经济学人下载:新闻的福克斯化

透明性是一种新的客观性

One way forward, suggests Mr Rosen, is to abandon the ideology of viewlessness and accept that journalists have a range of views; to be open about them while holding the reporters to a basic standard of accuracy, fairness and intellectual honesty; and to use transparency, rather than objectivity, as the new foundation on which to build trust with the audience. He cites the memorable phrase coined by David Weinberger, a technology commentator, that “transparency is the new objectivity”. In part, this involves journalists providing information about themselves. For example, on AllThingsD, a technology-news site owned by Dow Jones, all the journalists provide an “ethics statement” with information about their shareholdings, financial relationships and, in some cases, their personal life (two journalists are married to employees at large technology companies). “People are more likely to trust you if they know where you are coming from,” says Mr Rosen.

Rosen认为，向前推进的一种方式是抛弃无观点这种意识，认识到记者都是观点的，在准确，公平和诚实的基础的标准之上，给记者更多的空间，将透明性，而非客观性作为与受众建立信任的基础。他引用技术评论员David Weinberger令人印象深刻的表述，“透明性是新的客观性”。从某种意义上说，这意味着记者要提供他们本身的信息。在Dow Jones旗下的一家技术新闻网站AllThingsD中，所有记者都要求出示一份“道德声明”，其中包括他们所持有的股票，财务关系，某些情况下要提供其私人生活信息（有两名记者的配偶是大型技术公司的雇员）“如果读者知道你是什么人，就会更加信任你，”Rosen说。

Transparency also means linking to sources and data, something the web makes easy. Bloggers have long used the technique to back up their views. Ezra Klein, a blogger at the Washington Post, has suggested that news organisations should publish full transcripts of interviews online. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, a fan of radical transparency if ever there was one, makes a similar argument. “You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results. That should be the standard in journalism,” he said last year. Mr Weinberger has observed on his blog that transparency prospers in a linked medium: “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.”

透明性也意味着要给出信息来源和数据的的链接，这在网络时代并非难事。博主们早已采用这种技巧来支持其观点。华盛顿邮报的一名博主 Ezra Klein建议新闻媒体在网上发布完整的采访记录。维基解密的Julian Assange是完全透明性的狂热支持者，尽管这一目标难以达到。他也提出了类似的观点，他在去年指出，“如果没有完整的实验数据和结果，你不可能发表一篇物理学论文。这也应当成为新闻报道的标准。”Weinberger在他的博客上观察到，透明性来自于媒体的链接：“在媒体无法给出链接的情况下，客观性是我们所依赖的信任机制。但现在我们的媒体可以做到。”