If you go to Washington DC, you will find a variety of newsletters with high prices and limited readership on very specialized topics involving impending government regulation. I’ve never heard it claimed that the people researching and publishing such newsletters are not journalists.
Right, so I think you are getting to the crux of the matter: where the money/motivation comes from. The kind of journalist we like gets his money/cred/etc from the audience. If he writes articles that her audience values, he does better. The audience can be broad or narrow, but the important thing is that he’d like to broaden it if she can do so without lowering prices. This model is the most ethical because it puts the audience’s and journalist’s incentives in alignment.
But it’s not the only model. For instance, many journalists get their money/motivation from the message rather than the audience. In the most extreme form, this is advertising/propaganda. Without getting that extreme, a journalist may be attempting as much to get a certain viewpoint out there (Coke is delicious, trade with China is dangerous, whatever) as to benefit her audience. She may well believe what she is saying; this makes such activities more ethical. But yellow or unethical journalism is still journalism.
A specific form of the above is espionage. If you write lots of articles for the NY Times about how important it is to invade Iran, that’s propaganda. If you do so because the Saudi government is paying you to, you’re conducting espionage. The Nazi regime paid a large number of “pacifist” authors in Europe, for instance. It’s the dissemination of information/analysis on behalf of a foreign government, and it is (and was) considered to be espionage just as information-gathering on behalf of a foreign government is espionage.
I am certainly not promoting the prosecution of Assange as a spy, or the prohibition of unethical journalism. My point is that because espionage is a form of journalism, attempts to prevent espionage are always likely to result in the censorship of articles we’d like to see permitted. Likewise, restrictions on propaganda or advertising always ends up inhibiting free speech. We should be weakening rather than strengthening such laws.
I could be wrong as I have little experience with the category, but I am under the impression that they are expected to maintain confidentiality with their clients, in a similar way to lawyers, doctors, priests and psychotherapists.
So if A hires Mr. Bogart to spy on B, and then C comes to Mr. Bogart and tells him “I’m interested in B, and a little bird told me you spied on B for someone”, basic professional ethics would require Bogart to refuse to discuss anything related to A’s case with a random stranger, potentially costing him his licence should he fail to do so (depending on what regulations apply in Bogart’s country).
If you go to Washington DC, you will find a variety of newsletters with high prices and limited readership on very specialized topics involving impending government regulation. I’ve never heard it claimed that the people researching and publishing such newsletters are not journalists.
Do you need to fulfill certain requirements, other than money and interest, to be allowed to buy one?
Right, so I think you are getting to the crux of the matter: where the money/motivation comes from. The kind of journalist we like gets his money/cred/etc from the audience. If he writes articles that her audience values, he does better. The audience can be broad or narrow, but the important thing is that he’d like to broaden it if she can do so without lowering prices. This model is the most ethical because it puts the audience’s and journalist’s incentives in alignment.
But it’s not the only model. For instance, many journalists get their money/motivation from the message rather than the audience. In the most extreme form, this is advertising/propaganda. Without getting that extreme, a journalist may be attempting as much to get a certain viewpoint out there (Coke is delicious, trade with China is dangerous, whatever) as to benefit her audience. She may well believe what she is saying; this makes such activities more ethical. But yellow or unethical journalism is still journalism.
A specific form of the above is espionage. If you write lots of articles for the NY Times about how important it is to invade Iran, that’s propaganda. If you do so because the Saudi government is paying you to, you’re conducting espionage. The Nazi regime paid a large number of “pacifist” authors in Europe, for instance. It’s the dissemination of information/analysis on behalf of a foreign government, and it is (and was) considered to be espionage just as information-gathering on behalf of a foreign government is espionage.
I am certainly not promoting the prosecution of Assange as a spy, or the prohibition of unethical journalism. My point is that because espionage is a form of journalism, attempts to prevent espionage are always likely to result in the censorship of articles we’d like to see permitted. Likewise, restrictions on propaganda or advertising always ends up inhibiting free speech. We should be weakening rather than strengthening such laws.
Well, to be pedantic, doesn’t that then include your example above of private eyes?
I could be wrong as I have little experience with the category, but I am under the impression that they are expected to maintain confidentiality with their clients, in a similar way to lawyers, doctors, priests and psychotherapists.
So if A hires Mr. Bogart to spy on B, and then C comes to Mr. Bogart and tells him “I’m interested in B, and a little bird told me you spied on B for someone”, basic professional ethics would require Bogart to refuse to discuss anything related to A’s case with a random stranger, potentially costing him his licence should he fail to do so (depending on what regulations apply in Bogart’s country).