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A majority of the public believes the media can’t be trusted.

Which global news sites are most transparent about their operations? Not necessarily the ones you would think….

Openness & Accountability: A Study of Transparency in Global Media Outlets

Main Results

Study Conclusions

Understanding Results

Why Transparency?

Study Methodology

Authors

The study used five categories to evaluate the news outlets:

Corrections: Willingness to openly correct mistakes.

Ownership: Openness about corporate ownership.

Staff Policies: Openness about conflicts of interest.

Reporting Policies: Openness about editorial guidelines.

Interactivity: Openness to reader comments and criticism.

	Excellent
	Very Good
	Average
	Poor
	Not Acceptable

	Overall Score	Corrections	Ownership	Staff Policies	Reporting Policies	Interactivity
12. Fox News	1.2

Ranking: Poor (tied with ABC News, The Economist and the Daily Telegraph).
Details of Findings:
	No information about corrections was available on this web site. There was no stated corrections policy and no place to find a running list of corrected stories and corrections were not searchable on the web site. In addition, there was no central way to distinguish a corrected story (if it existed) from an uncorrected story.
	The owner information can be found easily. . Information about who owns the web site was available by clicking the ‘terms of use’ link on the homepage. This page only included the information that Fox News Network, L.L.C. (FOX) owns the web site. The rest of the page was dedicated to stipulating rules governing the use of the Fox news web site service, leaving no contact/other information for the site’s owners.
	There is no information about conflicts of interest or ethical codes of conduct anywhere on the web site. In addition, information about conflicts of interest/codes of conduct was not available through additional online searches or outside web sites.
	No News Values are listed anywhere on the web site or through a Google search.Even prolonged searches on search engines like Google returned no relevant results and instead returned stories with the phrase “News Values” in them instead of actual News Values.
	The outlet did not have an ombudsman/ there is no link to an ombudsman. There is not a link for letters to the editor. Fox News had links to email specific programs or news bureaus, but not individual reporters. Blogs were available, but were not written by reporters. No live chats were available on the site. No comments were available on the site.
(Hadass Kogan and Nick Sohr)

About Fox News

Circulation/Audience

7pm Wed March 14: Shep Smith - 272

Online Access

No log-in needed.

Parent Company

News Corporation http://www.newscorp.com/index2.html

Other Relevant Ownership and Interests

-New York Post http://www.nypost.com/
-Many other newspapers around the world: http://www.newscorp.com/operations/newspapers.html
-Entertainment studios: http://www.newscorp.com/operations/index.html
-National Geographic Channel http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/
-SKY TV http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/home
-Magazines: http://www.newscorp.com/operations/magazines.html

Parent Company Revenue

$25.327 billion for year ending June 2006

A center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy. Copyright © 2006 International Center for Media and the Public Agenda. 1117 Journalism Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742