Category Archives: Accountability

Good News Vs. Bad News

Accountability, Accuracy, Media, Minimizing Harm, Weighing Benefits and Harm, , , ,

On the whole, the world is getting better, writes Bill Gates, Time Magazine’s first-ever guest editor.

“To some extent, it is good that bad news gets attention,” he writes. “If you want to improve the world, you need something to be mad about. But it has to be balanced by upsides. When you see good things happening, you can channel your energy into driving even more progress.”

Bad news arrives as drama while good news is incremental — and not usually deemed newsworthy, he writes.

Michael Wolff’s Access Journalism

Accountability, Accuracy, Independence, , ,

Assessing Michael Wolff’s brand of access journalism: Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon say Wolff could not have written his book “without the hard work of journalists over the past year; the fire he catalogs was often fueled by stories from mainstream reporters.”

Wolff bluffed his way into the good graces of the Trump administration and produced “a thoroughly readable portrait of the Trump administration’s chaos and lack of preparedness.”

Probe Figure Dies By Suicide

Accountability, Accuracy, Fairness, Media, Minimizing Harm, , ,

What to do when the subject of a sex investigation dies by suicide: There’s no playbook for journalists about how to handle situations like that, writes Meg Dalton, about a Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media podcast revealing the troubled past of a prominent political and religious figure.

The case “is an exemplar not only of dogged local reporting, but also a how-to for newsrooms grappling with unexpected ramifications,” writes Dalton, such as the death of a subject.

Weeding Out Toxic Commentary

Accountability, Accuracy, Media, Minimizing Harm, Social Media, , , , , ,

Norwegian Broadcasting Corp. finds a way to weed out toxic commentary: Take a quiz.

Many large media organizations eliminated their comment sections because of abusive commentary, writes Steve Friess. The Guardian, for example, last year closed comments under articles on race, immigration and Islam because they attract “unacceptable levels of toxic commentary.”

A short quiz on the contents of a story, the Norwegian brainstorm, unlocks access to the comments section.

“We wanted to create a bump in the road to make people think a bit before ranting away,” a source tells Friess.

Facebook Home of Viral Hoaxes

Accountability, Accuracy, Fairness, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, Social Media, Transparency, Using Deception, , , ,

Rumors, misinformation and fake news: Craig Silverman says he helped popularize the term “fake news” and now regrets it.

Silverman and colleagues published an analysis of 50 of the biggest fake news hits on Facebook in 2017.

“This highlights the challenge faced by Facebook to find ways to halt or arrest the spread of completely false stories on its platform, and raises questions about how much progress has been made in fighting this type of misinformation.”

Facebook “remains the home of massively viral hoaxes,” says Silverman.

Unnamed Sources Harms Public Trust

Accountability, Conflict of interest, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, Transparency, ,

Reading a story with unnamed sources: Bethania Palma quotes experts who say that journalists risk losing audience trust by frequent or unnecessary use of unnamed sources.

“The public, like the reporters and editors putting a story together, should question whether the story is important enough to grant public-facing anonymity to the sources making the claims.”