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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
15. TIME	0.6

Ranking: Not Acceptable.
Details of Findings:
	There is no corrections page, but some individual stories have attached corrections. There is no contact information concerning corrections, and even when this term is searched on Google, nothing relevant comes up. Only articles that have had corrections attached later and articles with that term in their text appear.
	The owner information was found under the link on the bottom of the page, “Terms of Use.” Once clicked, surfers could click “Member Agreement” to read a very long piece, written in many legal terms, about the web site and its owners, Time and Time Warner affiliates. It was not specific though. Other related companies under the parent company’s umbrella were not mentioned, nor were specific board members or bigwigs.
	Time.com had no Code of Conduct or Conflicts of Interests on its web page, and a Google search brought up nothing but irrelevant search results, like articles with these terms in them. Even links where these items would seem likely to be under, such as “About Us”, contained neither of these terms.
	There were no news values listed on the web site anywhere. Even prolonged searches on the web site’s search engine or Google returned no relevant results and instead, returned stories with the phrase “News Values” in them instead of actual News Values.
	There was no link on the web page for an ombudsman, and it appears Time.com does not have one. There is a link provided to send letters to the editor, but that appears to be very generic and the only venue for complaints, as there are no specific email addresses for reporters. Blogs on this web site were written by non-reporters (like Bureau Chiefs), but had reporter contributions. In terms of being able to comment on stories, blogs provided space for this, but readers could not post on the same page as the actual story.
(Nikkee Porcaro and Chris Williams)

About Time

Circulation/Audience

3.25 million

Online Access

No log-in needed.

Parent Company

Time Warner http://www.timewarner.com/corp/

Other Relevant Ownership and Interests

AOL
-Time Inc.
-Turner Broadcasting
-HBO
-New Line Cinema
-Warner Bros

Parent Company Revenue

$44 Billion (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