Journalists, particulary print journalists, are not a well-loved lot. A Morgan Gallup poll asked people to rate the professions for honesty and integrity. Print journalists were just above car salespeople and equal with advertising people, but below real-estate agents, television journalists, politicians and even lawyers. As usual, nurses, doctors, pharmacists and even dentists were at the top.
There were astonishing differences in ratings. Print journalists were given a very high or high rating for honesty and ethical conduct by just nine per cent of the population, as against 70s and 80s for the medical people.
Yet we know from our common experience that human nature has some fairly universal properties, and it is likely that people in the medical profession, nurses and dentists would have roughly the same number of fraudsters, liars, adulterers, bribers and bribe recipients as journalists or car salespeople.
As for competence, doctors can quietly bury their mistakes, whereas journalists perforce expose them for all the world to see and for those affected by them to be angy at. And therein lies the rub. I suspect that the Morgan Gallup ratings reflect the state of knowledge rather than the state of reality. The pollster, of course, claims no more. The pollster is polling a state of mind.
Pharmacists have an astonishingly high rating of 86 per cent of people who thought their ethics and honesty are high or very high. That must be more a function of the fact that the public is utterly ignorant of pharmacology and blissfully unaware of the way pharmacists fall for drug-company stunts to entice them into prescribing patent drugs rather than generics. Too bad for taxpayers subsidising the PBS. The public just swallows its medicine, unaware of the rates of misprescibing. If the patient gets sicker it is put down to the disease.
Bank managers cop a hiding this time. They are down to 33 per cent, a steady fall over the 23 years that Morgan Gallup has been polling. Ah, but we are now more aware of the banks. I suspect, though, that bank managers are no more nor less honesty now than in 1976 when they scored 66 per cent.
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here. The banks and there managers are more honest in 1999 than they were in 1976. In 1976 with financial regulation and little competition, they lied to people all the time. They cross-sibsidised. They held the power of money in their hands. It may be tough and raw now, but at least you know where you are.
I’ll go further out on the limb with nurses. Some nurses some of the time make mistakes, pick favourites among patients and give less favourable treatment to others, in the same way that journalists under pressure make mistakes and in any event allow personal biases through. And both professions would have equal proportions of the hard working, lazy, honest and dishonest. They probably have equal numbers of idealists, too.
Federal MPs get a poor rating, though up from the past two years when the travel rorts affair was at its highest. Once again, the state of knowledge reflects in the rating. In fact, our federal politicians are an honest and ethical bunch, by and large. But Question Time is put to air. Polticians are grilled. They are presented with their own words later on, for every voter to see the inconsistency.
A doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis, however, are rarely recorded even by the patient, let alone reflected upon and judged after the event. Medical negligence cases are settled out of court wherever possible. A doctor is much more likely to say that a patient’s body just did not respond rather than admit another treatment might have been better, even with hindsight.
The symptoms of a doctor’s mistake can easily be passed off as symtoms of the disease.
But we know about houses and cars. We live in them and drive them every day. So we are quick to blame the agent or saleperson accusing them of dishonesty, even though we get ample opportunity to inspect and test drive before we buy. Who can test drive a medical specialist.
Gary Morgan says he thinks that the low rating of print journalists arises from their increasing tendency to mix fact with opinion. There may be some truth in this. But print journalists have other failings which are there for all the world to see. Grammatical errors, errors of fact, failure to get all sides of an issue are fairly common. When the emphasis is on speed and quantity, quality can suffer. But I think most professions have similar pressures, it is more a question public awareness of the consequences.
People who tell a story to journalists always know more than the journalist, so will almost always be disappointed that the full story was not told or a different emphasis was given because the story was contaminated by other views. The result is that accusations of poor professional conduct will be common and will be easier to prove and to tell to others by word of mouth. Whereas, the client of a lawyer invariably knows nothing of the law and the legal system so simply cannot tell if the lawyer is behaving competently, honestly or ethically. How would you ever know that XYZ Act could have help your position or that XYZ drug could have saved you or indeed whether the prescription was properly filled. Blind trust.
Yet when you cover the courts or read court reports avidly, the professions of the defendants in cases of fraud, sexual abuse involving breach of fiduciary relationship, bribery, fiddling expense accounts and the like bear no resemblance to the Gallup poll ratings. Medifraud, police bribes, churchmen on sex charges, politicians on rorts charges and bankers on embezzlement charges seem to be far more common than crimes committed by journalists and car salespeople.
I don’t want to put in a special plea for journalists. No my thesis is worse than that. The professions with which we have intimate dealings and with which we have close knowledge rate abyssmally. Those whose professional work is a mystery to us get high rating. Perhaps the sad truth is that if people had equal knowledge of the professions they would have a more equal view of them.