Best Practices for Journalistic Balance: Gatekeeping,Imbalance and the Fake News Era

ABSTRACT

The concepts of balance and fairness are considered pillars for ethical journalism. However, balance is not clearly defined within the working profession, and more importantly, the construction of a balanced news story is often subjective to its creator and institution, leading to calls of imbalance by both the public and political figures. This study examines the construct of balance and if there is a connection between imbalance and fake news from the perspective of news journalists within the United States. Interviews with television journalists across the U.S. show the definition of balance is widely varied, with a need to expand beyond the traditional two-sides-of-the-story model; a recognition that the expanse of the Internet has created a force of un-vetted gatekeepers allowing for imbalanced reporting, and that the threat of fake news could seriously harm balanced journalism.     

Journalists Primed: How Professional Identity Affects Moral Decision Making

ABSTRACT

This study examines whether professional journalists reason differently about moral problems when primed with their professional identity. This between-subjects experiment (N?=?171) used the Defining Issues Test, a much-used and validated instrument that measures moral reasoning. The results show identity priming does not affect how journalists apply ethics. The study also found that journalists score far lower in moral reasoning than they did 13 years ago. These results are interpreted through the lens of social identity theory.     

武德的价值功能及其培养

武德的价值功能主要体现在导向作用、调节作用和互补作用3个方面。因此,在武德的培养过程中,必须重视习武者的武德教育、武德行为规范的形成,落实武德教育的措施。     

关于加强教师职业道德建设的思考

目前，教师的职业道德状况呈下坡趋势，对教育事业造成了一定的危害，必须采取切实有力的措施予以匡正；应大力加强教师的职业道德建设。     

新世纪美国新闻学教育面临的挑战

进入新世纪后 ,美国新闻学 /大众传播学教育面临诸多挑战 ,核心是如何组织、管理新闻学 /大众传播学教育 ,作者列出了美国新闻学 /大众传播学教育的几种主要模式 ,并认为新闻学 /大众传播学教育不会在美国消退     

论新型师生关系的构建

师生之间的关系决定着学校的面貌,是提高教育教学质量的保证.当前,在一些学校,师生关系还存在较严重的问题,为了保证新课改的基本理念“以学生发展为本”落到实处,必须构建新型的师生关系.     

Foreign correspondence: journalism in the Germaine Greer Archive

Germaine Greer’s print journalism forms a significant portion of her archive. It needs to be reassessed and recognised as having equal value to her other types of writing. Greer’s journalism powers much of this major archive and it is important to acknowledge that this archive is as much a journalist’s one as it is the archive of a feminist, a performer or a literary scholar. Greer’s own methodical creation and re-creation of her print journalism legacy into a series of records in the Greer Archive is also an implicit argument for the value of her ‘smalls’. As a recordkeeper, she has gathered up ‘the madwoman’s underclothes’, the hundreds of articles published around the world.     

“The Best Minute and a Half of Audio”

In the introduction to a police audio recording of Bristol Palin describing her family’s involvement in an Alaska house party brawl, CNN anchor Carol Costello commented: “This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across.” The incident, however, involved an alleged assault—an act that mainstream journalism generally reports in a serious manner. Costello’s glib treatment of the event could therefore be seen as potentially breaching the boundaries of professional practice, which brought a widespread media response from both mainstream organizations and right-leaning blogs. Through textual analysis of these items, this study illustrates the challenge of conducting media boundary work—and the role strain that results—when the subject of a story occupies space within both entertainment and news spheres.     

Tracing the Sources

This article explores health journalists’ sourcing patterns in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium across a range of different media including newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online health news websites. A cross-sectional quantitative content analysis of health news items collected in February 2015 (N?=?981) was established to examine the number and origin (e.g. industry, citizens, experts) of sources (N?=?1998) mentioned in health news stories with particular attention paid to differences across various media types. Despite recent claims of media convergence, cross-media comparisons are scarce and, for a specialized beat such as health, nonexistent. The key findings of this study indicate that ordinary citizens and academic experts constitute the two largest source categories. The small share of industry-related sources confirms journalists’ skeptical attitude towards content provided by the industry. But on closer inspection, large differences can be observed across various media types. On the one hand, ordinary citizens occur with relatively high frequency on television but hardly make an appearance in online news items. Academic sources, on the other hand, are dominant online but nearly absent in television news items. In sum, this analysis demonstrates that health journalists’ source uses differ across various media platforms.     

User Experiences with Editorial Control in Online Newspaper Comment Fields

This article investigates user experiences with editorial control in online newspaper comment fields following the public backlash against online comments after the 2011 terror attacks in Norway. We analyze data from a survey of online news consumers focusing on experiences and attitudes towards editorial control set against a spectrum between “interventionist” and “noninterventionist” positions. Results indicate that interventionist respondents rate the quality of online comments as poor, whereas noninterventionist respondents have most often experienced being the target of editorial control measures and feel that editorial control has intensified after the terror attacks. We conclude that newspapers should pay attention to the different needs of participants when devising strategies for editorial control. Media professionals should also consider changes to increase the transparency of moderation practices.