First, I don’t agree that the Slate exchange added any information to the original article. It was clear to me from the NY Times piece (and the accompanying sidebar pieces that were available on the web site) that the reporter urged the subject to go to the feds in order to stop imminent abuse from happening. Of course it didn’t work out quite as planned because the feds apparently ignored the tip-off for several months. Justin Berry and his lawyer slowed things down, too, with their insistence that he be granted immunity from prosecution. I thought this was an interesting comment on his moral position, which was problematic throughout. Berry was exploiter as well as exploited, something that I thought the article made pretty clear.

Second, the “political speech” comparison brings in a whole host of other issues that just confuse things more. Political speech is NOT illegal here in the United States, whereas a 40-year-old sexually soliciting a 13-year-old is. Once you move into another country that has different laws, the frame of reference has changed. Are “journalistic ethics” an objective set of imperatives that remain the same across all cultures? I’m no journalist, but I can’t imagine how the answer could possibly be “yes”.

The political example makes me think of Nazi propagandists or Hutu hate radio — journalism being used to oppress or incite violence against another group. But journalism can be and often is used to move people to action in a positive way as well. The “exposé” has a long and hallowed history. I’m thinking in particular of Edward R. Murrow’s pieces on Senator Joe McCarthy that were portrayed in the movie *Good Night, and Good Luck*. That movie maintained that journalists have a responsibility to call attention to abuses like McCarthy’s, no matter how partisan such reporting may seem to the Powers That Be. So where does this leave “objectivity” as a standard? In the eye of the beholder.

You’re right that there could have been some discussion in the article about the complex problem of deciding when a person becomes an adult versus a child, and how screwed up Americans are on the subject of young people and sex. I can imagine this article being used as a weapon in the culture wars. But on its own, I thought it was an absolutely fascinating piece that couldn’t have been much longer without turning into a book. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it DOES turn into a book later on.

At the very least, it’s got people talking. We’ll see if that turns out to be a good thing or a bad thing. I imagine sales of webcams are going to take a hit. :-/

Now, the Slate article gave additional information, about ongoing criminal behavior and particularly criminal behavior involving underaged children which may have incurred a legal and/or ethical obligation on the part of the NYT reporters. So the NYT’s reporter’s actions look better to me, with the addition of the extra commentary from the Slate article.

The journalistic ethical problem I think this poses goes beyond so-called child porn. Imagine, for instance, that the web cams weren’t sex cams but were “underground political reporting” from a country that restricted such activities. Their behavior is also illegal — and I think if we transposed the behavior from ‘teen sex cams’ to ‘underground political reporting’ we can see that the NYT reporters’ actions are problematic in terms of journalistic ethics.

Now, of course teen sex cams are different from underground political reporting, even in the best case, and probably most people would argue that they are less valuable as speech. But from reading the NYT piece, it wasn’t apparent to me that there were significant overriding *ethical* issues that warranted the level of interference and persuasion that I saw in the interaction between the reporter and the subject.

The Slate article then added to the facts presented in the NYT piece in the dialog between the Slate & NYT reporters. The NYT reporter presented additional information that weighed the scales more heavily in favor of intervention. By including information about currently under-age operators, for instance, and discussing some of the additional behaviors (blackmailing, for example), the Slate facts changed the calculus on the NYT reporter’s legal and ethical obligations. Still, I think the basic journalistic ethical issue is problematic, and I was glad to see Slate raise it, even though I didn’t think Slate completely addressed all my concerns.

I guess I have two additional points / qualifications to make that flesh out the rather dry ‘what if this were political speech’ comparison, because in fact the problem that I saw in the NYT article was broader than just a general rule requiring the same treatment for all kinds of sources, and in part because of the specific subject matter at issue in this article.

First, I’m not necessarily opposed in general to reporters’ intervention in the subject. For instance I hate seeing wildlife documentarians filming little animals as they drop dead from dehydration: why don’t they just give them water for gods’ sake? The same applies to any kind of human issue, like violence or exploitation. ‘Objectivity’ is a real goal and a real value for journalism but it shouldn’t get in the way of expressing common humanity and compassion. There’s a balance that can be attained although I don’t kid myself that it’s easy. Usually, I am critical of reporters falling on the side away from compassion and intervention. But here the reporter’s intervention led to criminal charges. That’s troubling to me — maybe it’s a bad distinction, but intervening to bring water or food is different than intervening to get criminal charges brought against a third party. I understand certainly the argument that bringing criminal charges eliminates a potential source of harm, but it’s distinguishable in at least two ways from, say, providing water to someone dying of dehydration. First, bringing criminal charges is a much more attenuated and indirect way to eliminate harms; it involves third parties, legal judgments, a lot more nuance of judgment, trusting and relying on some people’s statements of facts, etc. That indirectness also introduces a lot of potential for error and abuse–including the error that is present in any disjuncts between what is legal and what is ethical. Second, getting criminal charges filed is not immediate assistance to someone in imminent peril; the element of urgency is completely absent. I’m not sure that these two distinctions completely eliminate the right or responsibility to act or intervene, but I think they certainly are significant, and weigh against the NYT reporter’s actions in this instance.

Second, I’m not necessarily opposed in all instances to interventions involving criminal law and non-urgent interventions. But such an intervention requires a bit more nuance than was exhibited in the NYT article. In this particular instance, for example, the article was about underage sexuality–a topic that is so sensitive across the political spectrum that it is scarcely possible to have any dialog about it. But in fact the extreme sensitivity and nuance of the topic requires that articles about it take extra care and caution to be accurate, non-sensationalistic, and thorough in their discussion of the issues. The NYT article was relatively non-sensationalistic, but I have grave doubts about the accuracy and thoroughness of the discussion.

For instance, there were real gaps in the timeline of the subject as described in the article. That might not have been fatal, although it’s a bit of a problem in an article that relied so heavily — was basically about — the one source. But in combination with the relationship between the reporter and the source, the gaps really raise questions about what isn’t disclosed, and about the credibility of the piece overall.

As for thoroughness, I was extremely critical. For instance, the NYT article scarcely addressed issues that I at least think are critical to discussions of underage sexuality — for example, questions of consensuality, power differentials, and the legal and ethical distinctions between sexuality in children, teens, and adults. Consider the sentence that occurred about halfway through the article that described how the subject turned 18, turning from a victim to a predator. Obviously that sentence reflects no reality other than legal consequences. But by not discussing any reality deeper than legal consequences, the article implicitly endorsed only the legal view. Which might be okay in an article, if the legal view of teen sexuality were at all consistent or coherent, but in fact, it’s not. Consider that the subject’s sex behavior probably would have been perfectly permissible had he been married, which in most states he could have done prior to the age of 18 with the consent of a parent — like his father, who was basically pimping him out! The exact same behavior — a parent authorizing their teen’s sexual conduct — could have zero legal consequences, or under slightly different circumstances get the parent stripped of rights and subjected to criminal charges. This confusion just reflects the general inconsistency and incoherency in law and regulation of teen sexuality, which is quite different from the status of pre-teen sexuality, which is criminalized much more uniformly, or adult sexuality, which is largely decriminalized. But the NYT article elided both the legal distinctions, and the ethical distinctions which are (poorly) captured by the legal distinctions. I’m amazed that a reporter could write an entire article about teen sex cams and never address the questions that distinguish children from teens and teens from adults — both legal and ethical questions. And then, on top of that, to get involved in encouraging the criminal prosecution of people involved in the matter being reported? While apparently taking an at-least-somewhat partisan role with respect to the subject of the article, who ‘crossed the line’ from victim to predator on his 18th birthday? And here the story was basically one person’s story, told more or less from that person’s perspective, with very little reporting on anybody else involved with that person. Details from the police? From the alleged customers? From the kid’s father? Or other parents? From the kid’s other under- and of-age co-workers/employees? Practically nothing; just the one source’s perspective, throughout; leading to criminal prosecutions. Maybe the NYT reporter had more, but he didn’t give it in the NYT article.

I don’t mean to suggest that the kid wasn’t troubled, that he wasn’t exploited, or abused, or that the NYT reporter was wrong to do the intervention–I didn’t glean enough facts from the two articles to really ascertain to my own comfort the NYT reporter’s obligations to do right by the kid. But evaluating those issues was hard in part because the journalism was poor. I couldn’t trust the reporter, who, to my eyes, acted more like a guidance counselor, attorney or advocate than a journalist. I certainly agree that this was a tricky issue to investigate, a tricky issue to write about, both because of the legal issues, the social disapprobation attached to any analysis of the issue, and the possibility of actual harms occurring. But *because* it is such a delicate and potentially dangerous issue, we really need very good reporting telling us what the picture is out there. And in my judgment, just on the facts I’ve seen in the NYT article and the Slate article, this reporter missed the bar in the significant ways I detailed above. I grant it’s a very high journalistic bar, and maybe it’s better to attempt it and fail than to have no journalism on this issue at all. But IMO a controversial subject makes it perhaps even more important that the original journalism be good, because if the subject is enough of a hot potato, it will dissuade even journalistic criticism which touches on the issue.

By the way, thanks for posting that summary of the Dover case. It gave this evolution-lovin’ skeptical atheist pleasure.