Tag: journalism

Posted on in Journalism, Media

Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload

Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information OverloadIn a world of information overload from the digital deluge of the Internet, this is next up on my reading list.

Here’s the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly: Veteran journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel (The Elements of Journalism) begin their intelligent and well-written guidebook by assuring readers this is not unfamiliar territory. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television were once just as unsettling and disruptive as today’s Internet, blogs, and Twitter posts.

But the rules have changed. The gatekeepers of information are disappearing. Everyone must become editors assuming the responsibility for testing evidence and checking sources presented in news stories, deciding what’s important to know, and whether the material is reliable and complete.

Utilizing a set of systemic questions that the authors label “the way of skeptical knowing,” Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a roadmap for maintaining a steady course through our messy media landscape. As the authors entertainingly define and deconstruct the journalism of verification, assertion, affirmation, and interest group news, readers gain the analytical skills necessary for understanding this new terrain.

“The real information gap in the 21st century is not who has access to the Internet and who does not. It is the gap between people who have the skills to create knowledge and those who are simply in a process of affirming preconceptions without growing and learning.”

Posted on in Journalism

Don’t shoot the messenger

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
-Walter Lippmann

Before being arrested in London today, Julian Assange, the globe-trotting and dogged founder of WikiLeaks, had an op-ed published in The Australian.

Assange began the article by quoting Rupert Murdoch: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” Murdoch purportedly said that in 1958, long before his beloved Fox News was launched and the world was plunged into a “fair & balanced” rush to truthiness.

In his op-ed, Assange claims that WikiLeaks has created a new type of journalism: scientific journalism.

“WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism,” wrote Assange. “We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?”

This is not a new type of journalism. This is what journalism is. (Well, or should be anyway.) Journalism is the discipline of verification.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), “Journalists rely on a professional discipline for verifying information. When the concept of objectivity originally evolved, it did not imply that journalists are free of bias. It called, rather, for a consistent method of testing information–a transparent approach to evidence–precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work. The method is objective, not the journalist. Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other modes of communication, such as propaganda, fiction or entertainment.”

There is no real journalism without the discipline of verification.

Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. “Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context,” according to the PEJ. “Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can–and must–pursue it in a practical sense. This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts.”

Without this pursuit of “journalistic truth”, the primary purpose of journalism–to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing–is gutted and left for dead.

“Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media,” wrote Assange. “The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.”