Dylan Byers has written an article on the debate over how journalists should use Twitter.
“News organizations should ban their reporters from doing anything on social media — especially Twitter — beyond sharing stories,” VandeHei said in remarks to students at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh over the weekend. “Snark, jokes and blatant opinion are showing your hand, and it always seems to be the left one. This makes it impossible to win back the skeptics.”
Kudos to VandeHei for admitting an obvious truth that too many people in the media try to deny. But Byers also takes note of James Poniewozick of the New York Times, who makes a solid point in criticizing VandeHei’s idea: Why should anyone trust journalists more if they conceal their opinions?
The article hints at but to my mind underemphasizes a key issue: the conflict between the interests of individual journalists and those of the institutions that employ them. A tossed-off tweet by a reporter from the New York Times will inevitably have some effect on how the Times is viewed, and how articles in it — articles that may reflect weeks of work and the judgment of multiple people about their conformity to the newspaper’s standards — are viewed.
A reporter’s tweets also foster a stronger relationship between readers and him as an individual than would exist without that medium. That may well be good for the individual reporter’s career, and his psyche. But it means that the reputation of a publication disassembles to some extent.
We have been arguing for decades about whether the media should aspire to objectivity or candor about bias. But it seems to me that Twitter poses a problem for media institutions that goes beyond that old debate.