Newspapers and other news organizations continue to face questions of whether or not a certain perspective or background of writers and reporters is advantageous in their professional coverage. The issue, along with the longstanding debate over journalist objectivity, emerges with the greater opportunity now for outside comments or even expressions of opinion apart from regular news reporting or commentary venues.

“The reality is that social media forces journalists to confront the fact that while many of them pretend professionally to have no opinions — outside of the op-ed pages — reporters and editors have plenty of their own views on the issues they cover, and those views can color the journalism they produce,” Mathew Ingram wrote on Gigaom July 8, 2010 in “Twitter Forces Media to Confront the Myth of Objectivity.”

Dismissal of CNN Senior Editor for Twitter Post

The day before Ingram made his comments CNN dismissed its senior editor for Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, for a Twitter message she sent expressing condolences over the death of a Lebanese Shiite cleric and founder of Hezbollah. Nasr said in a subsequent posting that her words were misunderstood and that she wasn’t endorsing all of the cleric’s views.

Thomas Friedman, in “Can We Talk?” in the July 16, 2010 New York Times, disagreed with Nasr’s firing while saying he thought she had made a mistake. “Reporters covering a beat should not be issuing condolences for any of the actors they cover. It undermines their credibility. But we also gain a great deal by having an Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-Christian female journalist covering the Middle East for CNN, and if her only sin in 20 years is a 140-character message about a complex figure like [Sayyed Mohammed Hussein] Fadlallah, she deserved some slack.”

Friedman, who has said in the past he thinks his background as a Jewish American aids in his coverage of the Middle East because critics of Israel want to see what he writes, termed the offences that justify termination as “misreporting,” “misquoting,” “fabricating,” “plagiarizing,” and “systemic bias.” About the Nasr case, he added: “What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprint.”

Social Networking to Express Personal or Controversial Views

Among the initial objectives in journalists’ use of social networking were to communicate with sources and have an exchange of comments or responses with readers. But some newspapers have become leery of its potential for conveying personal opinions or sometimes making intemperate remarks even if intended for a private audience.

In June 2010, contributing editor David Weigel resigned from the Washington Post for publicly disclosed comments he made on a private mail listserv that were highly critical of certain conservative political figures.

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