Editorial cartoon ethics: iMediaEthics noticed a growing debate over cartoon ethics, and published 11 controversial cartoons of 2018.
Four of the cartoonists were fired. Publications apologized for some of them, and stood by others. The cartoons focused on politics, sports and tragedies.
The truth sandwich: Repeating a lie helps it to live on, writes Craig Newmark.
“I predict that, in 2019, news organizations will start to institute new reporting methods to avoid being complicit. Tactics may include adopting the ‘truth sandwich,’ which means covering a lie by presenting the truth first and then following that lie with a fact-check, as well as increasing newsroom capacity to check claims for accuracy in real time, prior to publishing a story.”
Regaining public trust in journalism: “News organizations and journalism educators should teach members of the public (and their own journalists) how to stop being used as pawns in the meta-game of online disinformation,” writes Marie Shanahan.
“One antidote to modern information gamesmanship is more ethics and professional reporting.”
News dying, not journalism: News is losing its cultural relevance after two centuries, writes Hossein Derakhshan.
“The challenge for journalism in the years to come is to reinvent itself around something other than news, whilst resisting the seduction of propaganda and entertainment,” he writes.
“Innovation in journalism should not only be about business models or technology, it should be also about radically new culture forms and representation formats.”
Advice to aspiring journalists: “Most journalists are, whether they think of themselves this way or not, explainers,” writes David Roberts.
“They are in the business of making sense of the torrent of information constantly deluging us all.”
Bottom line: “There are many different ways to do good journalism, but there is no way of becoming a good journalist that does not involve learning, trying and practicing: Doing the work.”
Scalp headline an ethical lapse: Native American Journalists Association criticizes a newspaper for reference to genocidal practices.
“Referring to the act of scalping Indigenous people violates the dignity of men, women and children that were victims of the practice,” says the association.
“More importantly, such language downplays crimes now defined as genocide by human rights observers and glorifies such racially-motivated acts by ignoring context at the expense of Indigenous people.”
Denying coverage to Nazis: An Arkansas television station thinks about the news value in covering a Nazi rally, then decides to “give them silence,” writes Al Tompkins.
News director learns the protestors are not local, protesting an issue of no local importance.
A thriving weekly newspaper: Revenue tripled in three years at the Malheur Enterprise, with in-depth local reporting and an ad salesperson.
Tom Goldman describes the turnaround and the prize-winning journalism. There’s an appetite for good reporting, Goldman writes, and the paper’s editor and publisher “has earned his readers’ trust with his devotion to bedrock principles of journalism.” He’s called “the ideal community journalist.”
BuzzFeed adopts rules for covering mass shootings: Don’t shy away from the story, but don’t glorify the assailant.
Sydney Smith describes guidelines for language on mass shootings. All interviews should be considered on the record until a reporter agrees to go off the record or on background.
Lagging Freedom of Information Act: Passed in 1966, but “it’s more difficult than ever to pry loose documents about the federal government”, writes C.J. Ciaramella.
Roughly 800,000 FOIA requests were made in 2017. A record number were denied or censored in the first year of the Trump administration. Ciaramella calls the act “a wheezing, arthritic artifact of more optimistic times.”
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 