Evaluating Journalism Standards

—Seeking reliable information sources

News has long fascinated readers.

Introduction

Evaluating journalism standards is essential for upholding the principles of ethical conduct, professionalism, and public service in journalism. By promoting transparency, accountability, and integrity in reporting, stakeholders can ensure that journalism remains a vital force for democracy, accountability, and social progress.

Evaluate the information sources you rely on so that you can choose reliable sources, know how you know and seek true beliefs.

Objectives

The objectives of this course are to help students:

• Assess the suitability of various media outlets,
• Seek reliable information sources,
• Help you know how you know,
• Increase awareness of media bias,
• Value journalistic objectivity,
• Increase your media literacy.

Let’s get started!

Importance

Evaluating journalism standards is crucial for several reasons:,

1. Maintaining Credibility: Journalism serves as a cornerstone of democracy by providing citizens with accurate and reliable information. Evaluating journalism standards helps ensure that media organizations adhere to ethical principles, maintain editorial integrity, and uphold the highest standards of professionalism, thereby preserving their credibility and trustworthiness with the public.
2. Promoting Accountability: Journalism plays a vital role in holding individuals, institutions, and governments accountable for their actions. By evaluating journalism standards, stakeholders can assess whether journalists are fulfilling their watchdog function effectively, scrutinizing power, exposing wrongdoing, and fostering transparency and accountability in public affairs.
3. Protecting Press Freedom: Evaluating journalism standards helps safeguard press freedom by promoting responsible and ethical journalism practices. By holding journalists and media organizations accountable for their reporting, stakeholders can protect the independence of the press and defend against attempts to undermine journalistic integrity or manipulate public discourse.
4. Enhancing Public Trust: Trust is essential for the relationship between journalists and their audience. Evaluating journalism standards helps build and maintain public trust in the media by ensuring transparency, accuracy, fairness, and accountability in reporting. When media organizations adhere to high standards of journalism, they foster confidence and credibility with their audience.
5. Safeguarding Democracy: Journalism plays a vital role in informing citizens, facilitating informed decision-making, and fostering civic engagement in democratic societies. By evaluating journalism standards, stakeholders can assess whether the media are fulfilling their democratic function effectively, providing citizens with the information they need to participate meaningfully in the democratic process.
6. Addressing Media Bias and Misinformation: Evaluating journalism standards helps address concerns about media bias, misinformation, and disinformation that may undermine public discourse and democratic values. By promoting transparency, accuracy, and accountability in reporting, stakeholders can combat the spread of false information and promote a more informed and enlightened public debate.
7. Fostering Continuous Improvement: Journalism is an evolving profession, shaped by technological advancements, social changes, and shifting audience preferences. Evaluating journalism standards helps identify areas for improvement and innovation in reporting practices, fostering continuous learning, adaptation, and growth within the media industry.

Overall, evaluating journalism standards is essential for upholding the principles of ethical conduct, professionalism, and public service in journalism. By promoting transparency, accountability, and integrity in reporting, stakeholders can ensure that journalism remains a vital force for democracy, accountability, and social progress.

Directing Attention

Because we base decisions and actions on our beliefs, and because false beliefs are often harmful, it is wise to choose true beliefs.

Directing Attention

Although reality is our common ground, each of us has unique experiences of its vastness. Refer to the diagram on the right. Reality is vast, complex, and dynamic, and the range of experiences any of us has is a tiny fraction of reality as it is. Furthermore, within our range of experience, our attention is limited. Our attention concentrates awareness on some phenomena, including news sources, to the exclusion of other stimuli. Because our concentration is selective and focuses on discrete information, whether subjectively or objectively, we exclude other stimuli present even within our range of experience.

As information becomes more abundant, your attention becomes an increasingly valuable resource. Because our perceptions focus on what we direct our attention toward, it is wise to direct attention to reliable information sources and away from unreliable ones.

Responsible Journalism Standards

Responsible journalism standards are a set of principles and practices that guide ethical and professional conduct in the field of journalism. These standards help ensure accuracy, fairness, transparency, and accountability in reporting, thereby upholding the integrity of the profession and serving the public interest. Some key characteristics of responsible journalism standards include:

Accuracy: Responsible journalism prioritizes accuracy in reporting facts, events, and information. Journalists strive to verify the accuracy of their sources and fact-check their stories to ensure that they are truthful and free from errors. The Wikipedia guidance on choosing reliable sources provides one model.

Fairness and Balance: Responsible journalism seeks to present information in a fair, balanced, and impartial manner. This involves providing multiple perspectives on a story, giving voice to diverse viewpoints, and avoiding bias or prejudice in reporting. The Wikipedia policy of neutral point of view is an excellent example.

Independence: Responsible journalism upholds the principle of editorial independence, ensuring that journalists are free from undue influence or pressure that may compromise their integrity or objectivity. Journalists should be able to report on issues without interference from outside sources, such as advertisers, government officials, or corporate interests.

Transparency: Responsible journalism promotes transparency by disclosing the sources of information, the methods used in gathering and reporting news, and any potential conflicts of interest that may arise. Transparency builds trust with audiences and allows them to assess the credibility of news sources.

Accountability: Responsible journalism holds journalists and media organizations accountable for their reporting. This involves acknowledging and correcting errors, providing opportunities for response and rebuttal from affected parties, and adhering to established codes of conduct and professional standards.

Ethical Conduct: Responsible journalism adheres to ethical principles and guidelines that govern the behavior of journalists. This includes respecting the privacy and dignity of individuals, avoiding harm or sensationalism in reporting, and exercising discretion and sensitivity when covering sensitive topics.

Public Interest: Responsible journalism serves the public interest by providing citizens with accurate, reliable, and timely information that is essential for informed decision-making and democratic participation. Journalists have a responsibility to seek out and report on issues of public concern, even when it may be challenging or controversial.

Minimizing Harm: Journalists must always remember that they are dealing with human lives. The potential for public good must sufficiently outweigh the potential for harm that may come from the activity of journalism.

Continuous Improvement: Responsible journalism is committed to continuous learning, self-reflection, and improvement. Journalists and media organizations should regularly evaluate their practices, seek feedback from audiences and stakeholders, and adapt to changing circumstances and technologies to maintain the highest standards of professionalism and integrity.

Readily Available: Responsible journalists make their journalism standards readily available. This allows readers to assess the veracity, objectivity, and independence of the information that is being presented.

Overall, responsible journalism standards are essential for upholding the credibility, trustworthiness, and integrity of the media profession, and for fulfilling journalism's vital role in democracy and society.

The code of ethics in media organization, created by a suggestion from the 1947 Hutchins Commission, publishes a set of guidelines. The society of Professional Journalists also publishes guidelines.  Students may wish to compare these to the general guidelines listed above.

Professional Organizations

Several professional organizations work to maintain ethical journalism standards. These include:

1. The Ethical Journalism Network
2. Independent Press Standards Organization
3. Society of Professional Journalists

Students may wish to study the guidance and standards each of these organizations provide to their members.

Declared Standards

Below is a collection of standards declared by a sample of popular media outlets. If no standard is listed for a particular organization it is because no standard was readily available.

1. ABC News
2. BBC, The BBC’s Editorial Standards
3. Bloomberg News, The Bloomberg Way Guide for Reporters and Editors.
4. BuzzFeed, The BuzzFeed News Standards and Ethics Guide.
5. CBS News, Our publishing principles at CBS News.
6. CNBC
7. CNN
8. Daily Mail, Clarifications and corrections.
9. Forbes, Forbes Editorial Values And Standards.
10. Fox News, About
11. Google News, Google News policies
12. HuffPost, Journalism Ethics and Standards
13. NBC News, (Standards seem to be adopted locally. Check with your local station.)
14. Newsmax, About Newsmax
15. NPR, These are the standards of our journalism.
16. New York Post
17. PBS News, PBS Editorial Standards & Practices
18. Reuters, Reuters Handbook of Journalism
19. Slate, About
20. The Associated Press, Associated Press News Values and Principles.
21. The guardian, Editorial code of practice and guidance
22. The New York Times, Ethical Journalism, A Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Opinion Departments.
23. The Wall Street Journal, Newsroom Standards & Ethics
24. The Washington Post, The Washington Post, Policies and Standards.
25. Time Magazine, About Us.
26. USA Today, USA Today Network Principles of Ethical Conduct for Newsrooms.
27. Yahoo!, About

In addition to the list above, the Wikipedia assessment of perennial sources provides an informal assessment of many available information sources.

Fact Checking Services

Several organizations work to check factual claims made by media outlets. Consult these services regularly to assess the accuracy of the information you are receiving. If these services often find that your preferred news sources are inaccurate, misleading, or consistently biased, then it might be wise to choose more reliable sources.

1. Politifact
2. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
3. FactCheck.org
4. Snopes
5. TruthOrFiction.com
6. NewsGuard
7. The Washington Post Fact Checker
8. AllSides, including their AllSides Media Bias Chart.

It is wise to consult these services to assess media claims before passing on potential misinformation or committing to beliefs based on misinformation or disinformation that may be misleading or incorrect.

Social Media Sites are not Journalism

Although social media sites have become regular sources of news and information for many users, these platform's reliability and trustworthiness are questionable because of the amount of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation present. This is due to the lack of verification and regulation of information posted on platforms, as users can anonymously create posts containing misinformation and pass it off as truthful. While some social media platforms employ fact-checking to combat this, most do not or do not employ it effectively. Platforms have been found to magnify the spread of misinformation. Consider this finding based on a study of Twitter (recently renamed 𝕏) users.

“Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

Social media accelerates the spread of misinformation for two primary reasons. Firstly, the widespread presence of bots allows malicious actors to disseminate false information rapidly and in large volumes. Bots can generate and publish posts much faster than human users, creating an environment where Fake news significantly outnumbers truthful reports. Secondly, Fake news tends to attract higher user engagement. These posts often contain novel or sensational content, which piques users' curiosity and encourages interaction. As these posts garner more engagement, social media algorithms are more likely to recommend them, thereby amplifying the spread of misinformation.

User generated content is not journalism and is best assumed to be unreliable. It is wise to independently verify claims made on social media by evaluating evidence that supports or contradicts the claims being made. It is wise to fact check the speculations being made and consult reliable sources before assimilating this into your own beliefs or sharing it with others.

Assignment:

1. Complete the Wikiversity course Knowing how you know.
2. Know how you know.
3. Verify claims made outside of reliable journalism before adopting these as your beliefs, or sharing rumors and unverified claims with others.
4. Seek true beliefs.  
5. Direct your attention toward responsible journalism to obtain accurate information

Assignment

1. List several information sources you rely on.
2. Research the journalism standards of each publication that declares their standards.
3. Compare the declared publications standard of each information source to the criteria listed above.
4. What are your assumptions about those organizations that do not declare their journalism standards?
5. Are you obtaining information from reliable sources?  
6. Migrate toward more reliable information sources.
7. Know how you know.