Media, communication and struggles over transparency

Issues of transparency are not new, but have been magnified in the information society—often because of the scale and scope of information available—and because news media are increasingly part of the story, not merely, the storytellers.

The roles played by leading newspapers worldwide—the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, O Globo, El Pais and others—in reviewing and publishing stories based on disclosures by Wikileaks and Edward Snowden’s NSA files have thrust them into the debate about how much transparency society needs. Arguments over information they published and whether disclosures serves public purposes have been animated. These debates highlight differences in views about transparency in security matters, but they also are forcing society to address more fundamental issues about transparency involving many other issues.

Transparency debates are not just a struggle over information and secrecy, but about the bases of human interaction and experience. Transparency is a philosophical and ideological concept based on the view that disclosure is good for society. From a philosophical standpoint, however, transparency is not good in itself—like serenity, beauty, or truth—because for thing to be good in itself it cannot produce harm. Transparency, however, can produce negative consequences by harming dignity and modesty, creating surveillance and means for coercion, endangering public safety, fuelling violence and conflict, and exposing proprietary information in ways that harm economic development.

Transparency does have functional value for achieving desirable outcomes, such as understanding the environment, exposing corruption and abuse of power, promoting trust, facilitating democratic decision making, and making price evaluations in markets.  Information must be available or effective choices cannot be made. But it is not exposure merely for the sake of exposure, so it must be balanced with concepts of privacy, solitude, and security—which lead to debates about when and how transparency is practiced.

The debates taking place today are part of a highly visible struggle over transparency in information age. Digital platforms and all media are playing central roles in debates about the proper extent of transparency involving government, business, banking, and our personal lives. Media themselves are also gathering and using data from their users for their private gain, just as are other companies.

Some of the debates are occurring because of the differing norms and mores of the material and digital world. The norms of the material world tend to involve structure, authority, control, hierarchy, and formality; whereas the norms of immaterial world involve amorphous arrangements, collaboration, empowerment, egalitarianism, and informality. These differing norms and the struggles over the norms have significant implications for government, business, and personal life. They are part of a fundamental struggle over the political economy of information and data.

Wikileaks, Anonymous, and other actors are active participants in the struggle and battling powerful commercial and governmental forces that wish to impose the norms of the material world into the digital, non-material world. It is not surprising they have brought major media into their campaigns, nor should not be surprising that they have fallen afoul of state power. Activists with libertarian and anarchistic tendencies have historically generated backlashes from the state and elites because threats to power typically result in the exercise of power—a very Machiavellian response.

The debates over transparency, the use of information and data, and who should be transparent about what will grow more heated in the coming years. Media and media businesses will play important parts in the debates, not merely as conveyors of information about others, but also about the extent to which they will become more transparent on their own.

The deinstitutionalization of journalism

The most important change in news production today is probably the deinstitutionalization of journalism—the separation of journalism from structural arrangements that significantly influenced its development in the twentieth century.

The practice of journalism was heavily influenced in the past century by regular employment in news enterprises, hierarchical arrangements and organized beats, trade unions and professional associations, and common values and training.
 
These created strong institutional influences on journalistic work from employing organizations and professional colleagues. They provided institutional support to journalistic practices, journalistic specialization, and expanded news and information provision. The arrangements provided the foundation on which better journalistic working conditions and compensation were built.
 
The newsroom was a construction of the institutional arrangements and became the focus of journalistic life. The newsroom developed in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century after telephony altered the need for journalists to be constantly roaming the city and it has undergone several conceptual changes since that time.

Ironically, it is the development of better communication technologies and the digital era that are markedly changing the centrality of the newsroom in journalistic work. The number of journalists physically located in newsrooms is diminishing because of the ability to work fully from other locations and because of the reductions in regular employment.
 
In the new environment, the number of independent journalists working as freelancers or journalistic entrepreneurs—or within small journalistic cooperatives—is growing. There is growing pressure to expand the boundaries of the definition of a journalist to include non-professionals who regularly create and disseminate news and informational content.
 
These developments are changing the context of journalism, its norms and practices, the organization and direction of journalistic labor, perceptions of journalists’ identity, and its reward systems and career paths—all of which are visible signs of the deinstitutionalization of provision of news and the profession and trade of journalism.
 
In the twentieth century journalism was provided by insular news organizations that rarely cooperated with other news organizations, detached themselves from the society they claimed to serve, and often relied on news and information clues from elites and official sources. New, more flexible means of obtaining and providing news are emerging in the deinstitutionalized environment that rely on public accounts and data previously unavailable to journalists. Where these are taking us remains to be seen.
 
The deinstitutionalization raises a host of questions: How are these changes altering journalism practice? What does deinstitutionalization means to news, information, and an informed public?  How can and does innovation takes place in non-institutional settings? How do the transformations underway benefit journalism? How does the declining importance of the newsroom affect the institutional nature of journalistic ethics and decision making?
 
These are fascinating questions in an intriguing transformational period.