Meyer: Employers have right to ban blogging
In the following essay for CyberJournalist.net, University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer defends the Hartford Courant's decision to order a staff member to stop publishing a Weblog, arguing the Weblog has "the potential to damage his employer's reputation."
In a companion counterpoint essay, blogger and online columnist J.D. Lasica argues against the decision, saying it will send "a chilling effect through the journalistic blogging community."
By Eric Meyer
My friend J.D. Lasica thinks the Hartford Courant's order for a staff member to cease posting a Weblog will send "a chilling effect through the journalistic blogging community."
Good idea, J.D. It's about time for all those Webloggers out there -- you included -- to start chilling out. Even the former Iraqi information minister would have to bow in admiration to the amount of hyperbole being slung around in the Hartford case.
Webloggers cry about Big Business usurping the First Amendment and stifling what they regard as the only voices of truth in the wilderness. Maybe that's true some of the time. I would worry very much about it if it were true now. But this time around, the dispute isn't about using an atomic flyswatter to squash a tiny buzzing of opinion. It's about making sure an employee is doing the job he was hired to do, not getting caught up in some overgrown, overly opinionated diary/hobby that unfairly treads on his association with his employer and has the potential to damage his employer's reputation.
Major news organizations have long had codes of conduct to which staffers must agree as a condition of employment. Among other things, these codes typically forbid employees to accept unauthorized freelance assignments, to inject themselves into public debate or to leverage their status as employees into some outside venture. Any of these would doubtlessly block an employee from creating a Weblog without authorization.
The fact that Weblogging is a relatively new technology does not make it immune from long-established policies. Read my lips, J.D.: A blog is a publication -- legally, morally, ethically. Whether the author contributes his content without pay and publishes it without competing for ad revenue does not diminish this. Contrary to the opinions of those who seem to view the world through anti-corporate glasses, everything does not always come down to money.
What it does come down to, in this case, is to demanding "personal time" inside a spotlight that an employer has shined on an employee. It's the employer's spotlight, not the employee's. Like it or not, the employer has the right to determine where and when it will be shined.
If Attila the Hun were running for alderman and Dan Rather did the voiceovers for his radio ads for free, Dan still would be committing an ethics violation even though he didn't get paid and wasn't starting to read the news for ABC and NBC instead of just CBS. What he he would be doing was using his celebrity, which CBS helped create, to express views CBS might not agree with -- and that others might use as evidence of CBS being biased.
But we're not talking primarily about a conflict of interest here. We're talking about a conflict of commitment. Whenever you hire a professional journalist, you hire, among other things, his or her creativity. If the creativity you thought you were hiring is being siphoned off by some outside activity, you have every right to ask that such activity cease. It's not a stifling of opinion. It just forces those with unrequited opinions to make a choice: Be a writer for my paper on my terms, or be a writer for your Weblog on your own terms. I don't want you splitting your creativity between them.
J.D. likes to talk about one important specific of this particular case -- a Connecticut law unlike the laws in most states. But he misses a far more important specific:
What we have in Hartford is a writer who used to have an opinion column in the paper. For one reason or another, he no longer has that column. Suddenly, an opinion column written by the same guy begins appearing on the Internet as his "personal Website."
Forget making a cause celebre out of this because it involves a Weblog. It seems obvious that what we have here is someone who was trying to play hardball with his employer -- and learned the hard way that there is such a thing as a brush-back pitch. The people to pity are the poor readers, who seem to have become pawns in some intraoffice squabble over whether a particular reporter should be a opinion columnist or a travel writer.
Alas, I fear that many people -- J.D. included -- are defending the reporter merely because he's using a blog. If he were printing a newsletter or appearing on a radio talk show, we never would have heard about this.. As is, all we hear is that whatever an employee does on his or her own time is none of his or her employer's business.
That's simply ludicrous. If the employee-employer relationship existed only during working hours, shouldn't employer-paid insurance cover you only if you become sick or die on the job? If I got sick while on vacation, I wouldn't cancel my vacation and take sick leave instead. Then again, I'm not a member in good standing of the Age of Entitlement and Lack of Personal Responsibility club.
The only argument J.D. has going for him is that readers need to know the political opinions of reporters to properly judge their work. Although it's mainly View from the WELL claptrap to assume that readers are clamoring to discover every writer's personal feelings, there is some truth to it.
Yet making that pitch reveals a fundamental flaw in J.D.'s logic. If it's so important for society to be able to understand individual reporters' biases, how can it be that Big Evil Corporations are controlling and slanting all the news to the extent that reporters can tell the truth only in their blogs? It's circular logic worthy of a Spirograph.
No, this isn't an issue of monopoly power or an assault on it. Trust me, J.D.; the Courant fears a Weblog not nearly as much as the Third Infantry feared regular units of the Iraqi army -- the ones who surrendered before fighting. This is an employment issue. The columnist represented himself (though you say "disclosed" himself) as a Courant staffer and engaged in journalism absent Courant editing. Even in the Age of Entitlement, he can't have it both ways. If he wants to bask in the Courant's spotlight, he has to stand where the Courant wants to shine it.
If that kills blogging, may it quietly rest in peace. Not every journalist believes that the only way he or she can contribute to the world is by musing upon it. Some of us concentrate on creating things of value, not opinion, for posting online. My own NewsLink.org and the student site DeepThroatUncovered.com that I just helped my students put together are, I hope, examples. As a professional in journalist, not a professional in self-expression, I would much rather spend my scarce free time creating content than I would telling you how I feel about content already created. This would be post-Modernism in the absurd.
This is hardly a threat to democracy, J.D. In fact, what you describe isn't democracy at all. It's socialism. True, a few newsroom interns might indeed be brighter than some top newsroom managers are, but I don't think the answer is to give every intern his or her own Marxist-inspired column with the newspaper's stamp of credibility on it. And believe it or not, J.D., most senior managers actually are more talented than most of their interns.
Stopping blogging won't lead, as you opine, to "more and more talented journalists . . . leaving the profession." Frankly, I don't see that many talented journalists leaving with or without blogs. What I see, as a journalism professor, is that the best and the brightest still tend to go into journalism.
To them, it's a religious calling. It's only the ones who expect to get everything for nothing who end up working in other fields.
Or, in some cases, blogging.
Eric Meyer is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois; the vice president and co-owner of Hoch Publishing Co.; and the managing partner of NewsLink Associates.
May 1, 2003 | BY JONATHAN DUBE
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