referring sites saying about the sites on the roll? Are they endorsing them? Recommending them? The content? The writing style? The community? What am I, as a reader, supposed to think about the sites on the blogroll or the site with the blogroll? Alas, a Blog has nearly 200 sites on its roll; Body and Soul has 240, if I counted correctly. Am I supposed to believe that they recommend or endorse all those sites? Read them regularly? Is their any reason to believe they aren’t purchased space? Friends or family of the blogger who would have their feelings hurt if they were left off?
Then there are the links in the notes themselves. When I read a blog, unless I see some sort of editorial comment (I don’t usually like his stuff, but... This is the first good post I’ve seen on... If you want to know why I think this guy’s an idiot, check out ...) on a link, I assume the blogger respects the source of the link. That requires the blogger to have checked out the source of the link, which I mostly do, but often quickly and superficially. Are my standards as a blogger too low, or are my expectations as a reader too high? Do you, as a reader, feel like I have any sort of responsibility toward you in my choice of links? Do you know if I agree with that?
OK, then there’s the content. Many people are trying very hard to extend their influence over the world; put more gently, many bloggers are trying to improve the world. DKos, Atrios and others have been in pretty close contact with the Democratic Party at various levels, and discuss their actions in notes. In my opinion, Gov. Dean’s campaign suckered the blogleft by stroking their egos, and (among other things) linking to their blogs; the blogleft figured that Gov. Dean ‘got it’, and backed him in editorial notes. Should those sites have some sort of guidelines, to help them around those situations?
Then, there’s the advertising. The fact that half-a-dozen campaigns first advertised and then pulled their ads from DKos tells me that their relationship was based on a misunderstanding from the beginning. Atrios’ rule change also seems to me to speak of a lack of communication, or a lack of trust in the communication, between advertisers and bloggers. Nathan Newman takes ads, and gets around a thousand hits a day. According to The Truth Laid Bear’s Ecosystem, he went from ranking 107th when I linked to him to 89th after people started linking to him and visiting his site to abuse him. Is he obliged to tell advertisers or potential advertisers why he broke back into the top hundred?
Look, Kos got a new advertiser, Jeff Seemann’s congressional campaign. He then posted a note encouraging readers to send money to the campaign. According to a diary posted by the campaign on the DKos site, more than $7,500 was raised in 24 hours after that note. I believe that the whole transaction was aboveboard, that Kos researched the candidate before endorsing him, and that Kos is not whoring his site for cash. I think. But ...
I don’t really know what the answers are. I don’t know what the guidelines should be. Michael asked why blogs’ relationships with advertisers require a different code from that of, say, newspapers. Those relationships already are different. No newspaper would have a relationship like Kos’ with Jeff Seemann. It seems silly for a blog to have an advertising department that is kept separate from the editorial department; it seems like an inherent conflict not to have that separation.
Restrictions on links would not lead to better blogs, although they might lead to more responsible ones. Blogs are, fundamentally, unedited (well, we talked about this before); errors will be made. It’s changeable; if somebody put me on a blogroll last March and still has me on it, that endorsement (or whatever) is for a different site, not this one with wonderful comments and with book reports cluttering up the place. An advertiser may want my handful of overeducated Gentle Readers; I may lose all those readers tomorrow and get ten thousand yobbos.
Most of my Gentle Readers don’t read any of the top ten blogs, I imagine, and may not think of blogs as broadcasters. Eschaton, Daily Kos, Instapundit, Talking Point Memo, and Andrew Sullivan all get tens of thousands of hits a day, and sell advertisements to show to those viewers. They have thousands of other sites linking to them, which is to their monetary advantage. They can direct thousands of readers to other sites to the monetary advantage of those sites. They all write about, and want to influence public policy; they writers all have personal connections with some of the makers of public policy. Politicians and political parties want to use those blogs to organize support. Readers want to have—not objective analysis, but let’s say disinterested analysis. The writers all, I think want to provide disinterested analysis. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have guidelines?
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Lots of interesting thoughts. Am still pondering. A couple quick notes for now:
1. I’m definitely in favor of transparency; I approve of people revealing their biases and personal connections and vested interests and hidden agendas and so forth. So I may well just be getting hung up on the phrase “code of ethics”—and I should probably go read some journalist codes of ethics before commenting further on that.
2. I think there may be a difference (wrt to codes of ethics) between blogs that take paid advertising and those that don’t. But I’m not sure about that. Will think further.
3. I think there also may be a difference between blogs one trusts to be disinterested and blogs one doesn’t. I’m not sure there are any that I trust to be disinterested; perhaps one consequence of mostly reading only the blogs of people I know personally is that I tend to think of bloggers as people, with their own biases and agendas, rather than as institutions, like newspapers. (Which also have their own biases and agendas, of course.) But again I’ll need to think about this more.
4. A question: who enforces a code of ethics? In journalism, I assume it’s enforced by the publishers: assuming the publishers honestly believe in that code and honestly try to enforce it, individual journalists who violate it will presumably be chastised in some way. If a single blogger (who is, in your model comparing a blog to a newspaper, publisher and journalist and advertising director all in one) violates their own code of ethics, who decides that an infraction has occurred, and who acts to keep it from happening again? Would peer pressure from other blogs be sufficient? I’m not sure. (These are all honest questions, not rhetorical.)
Excellent points, Jed; I’ll try to address them as best I can.
1) Perhaps as part of, or even as the bulk of, a code, some guidelines indicating what sorts of relationships will to be revealed, and in how much detail. I maintain a fa�ade of anonymity, so I rarely will refer to you in my Tohu Bohu as an old college buddy, but if (for instance) I were to recommend a short story of yours, I would likely feel obliged to. Or not, with my limited readership I’m still fairly comfortable making it up on the fly.
2) Advertising would be a large part of any code. A site that that doesn’t take advertising could probably have a very simple code, saying in part ‘this site doesn’t seek or accept advertising, or gifts of any kind.’ That would make things simpler.
3) Hm. I trust your blog to be disinterested, but not unbiased. I would be shocked to discover you used your blog to your own personal gain, either monetarily or in terms of political influence (which I’m not sure is much of a motivator on your part, anyway). It’s possible, just, that your possible career as an editor of speculative fiction and other things could be furthered by your blog, but I don’t think you’ve been shaping entries on that basis. That’s different from bias, of which you have plenty (and a good thing, too).
4) I have no fucking clue. Sorry. This is the sort of thing I want other people who know more than I do, and have some experience with the other aspects of this sort of thing, to deal with. Then I can take whatever document they come up with, and show what crap it is. But yes, one of the main problems I have no idea how to solve is that a blogger is not only her own editor, but her own publisher, her own advertising director, office manager, and financial analyst. And how do you decide what’s best kept confidential? Who do you ask without revealing the stuff you don’t want to reveal? Although group blogs like DKos could presumably moot things like that, which would be a help.
Let me reiterate that I see a problem, but I don’t really see a solution. And, heck, I’ve been blogging for a year. I’m sure somebody posted some really good solutions at some point…
R.I.,
-V.
I think many of your questions about ethics are well worth exploring, and they have certainly provided much fodder for reflection and conversation in my house.
There are really only two fundamental points that I disagree with you about. First, I do not think most of those questions are specific to blogs. (As a webmaster, I have had for 10 years the same concerns about increasing links and traffic to my site that you have about increasing links and traffic to your blog.) Second, I do not think that a Code of Ethics is either a good or helpful approach to making most ethical decisions. I believe a Code would tend to mislead both the blogger and the reader more than help them, and would not have helped in any of the troubling situations that you raise.
As to whether it would ethical to send me fresh-baked cookies (after Passover is over): that would be far more ethical if the cookies in question were chocolate chip cookies than if they were ginger snaps.
In all seriousness: Transparency, as Jed describes it, combined with a fundamental precept of “be honest”, should answer most of your other questions. And those policies are good ones to follow in all aspects of life.
If you take honesty and transparency as your guiding principles, you may still come to different conclusions in specific situations than I or Jed or DKos would. That’s ok (in fact I’d argue that it’s good). And those different conclusions would still happen if you were to follow a 1-page or 10-page or 100-page Code of Ethics. There will always be difficult questions which will require staying up all night in the Bene Barak to explore.