CNN.com's primary failure

(Screen shot of my laptop at 8:05pm)

Spot the journalistic faux pas: On the night of four crucial primaries, CNN offered its most prominent right-panel advertisement space to Obama for America, the Illinois Democratic candidate's Web site. And, as expected, clicking on it redirected the reader to BarackObama.com, where he or she could learn more about -- or donate to -- his presidential campaign.

I’m not going to insinuate the existence of a pro-Obama media bias; as much as I believe the media has unfairly covered this election, speculative finger-pointing won’t encourage the likes of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to act more responsibly. Instead, I’m more concerned with CNN’s decision to include political ads on their Web site during such an important night in the primary season. To be sure, the ads rotate – out of sheer curiosity, I refreshed the page at least 10 times and never saw the image again – but the principles CNN violated are obvious: Even if a news organization (or, business) is overwhelmingly cash-strapped, editors ought to avoid ads that disrupt even the notion of objectivity. To do otherwise is to create undue suspicion, the prevalence of which damages any article or publication's credibility or reputation in the long term.

Granted, print media have a history of publishing politically motivated ads; MoveOn.org’s press campaign last year, for example, blatantly attacked Republicans’ Iraq war policy and ignited a firestorm of criticism. Nor was it the exception to the rule: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that political advertisements in print tripled since 2000.

But while it’s difficult to gauge whether these ads affected readers’ votes, it’s easy to understand the reason for their heightened popularity. As seemingly everyone in the industry would agree, funding mass media's news enterprises is by no means an easy task. Newspaper readership seems to be declining as more readers embrace the Web, a medium with so much uncharted territory that advertising is a murky business at best, and the result has been an unpredictable and tumultuous economic climate that many news organizations have struggled to navigate.

In the search to break even, political ads are one way to fill the void. As The Washington Post reported during the 2004 election, some news Web sites were in fact courting political ads “in an attempt to earn a slice of the $1.25 billion expected to be spent on political advertising [in 2004].” And while we're obviously months away from possessing final numbers on 2008 political advertisements, we can say with certainty that newspapers and Web sites coveted every bit of the revenue they've received (or, at the very least, that CNN's does). Where else can they find such a steady source of funding?

Problematically, this perceived breach of objectivity carries with it an ironic twist. The Post article continues:

“Political ads on the Internet are not governed by the same rules that apply to radio and television, leaving news sites free to run ads without having to disclose who paid for them. Sites also are under no obligation to provide equal time to candidates or offer campaigns the lowest available advertising rates.”

Granted, there are a variety of reasons for this double-standard, ones that range from a Web page's space limitations or, coincidentally, the Web's lack of space limitations (to the extent that users can seek alternative viewpoints ad nauseam, in ways that TV and radio pioneers could not have fathomed). But while technology has changed the way that journalists disseminate political information, it has not revised the rules of engagement. The code still reads, "In the war between a publication's editorial and business offices, the prior never loses to the latter." Journalists thus recover lost profits through accurate, fair and balanced reporting -- which, to excuse my flowery prose, is both far less tangible and far more beneficial than any financial motivation.

But therein lies the struggle; it is impossible to encourage investigative reporting without sound financial backing; to that degree, maybe all of this concern over political advertisements is merely an exaggeration, and perhaps the CNN-Obama ad is truly benign. But if print is slowly dying (creating a revenue crisis) and the Web needs advertisers' attention to sufficiently develop (creating a revenue demand), political ads of this kind are probably here to say. The journalistic faux pas is slowly becoming fashionable, and what it means for political journalism largely remains unclear.