In January, DailyKos was part of a major success: influencing a Virginia legislator to withdraw a bill that would have required women to report miscarriages to the police within 12 hours, or face up to a year in jail.
After I wrote this diary (cross-post from Democracy for Virginia) about HB1677 in Virginia, hundreds of blogs linked to the story, most notably infertility and miscarriage blogs like Chez Miscarriage. VA Delegate John Cosgrove received hundreds of emails critical of the bill. In just a few days, the story hit VA newspapers and TV stations, and we celebrated here when Delegate Cosgrove announced he was withdrawing the bill on the very first day of the VA General Assembly session.
ABC's Nightline is airing a segment on blogging tonight which includes coverage of the blog-inspired firestorm against HB1677 in VA. I was interviewed for the piece, as was Delegate Cosgrove. Based on the questions that I was asked during the interview it appears that the segment will include, if not entirely focus on, the ethics of blogging.
Last Friday, a Nightline crew and ABC correspondent John Donvan came to my home in Virginia to interview me for their segment on blogging.
They stayed for about two hours and took around 90 minutes of film. I wrote somewhat real-time thoughts about the filming of the segment in the comments on Blog for America that afternoon. You can read them in archives here and here. (If you search the page with "Maura" as the search term, you can find the applicable comments.)
When I first agreed to be interviewed for the segment, I received a torrent of advice from friends via email on how to come off well on camera. Since I had to leave my parents' house in CT (where I've been caring for my ailing elderly dad) nearly immediately to drive to VA in a blinding snowstorm, I didn't have much time to digest the advice. But I did spend a good time of what turned out to be a hellish 9-hour drive focusing my thoughts about what I considered most important (and positive) about the story, rehearsing a few sound bites, and practicing making focused 3-point statements.
Unfortunately, as I described on BFA right after the filming, most of that careful preparation completely flew out of my head once the camera was on me. As I wrote on BFA, overall I think I came off well, but I do know that they'll only use at most 3-4 minutes of the 90 minutes of tape that they took, and it's always a crapshoot about whether they'll choose clips where I sound coherent, or clips which I call my "Cindy Brady moments".
The very down-to-earth and friendly ABC crew helped to calm my nervousness, and correspondent John Donvan was incredibly nice. One thing that really threw me during the interview, though, was when John Donvan asked me pointedly, "Don't you feel that you had a responsibility to warn Delegate Cosgrove that you were a blogger when you wrote to him?"
I was so stunned by that question that I don't think I answered it very well on camera. Donvan returned to the question a number of times again throughout the interview, and I don't think I ever really "nailed" a good answer to it. There were many ethical considerations that I kept in mind as the story on the bill snowballed to become national news, especially as I continued to post updates on the bill at DFV, but the question of whether I should have warned Delegate Cosgrove that I was a blogger beforehand had frankly never occured to me as a core ethical concern.
It seems to me that that question comes from an understandable orientation of a journalist, who is trained to make every effort to contact the subject of a story before publication and to always identify their role as a journalist when talking to a subject. And although my story was about a bill, not about a legislator, I did attempt to contact him via email three days before I wrote my first blog post about the bill. Perhaps I would have heard a reply from the delegate had I "warned" him I was a blogger in my first email, but it seems to be that that's the opposite of what bloggers should be doing. Of course, if I planned to publish a correspondence with someone, I should declare my intentions and role as a blogger beforehand. But that didn't apply here.
When I finally did hear back from the delegate via email (after he had received hundreds of irate emails), I did -- at his request -- post his response in its entirety on the Democracy for Virginia blog. Blogging as an openly partisan progressive Democratic activist, I don't feel like I have the same obligation to tell "both sides" of a story as if I believe they have equal merit, but I did post the delegate's entire response, unedited, because I thought it was the fair (and ethical) thing to do.
There were many ethical considerations that I kept in mind as I wrote about the bill in frequent updates on Democracy for Virginia, but the question of whether I should have warned Delegate Cosgrove that I was a blogger when I wrote to him was NOT one of them. My position is that I'm primarily a citizen of Virginia, and I was writing to him in that role to ask questions and express concerns about a bill. Whether I choose to share my concerns with others via email, a discussion board, or a blog doesn't seem relevant to me.
What I wish I had been able to articulate during the interview (which a commenter on BFA posted as I was telling the story) is that, to me, blogging is unique becuase it is a conversation as much as it is a publication. The fact that my readers can fact-check the piece themselves, using the primary sources that I link to upon which I based my concerns, the fact that they can write back and offer feedback, the fact that other blogs link to the story and do additive research on it, all make blogging a unique kind of conversation. Some bloggers are lucky enough to have large audiences...(and some, like me, only get lucky like that occasionally!)...but does that mean we should warn elected representatives that we may have an audience for our concerns when we write to them?
When I first agreed to participate in the interview, I was under the impression that the segment would focus on the power of blogs, and that my participation in it was because they wanted to cover a blog that focused on inspiring civic action. I had hoped that the story would focus on the unique, positive aspects of this story; in particular, I'm proud of the fact that concerns about this bill went beyond the political blogosphere and inspired many ordinary non-political people to take action. I also think this story is unique because opposition to the bill transcended political and ideological lines. As I wrote in an update on DFV:
Some commenters in the blogosphere have suggested that this is a firestorm about nothing, since this bill is so unenforceable, burdensome, etc., that no legislature would ever pass it. That may be true, but I believe strongly that shining light on legislation like this can only be a good thing. If it causes Delegate Cosgrove's office great inconvenience of sorting through lots of concerned emails...well, I also think that's a good thing. Not the inconvenience, but the input from concerned citizens. It's democracy in action. And just as I'm trying to ascribe good intentions to Delegate Cosgrove, I hope he'll ascribe the same to me.
"Bekka" at Chez Miscarriage wrote a comment that really resonated:
"Wow. Just....wow. I'm a Republican, and when I went to that blog you linked I saw that she's a Dean supporter so I was suspicious. But I followed her link back to the text of the bill and just....wow. This is not good. I'm still a Republican :o) but I want to do something to stop this. This isn't about Republicans and Democrats, it's about common sense. Common decency, really."
Political common ground is harder to find these days than affordable real estate inside the Beltway. But the responses in opposition to this bill that have emerged in the past 24 hours from Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians show that it can be found. The common ground I see in these responses is that people don't want more government intrusion into their private medical decisions. And if that sentence sounds like pro-choice rhetoric - it's not. About one-third of the women I've heard from have said that they are staunchly anti-abortion, and yet they find the prospect of having to call the police to report a fetal death to be an unconscionable violation of their privacy and dignity. It's actually nice to know that we can find something to agree on: we all respect and care for the privacy and dignity of women and families that experience spontaneous fetal death.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that aspect of the story is what will be emphasized in this segment on Nightline. However, the positive aspect is that I at least got a chance tell this story -- how they edit the story is out of my hands.
Given there has been so much recent news about blogging, from concerns about FEC regulation of blogging to the recent court ruling in favor of Apple which denies bloggers the protection that journalists get regarding revealing their sources, I expect that tonight's Nightline segment will raise questions again about the extent to which bloggers are, and are not, journalists. The fact that blogger Garrett Graff from FishbowlDC finally got day credentials to cover this morning's press gaggle at the White House only makes these questions more timely. Garrett raises some of these questions in his most recent post.
For those of you who followed the story on HB1677, I'd love for you to post your thoughts on what would (and would not) constitute an ethical approach to bloggers voicing criticism of a bill:
- Should we make every attempt to contact a legislator before writing about a bill?
- Must we identify ourselves as bloggers when we contact elected representatives?
- What ethical considerations should we keep in mind as we write about legislation?
I hope you'll choose to watch tonight's Nightline episode. I'm incredibly nervous about how I will come off on camera. I hope I can do us proud.
Above, I raise some of the questions which came up during my interview, and I wonder how many of you would have answered them. The Nightline folks will likely review this thread, so if you've got any thoughts on ethical considerations regarding blogging, please join the discussion below!
Update [2005-3-9 1:16:57 by Maura in VA]: Thanks to everyone who wrote really supportive comments. All in all, I was stunned by the remarkably fair coverage given to blogging overall and to me in particular! There are always a few nits to pick, but overall I think this is the best depiction of blogging I've ever seen on TV. If you agree, I hope you'll take a minute to
give Nightline your feedback. Correspondent John Donvan and producer Elissa Rubin shaped this story, and I thank them for giving me so much air time and for, on the whole, choosing fair quotes to express my "side" of the story.