If Di Tzeitung had covered the Civil War
If I could pronounce it, the Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Di Tzeitung would be useful shorthand for “shamelessly using rationalizations to defend indefensible conduct.”
Last week, the newspaper ran the now-familiar photo of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others in the White House Situation Room, except that in Di Tzeitung’s version, Clinton and the only other woman present, Director for Counter-terrorism Audrey Tomason, had magically vanished. Di Tzeitung had airbrushed them out, Politburo-style.
Of course, publishing the photo of a historic news event and altering it to convey misleading or false information (in this case, “Hillary wasn’t there”) is a substantial and wide-ranging violation of core journalism ethics, a breach of the reader’s trust, unfair, dishonest, misleading, incompetent and disrespectful. The altered photo was alternately condemned and mocked all over the media and blogosphere. Yet Di Tzeitung is largely unapologetic, and made it clear that it would do the same thing again if the opportunity arose. In a prepared statement, the editors explained why they did nothing “wrong”…well, almost nothing…challenging the Olympic record for rationalization by a news organization along the way:
“Our photo editor realized the significance of this historic moment, and published the picture, but in his haste he did not read the “fine print” that accompanied the picture, forbidding any changes. We should not have published the altered picture, and we have conveyed our regrets and apologies to the White House and to the State Department.”
Rationalizations: 1) “It was all a misunderstanding!” 2) “If we hadn’t broken the law, we wouldn’t have been doing anything wrong.” 3) “It was the other guy’s fault.” This part of the statement is bizarre, amusing, and sad. Di Tzeitung’s editor “realized the historical significance” of the moment and the photo, and so he decided to change the photo and distort the record of the moment. “And this would have been fine and dandy,” the paper argues, “if that sneaky old White House hadn’t put a restriction in the same fine print that those crooked mortgage companies use…surely you can’t blame us for missing that! But we are sorry that we broke the law, and won’t do that again. If we can warp the historical record without breaking the law, however, then there won’t be anything unethical about it..right?”
Wrong.Of course wrong.
Going on…
“In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status. Publishing a newspaper is a big responsibility, and our policies are guided by a Rabbinical Board. Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.”
Rationalization: “It’s policy.“ The ethical problem is that this isn’t a defense, or even an excuse. “Our policy requires us to be unethical” just means that the paper has an unethical policy. This is supposed to be a newspaper, meaning that it has an ethical obligation to report the news truthfully. Reporting the news truthfully means not running a photo of South Vietnamese Police Chief Col Nguyen Ngoc Loan aiming a zucchini at the head of a Viet Cong terrorist because your paper objects to guns, showing Natalie Portman looking svelte at the Oscars because your paper has a policy of not giving positive publicity to unmarried pregnant women, and not airbrushing the U.S. Secretary of State out of a photograph of an important foreign policy event. As with the pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for some customers as a matter of “conscience,” a newspaper altering and publishing an altered photo as fact cannot and must not be defended as conscience. It is a betrayal of trust and professional ethical standards.
More from the statement:
“The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office, is a malicious slander and libel. The current Secretary of State, the Honorable Hillary R. Clinton, was a Senator representing New York State with great distinction 8 years. She won overwhelming majorities in the Orthodox Jewish communities in her initial campaign in ’00, and when she was re-elected in ’06, because the religious community appreciated her unique capabilities and compassion to all communities. The Jewish religion does not allow for discrimination based on gender, race, etc. We respect all government officials. We even have special prayers for the welfare of our Government and the government leaders, and there is no mention of gender in such prayers.”
Rationalizations: 1) The Jumbo Bluff : “Elephant? What Elephant?” (First uttered by the great Jimmy Durante in the Broadway musical “Jumbo,” when he was caught by a sheriff in the act of stealing the title character and asked, “Where are you going with that elephant?” 2) Self-Annointing Virtue: “We did it, and since we are as pure as the driven snow, those who accuse us must be the wrong-doers.”
The truth that Di Tzeitung is running away from so futilely is this: a newspaper that cannot be trusted to print the news accurately, and that would use the tools of censorship to retroactively change the record of history, is a travesty, and unfit to be published, distributed or read. Why it is this way doesn’t matter.
Ethics Alarms 
First, a minor note. I think I can help with the pronunciation of the paper’s name. It’s a Yiddish variation of the German “Die Zeitung,” which translates as “The Newspaper.” So, if you simply refer to it with its English translation you would be, arguably, correct, and pronunciation would be a snap. (Of course it might well lead to some “who’s on first” exchanges.) Second, a question: If the paper, in accordance with its long-standing editorial policy, had deleted the women from the photo (as they did), but explained in a caption what they had done, would it then have been an ethically OK thing to do? Or would it have merely been a little better (at least they’d have been making some attempt to square it with history), but still an ethics foul?
Still an ethics foul, don’t you think? Isn’t it like running a headline that says “Obama Defects To Poland” and explaining in the story under it that it’s not true, or running a false story with a disclaimer at the end? Especially in the era of the internet, when the chances that the photo will be run elsewhere, including in history books, without the explanation, are near 100%. A lie is a lie, no matter how quickly it is retracted. …and how many times have you looked at a photo without reading the caption?
Anyone else notice that Di Tzeitung is hiding behind religion to excuse their inethical behavior, or was that just me?
That’s exactly what they were doing!
Actually, they do run stories like “Obama Defects to Poland”—every April 1 though, in fairness, you’ve decried that practice as well. (A local paper called the Houston Press once ran a completely fictional—but plausible—story, but ran a retraction in the next issue, explaining it as an April Fool’s prank. A major problem was, the Houston Press is a weekly.) There are also the stories where the headline is a teaser, but nonetheless literally true—my personal favorite. Anyway, you’ve convinced me. Thanks for the clarification.
It’s a contradiction in terms to use “ethics’ and “orthodox” in the same paragraph. As in orthodox Jews, orthodox Muslims, or orthodox evangelicals (if such exist). They all deny the humanity of women and gays, and in some cases, of anyone who doesn’t share their orthodoxy.
I’m kind of glad for the fake photo because it exposes this inhumanity.
I don’t see what orthodox has to do with it. Anyone willing to base their beliefs on fiction is ripe for conversion to inethical behavior.
And just to think, they could have avoided this if they had simply not published that picture, period. (Then again, this whole thing resulted in a bunch of people who had not heard of Di Tzeitung before hearing about, well, Di Tzeitung).
Jack,
I guess I’d get more worked up if I assumed the readers of Di Tzeitung actually expected to read the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but they don’t (not really). This is a group who steadfastly refuses to recognize the State of Israel because it wasn’t founded by G-d and who consider it a mortal sin to drive on a Friday. I have nothing against Jews, mind you, or any orthodox religious group, but all cultures of that sort exist in a realm where truth is largely subjective.
Thus, it’s not so much that they wanted to pretend Hillary wasn’t there, but rather focus on the “important” people as they saw it. After all, groups like this see the world according to their own narrative and whatever doesn’t fit that particular narrative has to be explained away or outright ignored. More than likely few of their readers even noticed the exclusion or, if they did, couldn’t have cared. Bad journalism, yes .. but it makes for great dogma.