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The study used five categories to evaluate the news outlets:
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Corrections: Willingness to openly correct mistakes.
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Ownership: Openness about corporate ownership.
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Staff Policies: Openness about conflicts of interest.
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Reporting Policies: Openness about editorial guidelines.
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| Interactivity: Openness to reader comments and criticism. |
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Excellent |
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Very Good |
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Average |
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Poor |
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Not Acceptable |
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| STUDY CONCLUSIONS
The recent Libby case dramatically illustrated not only the hubris of Washington power politics, but the lack of commitment of mainstream media to journalistic transparency. “Here's the conflict in such situations,” wrote reporter Sydney Schanberg, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the fall of Cambodia. “The press calls for transparency by government, corporations, and everyone else. But here the reporters reject transparency for themselves, and yet they say they are practicing good journalism. The public needs a fuller explanation, and that can only come from the reporters themselves.”
Journalists are not only reluctant to explain what they know and how they know it, their news organizations are also often loathe to admit mistakes, and loathe to publicly state their policies regarding their internal journalistic and ethical guidelines. |
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This study investigated 25 of the world's top news sites to evaluate which of them open up their newsrooms to public scrutiny and comment:
- Which outlets post corrections to their stories?
- Which ones provide details about their owners and offer information about any other media and non-media holdings of those owners?
- Which ones publish their internal guidelines for reporters (such as how potential conflicts of interest by reporters or editors are handled)?
- Which ones publish their internal standards for stories (such as how anonymous sources are handled or how politicized language is identified)?
- Which ones actively seek readers’ comments and complaints?
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Most news sites grudgingly give information about their corporate owners…
What most news sites manage best, according to the study, is admitting to who owns them. Still even that public information is rarely prominent, and news outlets differ on the details they provide—most are chary, for example, about disclosing other media and non-media holdings of their parent corporations.
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And most sites have bought into the concept of engaging their visitors.
Most of the news outlets manage a certain level of interactivity—most have at least one or two venues through which readers can make comments about the news coverage: through contacting an ombudsman, writing letters to the editor, emailing correspondents directly or talking with them via on-site blogs, live chats, or leaving remarks at the bottom of stories.
But while interactivity has become a must-have component of websites, the distinct impression many of these outlets leave was that they are not really interested in considering readers’ opinions. In many cases, the interactivity possible on the websites seems geared more to generate stickiness than to allow the newsrooms to hear and respond to readers’ complaints.
Evidence for that? Only seven news outlets have ombudsmen (or their equivalent)—all newspapers, with the exception of National Public Radio and CBS. And even more striking, nine of the sites have no provision for visitors to write letters to the editor—effectively all of the broadcast outlets, with CNN and PRI’s “The World” being exceptions.
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The greatest surprise was how most news outlets handle corrections. Most don’t publicly acknowledge their mistakes.
Only 11 out of the 25 news sites visibly post corrections to their stories, and again, it is the broadcast outlets that have a particularly poor track record. The one major exception: CBS News. CBS has created a section of its news site, titled Public Eye, devoted to transparency.
In effect, it is their effort to create a dynamic blog version of the traditional ombudsman experience. Linked off the CBS News homepage, Public Eye is a model for what journalism should be doing.* To quote from the site:
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"Public Eye’s fundamental mission is to bring transparency to the editorial operations of CBS News — transparency that is unprecedented for broadcast and online journalism.
And what, exactly, is transparency? It has several aspects, but most simply it is this: the journalists who make the important editorial decisions at CBS News and CBSNews.com will now be asked to explain and answer questions about those decisions in a public forum.
Public Eye will be run by a team of independent and experienced journalists. They will take questions, criticisms and observations from our vast and articulate audience to the people of CBS News and try to come back with some answers, explanations and analyses. The Public Eye team will also report on CBS News, working sources, talking to the reporters, producers and executives who make the news, not just to the press office.
Public Eye is an opportunity for our audience to hold CBS News more publicly accountable. It is also an opportunity for CBS News to be more open about how and why it makes editorial decisions that affect what millions of people see, hear and read each news day." |
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CBS News clearly now understands that bringing visitors into the process of deciding what's news is critical to its credibility. And further, CBS News now "gets" that once a mistake has been made it is far better to admit to it. Trying to ignore mistakes only serves to enrage those audience members who are alert to errors. And it is often those audience members who are the most dedicated consumers of the site’s content—as well as the most dedicated and vociferous critics through watchdog blog sites.
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But where the news sites really did poorly was on posting their guidelines for writing and editing stories.
Almost across the board the outlets are unwilling to make public their editorial and ethical guidelines. Many news outlets have internal documents that stipulate all kinds of standards for reporting and writing stories. Some are writing and editing concerns: how should reporters spell “Al Qaeda,” when can reporters use the term “terrorist,” and how many sources does it take to confirm a story? Other guidelines are in place to help reporters, editors, producers and others in the newsroom navigate their own behavior conflicts: can journalists be taken out to lunch, can they contribute to a political candidate, can they accept speakers’ fees?
While one might think that the media would be eager to make such documents public in the interest of honesty, accountability and credibility, the reverse has been the case. Only a few of the news outlets this study looked at actually post their newsroom standards, and only a few others even speak about them in general terms on their sites. However, In several cases ombudsmen have “outted” the guidelines—or sections of the guidelines—in their columns.**
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Of course, “Transparency” doesn’t guarantee fair and accurate reporting.
Now it’s true that media transparency doesn’t ensure that individual reporters will always be honest brokers of information—as Jayson Blair and Judith Miller taught the New York Times. But a news outlet’s commitment to being transparent helps its visitors understand the judgments made by the news operation and gives those visitors a venue for complaints and criticism when something goes awry. Ultimately—if not immediately—transparency leads to accountability. And accountability leads to credibility.
As Schanberg noted, “Journalism's most serious failure, probably, is its reluctance to explain how reporters go about putting together a news story….This lack of openness about our tradecraft—this non-transparency—is really the mother of most of the press's troubles.”
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| * Our one complaint about PublicEye is that it is poorly marked as a site visitors can go to to learn about corrections and ethical issues at CBS News. Precisely, because it breaks the mold of how other media make their reporting policies and corrections public, Public Eye can be invisible to those who don't know it's there. We here at ICMPA fell afoul of that "invisibility" in our original coding of CBS--our three tiers of fact-checking our data didn't turn it up.
** As the New York Times public editor Byron Calame wrote in the final column of his tenure on May 6, 2007: “There is one key aspect of transparency that I failed to fully explore as public editor: The Times’s willingness to put its reporting and editing standards in writing exceeds that of many newspapers. It has been encouraging to find the paper’s 2004 “Ethical Journalism” handbook, which has a link on the public editor’s Web page, quoted regularly by readers with a complaint. But The Times’s less-noticed 1999 ‘Guidelines on Our Integrity,’ which I had forgotten about until recently, predates the Jayson Blair fiasco of 2003 and is even more specific on some matters, so I am posting it on The Public Editor’s Journal. Interestingly, although attorneys at many newspapers worry that written rules can be misused by plaintiffs’ lawyers in libel situations, The Times has not lost any court battles in recent years as a result.” full article
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