Characteristics of News are Accuracy,

Balance, Concise, Clear & Current

Just as cotton can be used in making heavy clothes and high explosives to the raw material of
human activity can be used for rendering poems, writing short stories or friends or the news.
A journalist here to decide as to what use he is going to make of the raw material available. A
newscaster, news reporter can use his material for sociological expositions, propaganda and
highlight even the human activities. The factual materials from which news stories are made
are extremely delicate. They find immediate response from the readers, audience and
viewers. News conforms to set news style and pattern which has been developed over a
period of years.

5 Characteristics of News
The major characteristics of news are:

1. Accuracy
2. Balance
3. Objectivity
4. Concise and clear
5. Current
Accuracy of News
The accuracy of news is in fact taken for granted by the news consumers. Though it is very
difficult to be accurate in news. Readers should have a feeling that whatever they are being
presented is the overcome of an honest and dedicated effort of the writer. The readers should
never be given an opportunity to say that they never believed what appeared in the papers.
All facts given in the news item should be accepted by readers without questions. What
factual accuracy really means is that every statement in news items every name and date and
age, quotation every definite word or expression or sentence must be precise and presentation
of the true facts. Accuracy means correctness not merely in general impression but also in
details, hastily accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady.

News should be Balanced

News is to be balanced though it is not an easy task to write news which is balanced in every
respects, a severe effort must be made by a reporter to render the account of any event in the
best possible manners. The reporter has to write all the specific facts correctly, fairly and
accurately and objectively. He has to put all the facts together in a manner that his report
conveys the correct and factual impression. He has to give a fair picture of the event as it
takes place. In order to be fair both to the audience and about the gentleman about whom
news is given it is necessary that the news is balanced in content and meaning. News should
be balanced in the matter of emphasis and complements. As a reporter he must constantly
strive to give each fact its proper emphasis and to put it in proper relation to every other fact
and to give those facts the relative importance to the meaning of the story as a whole. A
reporter has to narrate every last circumstance of the story in pause taking details. A reporter
has to select and arrange facts in a manner so as to give a balanced view of the whole
situation.

Objectives
News is a factual report of an event as it occurred. It is not the event as a prejudiced eye
might see it or as the reporter might wish it to be or have thought it to be on those concerned
in the event might like to present it. Facts must be reported impartially as they occurred.
Objectivity in the news is one of the most important principles of modern journalism. It
means that the news covers to the consumer intimated without any personal bias or any
outside influence that would make it appear anything but what it is. News is unavoidable.
News should be presented without a shade. A reporter should not look at events through
glosses either raised colored or smote. News is to be presented in full light of impartial .and
scrupulously honest observation. Objectivity is essential because only pure news can give the
consumer confidence since people form their opinions on the basis of news items it is all the
more necessary that it should be objective in all manners.

News should be Concise and Clear

News must follow the news form developed over a period of many years. It must be unite,
concise, clear and simple. A story that is diffused, disorganized and ambiguous in meaning
does not have the characteristic quality of news. It should be well-paced, unified and abuse
all written so clearly that the meaning of the story is also absolutely plain.

Current (Elements of Time in News)

The definition of news remains incomplete if element of time is not given major
consideration. Time is the essence of the news. Emphasis is on the time element of news
story, this is necessary because of the changes which may occur in the transitory period.
Things are always changing and the news consumers want the most recent information on
subjects of concerns or interest to them. In the present circumstances the news development
might undergo a rapid change. The events occurring in the morning may completely outdate
or upset east might facts. Most news are labelled “todays” or at the most distant, last night.
The news media are specific about time. They tell the readers that the news is not only recent
but truly the last word on the subject. The news media has developed great speed in news
media has developed great speed in news handling in order to able to report events while they
are still new. The reader is interested in current and new things. A newsman wins consumers
and readers by rendering.
Qualities of a Good News Story
As a senior living marketing professional, it can be daunting to approach the media
with a story suggestion. But, with a little knowledge of what makes a story
compelling, you will be better equipped to pitch your idea with confidence.
Whether you want coverage for a cool new program your community is running or
have a special event coming up, Donald Murray, a former writer and writing coach
at the Boston Globe, says there are seven elements to a good news story. You
should understand them before you make a pitch!

1. Information:
You need to have concrete details about the who, what, when, where and why.
When reporters ignore your pitches, it is often because they lack substance. Think
about the facts and details before you pitch a story, and be sure to also consider the
logistics. If you want an outlet to cover a resident’s birthday, for example, make
sure you check with the resident first and confirm they would even want to speak
to a reporter!

2. Significance:
Your story pitch may be of utmost importance to you, but what about the outlet’s
readers, listeners or viewers? If you are not thinking of the audience, it is likely
you will strike out. Keep in mind, however, that even if your pitch isn’t particularly
news-worthy (i.e. what a newspaper would, for example, want to run on their first
page), editors still want ideas for feature stories that they think their readers will
care about.

3. Focus:
A good story is limited and focused. In public relations, we often want a reporter to
get all the details, but if you give them too much to work with, you will be
disappointed in the result. Remember what your core story idea is and stay focused
in your pitch. You ultimately can’t control how a reporter decides to report, but
you can help them to determine the story angle.

4. Context:
Good news stories offer readers perspective. Again, your story idea might be of
great interest to your own community, but reporters are often responsive to a pitch
that has wider implications beyond the senior living community you represent. Is
there a larger trend or issue you could tie your pitch back to? For example, if you
wanted to pitch a story idea about a new art program, is there a local or national
trend you could reference in your pitch to attract a reader?

5. Faces:
Good stories include characters. Think about who will be the face of the story you
pitch. Whomever you put forward – and you should offer up different sources to
enhance your success – should understand and be passionate about the story. They
should also be responsive and willing to get back to a reporter in a timely manner.

6. Form:
Good news stories take shape and give the reader a sense of completion. As a
public relations practitioner, you can help reporters generate form by offering a
well-rounded set of facts and sources for a story. This list of facts and sources does
not have to be formal, but should be comprehensive, focused and carefully
coordinated.

7. Voice:
Good stories also include good conversations. The reporter has a job to provide a
narrative of facts and details; good, concise quotes will add color and accentuate
points in the story. While reporters will likely want to obtain their own quotes for a
story, including them in a pitch or news release, when relevant, can help to show a
person’s personality and provide key insight that further inspires a reporter to
pursue your story.
Mr. Murray was one of the best, and his book, “Writing for Your Readers” is a
classic. PR and marketing professionals who want to better understand what
reporters want should pick up a copy.

NEWS VALUES
IDEAS FOR AN INFORMATION AGE

By Jack Fuller
 THE TRUTH OF THE NEWS

The thought that news reports should be true dawned on journalists

only recently. Until well into the twentieth century, most American
newspapers propagandized on nearly every page. This sometimes meant strict
adherence to a political party line. Sometimes it meant reflecting the personal
and often eccentric views of a single owner. People selected their newspaper
or newspapers in full knowledge of what they would find there. In fact, most
readers probably chose papers for the slant.
During the first decades of this century, the Progressive Era ideal of
disinterested judgment in the public interest took hold of important figures in
journalism. Later, university training of journalists became more
commonplace, as did the idea that news was a profession rather than a trade.
The number of newspapers serving individual communities began to decline.
Surviving papers passed out of the control of the founders and their families
and into the hands of the professional managers of publicly held corporations.
All this led to the sense that journalism should aspire to some higher standard
of veracity. Publishers had always claimed to be printing the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, but suddenly journalists began taking this
literally. It was an important step, and a salutary one for the quality of public
discussion. But to this day many of its implications remain inadequately
examined.
This is not surprising, since most news people talk as if they think the
examined life is hardly worth living. They consider themselves skeptics, but
this is not so much a matter of philosophy as of style. Even among themselves,
they rarely discuss the nature of the claims of truth they make in their work or
the basis of the disciplines they follow in furtherance of these claims. And
when they do think about the underpinning of their reports, they usually get no
further than debating a two-source rule for unattributed statements or repeating
the catechism of Chicago's legendary institute of street wisdom, the City News
Bureau: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
The considerations that determine when journalists feel free to print a
statement as fact typically do not take the form of written rules. They vary
from news organization to news organization, passing down the generations
by the process of example. And they are sometimes utterly self-contradictory.
The same editor may reject one story for want of neutrality and another for
insufficient authority of judgment.
The issues of fact journalists have to decide cover an enormous range.
Often a newspaper must act in the face of quivering uncertainty, as when it
announces which candidate has won an election before the vote has been
tallied. (A mistake can leave a lasting mark, as the "Dewey Defeats Truman"
headline marked the Chicago Tribune for decades. To this day the Tribune has
an unwritten policy that it is better to be last than wrong.) A newspaper
sometimes must even decide when to call a man dead, for example in the
chaotic aftermath of an assassination attempt or when a totalitarian society
hides its leader's demise. It has to attempt to state fact through the smoke and
thunder of war and recognize the error that often hides in what Clausewitz
called the "vividness of transient impressions."
At the other end of the scale, a newspaper must decide when to believe
the representation of a letter writer that he has given his real name, or of a
person calling in from a community arts group that a concert will take place on
a given day at a given time, or of a police officer that a burglary took place at
a particular address. Even these decisions can involve great uncertainty. When
I was about to take my turn at City News Bureau as a lad of eighteen, my
father (a City News veteran) gave me this bit of advice: "When a fire is
burning, you're going to be the only one who cares how the dead spelled their
names." (Or at least he said words to that effect, if my memory serves me
correctly.)
At another level of complexity, journalists make judgments about
when to report the statements of authorities. We commonly rely blindly on
scientists, economists, engineers, and other experts, all the while purporting to
be ruthlessly skeptical. And the judgment journalists make concerning which
government statements to pass on to the public as fact-which to report as
debatable and which simply to disregard-stands near the very center of the
press's social purpose in a self-governing society.

WHAT IS NEWS?

What is the proper standard of truth for the news? To answer that, one
must first come to some clear understanding of what news is. Even at its most
presumptuous, the news does not claim to be timeless or universal. It
represents at most a provisional kind of truth, the best that can be said quickly.
Its ascription is modest, so modest that some of the most restless and
interesting journalists have had trouble making any claim of truth at all.
In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, then a writer
for Fortune Magazine, savaged the whole idea of journalistic truth:

Who, what, where, when and why (or how) is the

primal cliché and complacency of journalism: but I
do not wish to appear to speak favorably of
journalism. I have never yet seen a piece of
journalism which conveyed more than the slightest
fraction of what any even moderately reflective and
sensitive person would mean and intend by those
inachievable words, and that fraction itself I have
never seen clean of one or another degree of patent,
to say nothing of essential falsehood . . . .
[J]ournalism is true in the sense that everything is
true to the state of being and to what conditioned
and produced it [which is also, but less so perhaps, a
limitation of art and science]; but that it is about as
far as its value goes . . . . [J]ournalism is not to be
blamed for thi;s no more than a cow is to be blamed
for not being a horse.
 Even accepting that news is not the kind of truth that would meet the
rigors of science or the clarity of revealed religious insight, there is still too
little agreement on how to define it. Though journalists might agree the beast
is a cow, they will debate what breed and how much milk it can produce. Look
at one day's newspapers from a dozen cities and you will find, even correcting
for local factors, no consensus.
One might be tempted to say that news is anything that news
organizations report. In fact, this definition has adherents among a few
journalists whose fascination with power leads them to overestimate their
own. It also appeals to certain outsiders, such as those who encourage the
media to do more uplifting stories in the expectation that-they-might revise
grim reality as easily as they revise a sentence.
But the definition of news does not have to be so empty in order to
explain most variations in coverage. Most respectable journalists on American
newspapers would, I think, roughly agree with this statement: News is a report
of what a news organization has recently learned about matters of some
significance or interest to the specific community that news organization
serves.
This narrows the debate over the news value of any particular item but
does not lead to unanimity. The New York Times may consider a vote in
Congress on free trade to be the most important story of the day while
the New York Daily News leads with a deadly fire in the Bronx. This is
because of each newspaper's understanding of the community of readers it
serves and, perhaps, because of differing judgments about what is significant.
There are some papers, to be sure, that do not seem to be concerned
with the element of significance at all. Such a paper would always go with a
sex scandal over a coup attempt in the Soviet Union. Most contemporary
journalists would scoff at this as pandering, but the honest ones have to say
that they, too, take account of the pull of basic (even base) human curiosity;
the difference is whether any consideration of larger interests comes into play.
What is significant will always be a matter of debate, but in general the
evaluation should turn on the foreseeable consequences. Significance and
interest provide separate bases for calling an event or piece of information
news, and either may be sufficient. No matter how few people were interested
in reading about strategic arms limitation talks, the enormous importance of
these negotiations to the future of the planet made them extremely
newsworthy. And no matter how insignificant Michael Jordan's performance
in minor-league baseball may have been to the history of the United States, the
deep popular interest in it justified extensive coverage.

THE FUNDAMENTAL BIASES

My proposed definition of news includes several elements that are not

wholly subjective (though this does not mean they are unambiguous):
timeliness, interest for a given community, significance. These look beyond
the journalists' personal preferences outward to phenomena in the world that
can be discussed, if not measured.
The elements of the definition also suggest some ways in which the
journalist's report of reality is likely to be fundamentally biased.
 First, journalism emphasizes the recent event or the recently
discovered fact at the expense of that which occurred before or had already
been known journalists recognize this bias and talk about the need to put
"background" information into their pieces. But commonly the internal logic
of reporting puts "background" information very much in the background and
tolerates little more of it than is absolutely necessary to permit the reader to
make some sense of the new material. From time to time a newspaper may go
back and attempt to tell about an event or issue comprehensively, but this is
very special treatment. The bias of immediacy is the rule.
Second, the journalist has a bias in favor of information that interests
his audience. This helps explain the favorite complaint about news-that it
accentuates the negative. People's curiosity shows a tropism for misfortune.
Disaster always becomes the talk of a community in a way that good fortune
less commonly does. Trouble touches some people's empathy at others' sense
of doom. Fear and anger operate strongly at greater distances than love, so bad
news travels farther. One might delight to hear that the daughter of someone
he knew had just received a prestigious scholarship, but he would shudder at
the brutal murder of a stranger's child a continent away.
The bias of interest also means that the audience's blind spots will tend
to be blind spots in the news. If people are generally indifferent about a
particular subject-say international trade talks such as GATT — the journalist
knows that it will be very difficult to make them pay attention to it, regardless
of how important it may be in their lives. Whole areas of inquiry go years,
decades without attention in the news until they become involved in an event
that captures people's imagination. The engineering of bridges receives scant
notice until a large span collapses. Human retrovirology meant nothing to the
general population until the scourge of AIDS. Even disciplines that find
themselves more commonly in the news — economics, law, medicine — are
lit up piecemeal, depending on the fascination of the day. The Phillips curve in
economics reaches public print when in defiance of it inflation and
unemployment both begin to run high. Even an obscure field of law such as
admiralty might get an examination in the news when something of sufficient
drama happens upon the high seas. We learn everything we never wanted to
know about the human colon when a president has part of his removed.
Walter Lippmann described the press as a searchlight that restlessly
prowls across the expanses, never staying on any feature for very long.
Actually, human curiosity is the searchlight. We journalists just go where it
points.
Finally, there is a bias toward what occurs close to the audience's
community. Often this manifests itself as a simple matter of geography.
A National Lampoon parody of a hometown newspaper called the Dacron
Republican-Democrat some years back had a page one headline that read:
"Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster." The drop head
read: "Japan Destroyed."
Community is not always defined by physical proximity. Communities
of interest have newspapers, too, and the list of publications includes more
than the trade press. Consider, for example, the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times. Both have specialized audiences and are edited to satisfy
their interests. USA Today also appeals to a distinct public-the business
traveler away from home-and this explains many of the editing choices it
makes, which would be foolish for a metropolitan daily newspaper with an
audience that has a much different set of shared interests.
The bias of community provides an answer to a snobbish question one
often hears: Why don't other newspapers pay as much attention to
international affairs as the New York Times does? The Times recognizes that
for much of its audience the world is the pertinent community of interest. A
disproportionate part of its readership engages directly in international busi-
ness and public policy. Since it is circulated nationally, the Times becomes a
kind of local newspaper for this community (and can be as provincial about
matters outside its territory as any other paper; just try to get guidance from
the Times about the best easy-listening CDs or religious TV shows). There are
not enough people in most cities who are deeply engaged in international
affairs to command strong international coverage in their metropolitan dailies,
though in certain centers such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago
the audience is large enough to support a substantial foreign-news
commitment by the local papers, and in others such as Miami there is enough
interest in one part of the world to require the newspaper to make a large
commitment of space and attention to it.
The element of significance in the definition of news does not
necessarily introduce a bias. Rather it might be said to be the heading under
which to group all other biases. These may arise out of the social
circumstances of journalists, the imperatives of the economic market on their
news organizations, the culture from which a journalist comes, or the larger
intellectual currents of the times: interesting issues, but I do not mean to
pursue them here, as they do not distinguish observational bias among
journalists from the bias of any other observer.
Later chapters will discuss in much greater depth the relationships
between news and the audience and between news and the interests of a
self-governing community as well as the reasons journalists define news the
way they do. For the moment, though, suffice it to note that the biases that
arise out of the definition of news sharply restrict whatever truth claim
journalism makes, narrowing its angle of vision and establishing the qualities
of the lens.
What is the standard of truth to which the news ought to aspire? A
report that meets the criteria of timeliness, interest to a community, and
significance may be more truthful or less so. It may reflect reality or show it
on a skew. Once again, journalists tend to look at this practically rather than
philosophically. And they have suggested over the years several ways of
describing the disciplines to which they adhere in order to correct against bias
and maintain a proper relationship with the truth.

ACCURACY, ACCURACY, ACCURACY

When nineteenth-century New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer made

"Accuracy! Accuracy!! Accuracy!!" his motto, he meant the small things:
names, ages, and addresses. Like other press barons of his day, he committed
his share of sins against the larger truths. Nonetheless, his emphatic insistence
upon the smaller ones demonstrated a great deal of practical wisdom: Get the
little things wrong and readers will not trust you to get the big things right.
 And so before going into more subtle issues, it is worth spending some
time in a realm of knowledge where there isn't much question about what truth
means. Not that everything is perfectly transparent even at this level. Writers
sometimes face ambiguity about how to express facts that are easily verifiable.
Does one call a married woman Ms. if she prefers it that way, or does the
newspaper have a general style on married names? Should the cause of a
person's death be described as AIDS or the opportunistic condition that was
the more immediate cause of his demise? When a building carries a vanity
address — One First National Plaza, One Magnificent Mile — should it be as-
signed a number on the street that passes by it? In most instances a convention
of some kind designates proper usage, and it is possible to verify the simplest
facts through sources virtually anybody would agree are
authoritative-telephone records, county files, Dun & Bradstreet.
Journalism's unacknowledged shame is how often it fails to live up to
Pulitzer's standard even with respect to the most commonplace details. Nearly
everyone who has ever been close to a news event has had the experience of
finding the report flawed in the simple things. Susan Jones is an associate
professor, not an assistant professor. John Smith is the chief operating officer
and not chief executive officer of Widget Company. It is Widget Company,
not Widget Corporation; Lincoln Street, not Lincoln Avenue. The burglar got
in by the back window, not through the basement door. It's Diane, not Dianne.
There are as many reasons for these errors as there are occasions:
sloppiness, mishearing, misstatement, mischief. But the reader of the news
does not care about reasons any more than the driver of a new automobile
cares why his door handle came loose. Error is the journalist's responsibility,
regardless of the cause.
The rate of error is a long-term problem of the first magnitude for news
organizations. Author Michael Crichton makes the comparison between the
media's failures and the quality problem American industry has had to face
under the stimulus of increased foreign competition. In the case of the
American media, Crichton argues, the reckoning will come not from abroad
but as a result of new technology that will vastly increase the reader's choices
of what to read. When anybody can have any information source he wants at
the touch of a keypad, the reader will not settle for shoddy goods:

More and more, people understand that they pay for

information. Online databases charge by the minute.
As the link between payment and information
becomes more explicit, consumers will naturally
want etter information. They'll demand it, and they'll
be willing to pay for it. There is going to be-I would
argue there already is-a market for extremely
high-quality information, what quality experts
would call "six-sigma information." (The trendsetter
for benchmarking American quality was always
Motorola, and until 1989 Motorola was talking
about three-sigma quality-three bad parts in a
thousand. Six-sigma quality is three bad parts
per million.) [Emphasis in original]
 Among journalists the resistance to this warning is as great as the
resistance among electronics company executives to the warning about the
inadequate quality of American TVs in the 19 6os or among automakers to the
warning about American cars in the 1970s. Journalists have just as much
trouble admitting error as anybody else — including the public officials whose
"coverups" reporters delight in uncovering. Judging from the small number of
corrections published in most American newspapers, journalists may have
even more difficulty. Surely nobody thinks newspapers run so few corrections
because they all operate at the six-sigma level. Most editors do not give an
accounting of all a paper's daily errors (or even of its factual errors,
disregarding the spelling and punctuation mistakes, garbled type, dropped
lines, transposed captions, and so on) because doing so would be too
embarrassing.
Properly understood, though, a lack of corrections ought to be much
more embarrassing, for it discloses a shocking lack of concern about the basic
quality of the goods. Aggressive correction of factual errors, while initially
provoking amusement in the public and consternation in the staff, ultimately
builds both credibility and pride. It makes Pulitzer's point emphatically. It
says: We do not tolerate error here. And when we discover it, we cannot rest
without repairing the record. It says: While we recognize that exigencies of
time and circumstance make perfection impossible in the immediate rush of
the news, we are committed to making sure that anything less than perfection
at the level of the readily verifiable will not stand.
The whole culture of journalism must change before simple accuracy
becomes once again one of its signal virtues. In an informal survey of
upper-level editors at newspapers in other cities taken by a staff committee at
the Tribune most of the editors thought little of trying to obtain a rigorous
understanding of a paper's rate of error:

Editors at most of the larger papers contacted ... said

such a system [of checking with people close to
news events after a story runs to see how accurate
they perceived it to be] opens the door to disaster,
and they would never consider using it at their
paper.

Typical was the remark of one editor who called the idea insane and said it
would invite lawsuits. That kind of defensiveness shows how far journalism
has to go.
Newspapers need to get back to the basics before changes in
telecommunications force them to a public accounting. Reporters who do not
meet the simple standard of accuracy should not be taken seriously, however
stunning their work may appear to be in other respects. Newspapers should
overcome their reluctance to use quantified performance measures and begin
rigorously counting up their accuracy score. Goals should be established.
Incentives should be provided to reward improvement. The quality techniques
used in other industries should be applied in the newsroom, beginning with the
elegant ideas that obsession with quality saves time and effort and that ex-
cellence comes most reliably as people first do the work, not through elaborate
fail-safe mechanisms. (This is because one of the most facile and common
excuses given for declining quality is that financial pressure has eliminated
redundancy in editing, which means fewer chances to catch errors.) If we are
clever enough, we can get our computers to help us by standardizing certain
error-prone material (prep sports box scores, for example, or routine listings)
so that once we get a name or address or telephone number right, it stays right.
We might also build in spelling- and style-checking routines tailored to
identify the errors our measurement system discloses are most common.
journalists will find no thrill in this project. It is as dull as making sure the
doors on automobiles open and shut properly. And just as vital to the
continued success of the enterprise.
When the idea of accuracy has really taken hold of a news
organization, we don't hear it respond to a challenge with a "we stand by our
story" statement before it has even had a chance to examine the complaint
thoroughly. News organizations rightly hold up this kind of behavior to
criticism when other enterprises engage in it-petrochemical companies de-
nying responsibility for oil spills, auto manufacturers blaming drivers for
safety defects in their cars, government protecting its own. A quality-driven
news organization examines each serious complaint of error, open to the
possibility that it may have been wrong, and takes the time to be sure before
either correcting itself or reaffirming the truth of what it said. Of course, even
a quality-driven newspaper will make errors, because eliminating all
possibility of error would bog everything down. But when it errs, such a
newspaper quickly and without defensiveness acknowledges its mistake and
corrects it.
The commitment to an exacting standard of truth is essential at the
level where it is easy to agree what the truth is, because the disciplines at the
next level become far more difficult to apply.

OBJECTIVITY

Almost nobody talks about objective reporting anymore. What

philosophical analysis had not already undermined, radical multiculturalism
did. But for many years the ideal of objectivity prevailed in the schools, and
you still hear it from people who haven't spent their lives thinking about the
press but simply don't like some of the things it does. So the concept of
objectivity provides as good a starting place as any for the inquiry into the
meaning and limitations of the words journalists have used to describe the
truth discipline.
The idea of objectivity came naturally to a group of people seeking
legitimacy in an era of scientific discovery. In its purest usage, the term
suggested that journalism meant to be so utterly disinterested as to be
transparent. The report was to be virtually the thing itself, unrefracted by the
mind of the reporter. This, of course, involved a hopelessly naive notion from
the beginning. And surely every reporter who has ever laid his fingers on the
typewriter keys has known it.,
No one has ever achieved objective journalism, and no one ever could.
The bias of the observer always enters the picture, if not coloring the details at
least guiding the choice of them. I don't use bias here as a term of opprobrium.
One might have an optimistic bias or a bias toward virtue. It is the inevitable
consequence of the combination of one's experience and inbred nature. An
observer may be able to recognize his biases and attempt to correct for them,
but even when this difficult psychological effort occurs, the resulting depiction
is still subjective, doubly so. The process of correction requires a self--
conscious mental intervention that is at odds with the concept of objectivity.
Trying to think objectively while recognizing the universality of bias
becomes a bit like trying not to think of a purple cow. An example of how
difficult it is to free the mind in this way occurs whenever a news organization
attempts to deal with reports concerning its own people or interests. Say
WGN Television, a subsidiary of Tribune Company, which also owns
the Chicago Tribune, becomes embroiled in a public controversy concerning
one of its programs. Ideally, the story should be handled just as though it
involved any other TV station. But quickly this equivalence becomes
complicated. WGN is not like any other station. It is, for example, a
superstation seen on cable television all over North America. It is a sibling of
a newspaper with a long and colorful tradition and a certain position in the
local and national communities. Its behavior reflects upon the family. And this
gives its acts more significance than they might have had if done by a station
owned by a faceless entity.
Bad publicity concerning the station could adversely affect its ratings
and advertising revenues, which could hurt the price of Tribune Company
stock, in which every Chicago Tribune reporter and editor has a stake through
the company retirement plan. Moreover, the fact that the newspaper has a
financial interest in the performance of the TV station is no secret. Most
readers know this and will, presumably, be looking for evidence that the
conflict of interest has led the paper to deal too favorably with the story. And
so the editors will worry about the effect their handling of the story will have
on the newspaper's credibility. Though the hierarchy of Tribune Company has,
through long experience, developed a thick skin in these matters, everyone
involved in the news decision still knows that all people have similar wiring
when it comes to bad publicity: Whether they say so or not, they do not like it.
And so there is a certain nervousness in the situation, coupled with a summon-
ing up of courage, which may cause an overreaction against the source of the
anxiety and an exaggeration of the play of the story. So it is impossible to
handle the story disinterestedly, just as though it involved some other station,
let alone objectively, as though no mind got in between the event and the
depiction.
Despite the difficulty, good journalists always discipline themselves to
correct against bias. And good newspapers try not to shade the facts, even
when the facts are detrimental to their interests. They try to play it straight.
There are many examples. New York Times labor writer A. H. Raskin was
assigned in 1962 to cover a strike against the paper. His report, critical of
some Times negotiators, appeared in the paper immediately after the strike
ended and publication resumed; the paper's chief negotiator later resigned.9
The Tribune, in a matter close to the circumstances of the hypothetical
situation I just posed, played a controversy between the TV station and the
Roman Catholic archdiocese on its front page. WGN-TV returned the favor by
giving similarly prominent coverage to a later dispute between the newspaper
and Chicago's Roman Catholic archbishop.
I need to make a distinction here between discipline and style.
Objectivity as a discipline defeats itself. But as a style of expression marked
by affectless recitation of fact, it can have considerable force. The
book Friendly Fire 10 by C. D. B. Bryan provides an excellent example.
Originally a series of articles in The New Yorker, which once specialized in
reporting of this sort, Friendly Fire tells the story of the attempts by two
parents to determine how and why their son died in Vietnam. The narrative
describes in detail how the mother and father became frustrated with the way
the Army bureaucracy responded to their inquiries. Without facts to moor it,
the family's imagination began to race.
The first time through this book, a reader cannot help thinking the
author shares the family's ideas about conspiracies and elaborate official
coverups. The objective style helps build this expectation. Here is an example.
In it Bryan describes the boy's mother's feelings after receiving a form letter
from the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam:"

Peg was still disturbed that with the

exception of Culpepper none of Michael's friends
had written. She was now certain that at least half
the casualties in Vietnam were due to mysterious
circumstances, "accidents," because maps were
wrong, because someone high on drugs was
shooting off his gun or because men were being
killed by their own artillery. That was why no
communication was permitted. What was it that
Waverly mother said, the one whose son was
missing in the bumed-out tank? "We've been told by
the Army that we can!t discuss this with anyone
because it might 'aid and abet' the enemy."
The enemy, it had begun to appear, was
anybody who opposed the war.

Bryan effectively plays upon the reader's preconceptions of journalists'

biases-particularly the biases that operated at the end of that distressing war.
We assume the author thinks, along with the family, that there was official
misconduct, because journalists usually do. Why else tell the story?
Bryan acknowledges his own presence in the narrative by reporting his
interactions with the family. He becomes so intimate with his subjects that
when he reports their thoughts (a technique discussed in a later chapter) he
does not seem to overreach. Coupled with his withholding of judgment, these
elements of his style only heighten the sense that he must believe what he is
being told, since he does not try to set the family straight. But as the family's
ideas about what happened to their son become more and more extreme, a
deep discomfort comes over the reader, at least a reader who has enough
acquaintance with the reality of that war to see the flaws in what the family
imagined. To such a reader, both the characters and the author seem
increasingly unmoored.
If the story went no further, the plain-style rendering of the "objective"
facts of the family's statements and behavior might demonstrate another
difficulty of objectivity as a standard for journalism, namely that it begs the
question: Whose perception of reality is the journalist attempting to be
objective about? The objectivity of a mystic is different from that of a
scientist, unless perhaps he is a particle physicist. How can a writer be
"objective" about a reality he can only discern as it is refracted through the
consciousness of others, who may disagree among themselves? But in the end
C. D. B. Bryan resolves this tension by permitting the reader to understand
that all along his story has been about the family's growing distance from
reality. He does this, not by changing his voice, but by letting the factual
details pile up until the reader has a fair idea that the young man died as the
result of a tragic but not uncommon accident of war.
By the close of the book it becomes clear that Bryan's "objective"
stance is a writerly technique, an effective one at that. It serves to tell this
story most vividly. It permits the reader to sympathize with the family without
sharing the family's view. It creates intellectual suspense as the reader
wonders whether these people (Bryan included) are ever going to get a
purchase on the truth. And it depicts memorably the corrosive emotional
effects of public doubt and official silence.
But it is not "objective." The author does not in the end withhold his
view of the events he narrates. Because Bryan knows exactly the meaning he
wants to convey, he can make Friendly Fire appear objective, though in fact it
represents a marvelous act of intellectual intervention.
As she often does, Janet Malcolm put the point provocatively. "The
ideal of unmediated reporting," she wrote, also in The New Yorker, "is
regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what
is going on in his imagination."12 She may be simplistic in her understanding
of fiction, in which irony and the complex use of point of view (including
unreliable narrators) sometimes make it difficult to determine what the writer
really thinks. But she certainly has a point about objective journalism.

OBSERVER AND OBSERVED

Objectivity, along with certain other concepts journalists have used to

describe their truth discipline, assumes an independence between the observer
and the phenomenon observed that simply does not exist. Whether at the level
of skittering subatomic particles or the clash of nations, the object may be
transformed by the attention paid to it.
Good reporters know how to make themselves unobtrusive so that life
will go on around them close to the way it would if they were not there. Some
of the best share the shuffling, stuttering, down-at-the-heel genius of
the New York Times's late, legendary Homer Bigart, who had a great gift for
making his intelligence seem harmless. Bad reporters try to dominate the
room.
One of the most serious difficulties of contemporary reporting grows
directly out of the effect of observation on the phenomena observed. The most
common objects of coverage —beginning with government and
politicians-have become extraordinarily sophisticated about the imperatives
that drive journalism. Consequently, events are planned and public policy
decisions are made merely to play well on TV and in the press. In one sense
this development simply represents democracy at work in an era of
immediacy. The need for consent of the governed, after all, should put a
burden on public officials to try to determine how people will respond to what
government has done or is planning to do in their name and then to change
course, if necessary, to achieve support. The problem is not the immediacy or
the continuous seeking of consent. The problem is the means, which have
placed an unhealthy emphasis on appearances.
This is not a new phenomenon. Daniel Boorstin caught the leading
edge of it with his 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America. But the intervening years have seen politicians take Boorstin's
complaint as an instruction manual; what he decried has become the very basis
of American political life.
The White House is an extreme but useful example of what has
happened to the process of decision-making as the day-to-day grooming of
public image has grown in importance. Michael Kelly has described in
the New York Times the extent to which image has become a political creed:
In this new faith, it has come to be held that what sort of person a
politician actually is and what he actually does are not important. What is
important is the perceived image of what he is and what he does. Politics is not
about objective reality, but virtual reality... It exists for only the fleeting
historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts....
By the time Bill Clinton was elected the 42d President of the United
States the culture of Washington (and therefore of governance, and politics)
had become dominated by people professionally involved in creating the
public images of elected officials. They hold various jobs — they are pollsters,
news-media consultants, campaign strategists, advertising producers, political
scientists, reporters, columnists, commentators — but the making of the movie
is their shared concern. They are parts of a product-based cultural whole, just
like the citizens of Beverly Hills. Some are actors, some are directors, some
are scriptwriters and some are critics, but they are all in the same line of work
and life. They go to the same parties, send their children to the same schools,
live in the same neighborhoods. They interview each other, argue with each
other, sleep with each other, marry each other, live and die by each other's
judgment. They joust and josh on television together explaining Washington
to conventions of doctors and lawyers and corporate executives.
Not surprisingly, they tend to believe the same things at the same time.
They believe in polls. They believe in television; they believe in talk; they
believe, most profoundly, in talk television. They believe in irony. They
believe that nothing a politician does in public can be taken at face value, but
that everything he does is a metaphor for something he is hiding. They believe
in the extraordinary! disastrous! magnificent! scandalous! truth of whatever it
is they believe at the moment. Above all, they believe in the power of what
they have created, in the subjectivity of reality and the reality of perceptions,
in image.
Note Kelly's assertion that Washington correspondents share the
political spin doctors' belief in the subjectivity of truth. Nothing could be more
subversive of the journalist's traditional role, especially since this belief links
up in an ominous way with radically skeptical social and intellectual currents
in our culture (discussed in Chapter Four) which threaten the very idea of
truth.
Kelly is certainly right that the media and politicians are in the game
together. In the conventional understanding of journalism's truth discipline, the
separation of observer and observed must be maintained. Even if a reporter
does not pretend to be objective or neutral (and Kelly makes no such pretense
in this piece), he still can insist upon operating at a distance from the event.
But in the new order, the journalist may think of himself as being as much a
part of the event as the President. He just has a smaller part, and so he has to
work harder to be noticed.
The paradox is similar to what happens to journalists dealing with
stories that involve their organizations and other direct elements of
self-interest. Reflexivity reigns. It becomes impossible to separate the dancer
from the dance. The political writer finds himself in the odd position of
analyzing how a particular message or action will play with the public when
what he says affects how it plays. To complicate matters further, the central
purpose of the message or action in the first place may have been to influence
what political reporters say.
This may seem an enviable position for a journalist to be in, since the
reporter cannot be all wrong: The very existence of the article he writes
provides evidence of the political success or failure it describes. But at the
same time, if he is at all thoughtful, he will recognize that whirl is king and he
is dealing only with spin. He will yearn for some truth referent beyond the
small, closed loop of which he is a part. (It is interesting that the "spin"
metaphor is so close to the language of particle physics in which the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle arose.)
Dealing with this reflexivity is not simply an abstract problem for
decision makers in news organizations. It has real and immediate bite. I recall
the night the story broke that a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court had
admitted smoking marijuana some years before when he was teaching at a
prestigious law school. I got into a heated debate with colleagues, especially
those in the Tribune's Washington Bureau, over my decision not to run the
story on page one. I reasoned that it was not terribly significant that a person
this man's age had smoked marijuana in the past, that the experience was
common enough that it probably reflected no more about his character than
having had an occasional drink during Prohibition would.
The counterargument was that the professor's admission was going to
be political dynamite. Opponents of the President were on a tear after
defeating the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork. They would be able to use
this to make things embarrassing, perhaps even to stop this nomination, too. I
argued that this might not be true if everyone treated the information as having
little genuine significance to the merits of the appointment. As it turned out,
the Tribune was alone among major papers in playing the story inside. And
the nominee went on to his political doom. The information was dynamite, of
course. But should it have been? And would it have been if the story had been
generally played for its real rather than its symbolic importance? Since this
episode we have elected a vice president who admitted having smoked
marijuana and a president who deepened an image problem for himself, not by
saying he had smoked, but by saying that he had not inhaled.)
The self-imposed constraints journalists try to follow affect the general
methods of politics. For example, if journalists were to universally disdain the
use of unnamed sources, it might appreciably increase the power of the
presidency. (It would also dramatically decrease the amount and timeliness of
information available to the public, which may be a way of saying the same
thing.) This is because the use of unnamed sources permits anyone with inside
information to use it against the position of those in authority and take
minimal risk of punishment in doing so. The leak is an equalizer.

THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY

This is one of authority's problems with journalism, but journalism also

has problems with authority, even in a culture that offers remarkable leeway to
free expression. One vexing aspect is how to deal with authoritative untruths.
Journalism's goal is to depict significant things learned about reality
since the last report. When a scientific journal publishes a paper warning of a
frightening new environmental health hazard, or the junior senator from
Wisconsin says he has in his hand the names of fifty-seven members of the
Communist Party who work in the federal government, what should a
disciplined newspaper report? The facile answer is that both are verbal events
in the world and, as such, are true. But this narrow conception of truth
disregards whether the authoritative assertion is accurate.
When the man next door says something to a reporter over the back
fence and the reporter has serious reason to doubt it, he does not publish a
word unless he concludes on independent scrutiny that the neighbor's assertion
has met the general standard of proof. But when someone makes a statement
from the position of the authority either of rank or of expertise, the situation
becomes more difficult.
If the reporter has evidence refuting or clearly casting doubt on such an
authoritative statement, the proper approach is to publish both assertion and
rebuttal. It may even be appropriate for the journalist to present a factual
judgment of his own. But often the contrary evidence does not emerge in time
for simultaneous rebuttal. If the journalist still does not believe the statement,
should he print it anyway? Or should he cast doubt upon it even without
articulatable facts tending to refute it? Are there ever circumstances in which
the journalist should withhold a statement by an authoritative figure simply
because he disbelieves it?
For analytical purposes let's put the issue in its starkest form: Should a
journalist ever decide not to report what the President has said because the
reporter strongly believes, but has no way to prove, that the President is dead
wrong? The same, of course, could be asked of statements by the Pope or a
member of the Senate or House of Representatives, the chairman of General
Motors, and so on all the way down to a policeman at a homicide scene. Any
general approach to this question should deal with the difference between such
cases.
At a minimum, the truth discipline requires that if a journalist
publishes anything that might mislead, he must take steps to correct the
misimpression. This basic rule helps parse out problems that will occur in an
electronic, interactive newspaper, in which news space is virtually
unconstrained and large amounts of textual material can be published
(speeches, press releases, statements, and so forth) that bear on the news. The
journalist presiding over such an environment has a responsibility to assure
that the texts that he publishes are what they purport to be (that the XYZ
Corporation and not an imposter posted the press release on fourth-quarter
earnings, for example). But beyond that, the journalist also should generally
provide readers a context in which to understand these materials and, if he has
reason to disbelieve what they say, the evidence supporting his disbelief. This
is not to suggest that the electronic newspaper should exclude original source
texts (which are valuable in giving readers a full picture and the means for
making their own judgments). It only suggests that journalists have a
responsibility to shed light on the ones that are dubious.
Getting back to the initial question, if the President says insurgents in
the tiny country of Xenobia have systematically massacred hundreds of
women and children and the journalist suspects this is bloody-shirt
propaganda, he has a duty to try to determine whether these massacres have
taken place. But that takes time. What should he do the first night?
It seems clear to me that if the President made such a statement, a
journalist must report it, even in the face of his own serious doubts about its
veracity. He might write his report in such a way as to put the remarks in the
context of the President's efforts to create the political conditions for military
intervention in Xenobia, but he probably should not (in the absence of
anything more than a hunch) transform his doubts into a clear statement of
skepticism about the President's claim. (If a reasonable reader" would take the
account as indicating the journalist's disbelief, the journalist has gone too far.)
The reason for permitting a journalist to violate the ordinary truth
discipline and publish something he thinks is false is that the significance of
the statement, accurate or inaccurate, far outweighs the risk that it will mislead
people. It is impossible to avoid this kind of balancing test. Onto one side of
the balance goes the significance of the utterance and the level of the public's
interest in knowing of it (whether or not it is true); onto the other goes the
likelihood that temporary belief by others in the statement will have
irreversible consequences, the severity of those consequences, and the degree
of doubt the journalist has concerning the truth of the statement.
In some circumstances perhaps even a president's statements might be
withheld on the basis of no more than a hunch. But trying to imagine them
forces one to such fantastic extremes that they do not represent any important
qualification of the general rule in favor of straightforward publication. If on
the first night of the Gulf War President Bush had stated that U.S. planes had
destroyed the Iraqi Air Force on the ground or decimated the Republican
Guard in their bunkers, I would have published it without hesitation, because
all we had was a gut feeling that this assertion could not be so. The hunch was
good enough for us to withhold rumors reported on TV, but it would not have
justified withholding the President's words.
Few journalists would be tempted to withhold in these circumstances.
But the itch of doubt is epidemic. Journalists today have persuaded themselves
that they have a duty to show their universal skepticism of authority. In the
White House pressroom it operates as a kind of collective gag reflex. And it
becomes most acute when the political environment turns mean and personal,
as it too often does these days. Thus we have to be very clear about the rare
circumstances in which subjective disbelief of authoritative statements may be
permitted to intrude into news reports.
In cases involving authority less exalted than the President, the
statement itself is generally less newsworthy in its own right, so the threshold
for withholding publication is lower. For example, a passing remark by a
police officer at a murder scene that the husband of the dead woman must
have killed her can easily go unpublished. The level of doubt is high, the con-
sequences of publication severe to the person involved, and the significance of
the statement (even the public's curiosity about it) low.
One unavoidable consequence of this analytic framework is that it
permits reporters to treat differently cases that are alike from the point of view
of the potential victims of the utterance. A false and disparaging statement by
a highly placed public official in a supercharged political contest might be
published while a similar statement in a more tranquil situation by someone of
less prominence would not be. Likewise, an official pronouncement-like a
grand jury indictment or congressional report-would be publishable even in
the face of doubts about its validity. But so long as the journalist accepts the
obligation to follow up on his doubts and correct misimpressions, the
temporary inequity of this approach is acceptable, given the alternatives.

THE ADVERSARIAL APPROACH

Moral revulsion at publishing doubted information and the fear of

being deceived by skilled image specialists have led some journalists to adopt
an adversarial stance in their relationship with public officials and others they
cover. The adversarial model comes from the conflict resolution methods of
American law. The journalist postures himself as a relentless crossexaminer,
hostile to every assertion by those he faces. He begins with the supposition
that everyone in authority is a liar. Both his questioning and, inevitably, his
reports may reflect this supposition. The adversarial journalist has no trouble
figuring out what to do about a presidential statement he doubts. He simply
lets his doubts show.
Though the law protects the journalist who strikes such a posture,
neither the nature of the system of free expression nor the reasons underlying
the Anglo-American adversarial system of law should be taken as intellectual
support for using the adversarial model in journalism. Both systems were
designed to achieve some degree of truth from a competition among people
with no necessary commitment to accuracy, but both recognize at least tacitly
that there may be better ways of arriving at the truth.
The adversarial model in law puts a duty on the advocate to state the
best possible case for his client. He has no general obligation to reveal the
weaknesses in his position, to discover the falsehoods in his client's assertions
or to put his opponent's case (though he is theoretically bound by minimal
requirements that he reveal certain things that may conflict with his client's
interest). After both advocates speak single-mindedly on their clients' behalf in
a highly stylized debate constrained by elaborate rules of evidence, a third
party (judge or jury) decides what is the legal truth. Some rules of evidence
frustrate the objective of reaching truth in the interest of advancing other
objectives. For example, the rule against introduction of illegally seized
evidence withholds facts from juries in order to deter wrongdoing by the
police. The point of the adversarial process is in the first instance to resolve
conflicts by providing the means of reaching some approximation of truth
from participants who may dissemble or speak with less than perfect candor.
The free expression model embodied in the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution has a similar rationale. The system of free expression
permits almost any message to be sent, recognizing that some messages will
gravely need refutation. But it assumes that this is best entrusted to a large,
decentralized network of participants in the system. It does not impose a gen-
eral, legally enforceable duty of truth because it does not trust any authority
officially to establish the truth. It permits speakers to make false statements
even when they know them to be false, but it does not encourage people to
speak falsely. Nobody denies that the system would work more efficiently as a
generator of truth if everyone felt an obligation to speak candidly despite their
right to do otherwise. (The classic form taken by debates within the academic
world, for example, assumes disagreement but presupposes a shared morality
of truth-telling. It recognizes that when everyone accepts this obligation the
cause of knowledge is most efficiently advanced.) If nothing else, with the
range of disagreement narrowed, the audience (as the ultimate finder of fact)
can focus on the areas of genuine conflict.
The cause of knowledge is also better served by journalists who accept
a duty to tell the truth rather than to take an adversarial posture toward those in
authority. The adversarial model
encourages less than candor, which is why it is so subversive of good
journalism. Furthermore, though journalists certainly participate in the
marketplace of ideas, their role is not an advocate's. They review the debate
and try to come to some form of judgment. They act as surrogates who help
the public discover and weigh the evidence. Their role should be more like the
judge's than the lawyer's, more like the scholar's than the partisan's.

NEUTRALITY

Since objectivity and the adversarial model are inadequate descriptions

of how journalists should do their duty to the truth, one might use a general
standard of neutrality to describe the journalist's truth discipline. This accords
with journalists' description of their duty to be "impartial" or to act "without
fear or favor." As a description of the proper attitude in reporting a story, these
oft-used descriptions have utility. They describe an aspiration, of course, an
unattainable standard of perfection. Only an amnesiac could approach
anything in a state of pure neutrality. But, even recognizing this, journalists
can discipline themselves to correct against bias and deal with each new situ-
ation with an open mind.
What about situations that are not entirely new? Or situations in which
a study of history provides some guidance? Preconception, after all, can be
another word for experience or even wisdom. If editors had no preconceptions
about the nature of warfare, they might have accepted early reports from the
Persian Gulf about the level of destruction achieved by the allies' first air
strikes. If they had relied on these preconceptions a little more, they might
have been warier about the military's reports of how flawlessly "smart
weapons" performed.
Some years before the Gulf War, not long after the bombing of
Muammar al-Khadafy's headquarters in Tripoli, a senior defense official
visited the Tribune editorial board. I asked him what he thought when he
heard the Secretary of Defense say the night of the attack that since the bombs
were precision-guided weapons he found it inconceivable that, despite reports
of damage to the French Embassy, any had gone off track. The Pentagon
official, a combat veteran, replied something like this: "Each aircraft carried
two young men in their twenties who flew half a day in uncomfortable seats to
reach the Libyan coast. At that point they ran into heavy flak. it flew up at
their aircraft from all directions, trying to kill them. They dropped down to
low altitude and flew at a high rate of speed toward the target, then turned the
plane upside down to make the final run. If they dropped a bomb one second
early or late it would land miles off target. No, I did not think that missing was
inconceivable."
His was a preconception, a very knowledgeable one.
The attitude of neutrality in reporting a story has to be tempered by
experience, always recognizing that experience in turn must be tempered by
the new insights provided through the gateway of an open mind. But that is
just common sense. So why not simply declare a general standard of
neutrality? The difficulty comes when neutrality is meant not only to describe
a state of mind for reporting a story but also the way the story should be told.
Journalists often hear complaints that a news story showed bias
because it openly stated the reporter's conclusions or because it had a clear
point of view. This complaint assumes that neutral presentation of information
is always a journalistic virtue. Often the people who make these arguments,
sometimes with great intensity, have a strong point of view of their own. In
fact, hearing enough complaints of this sort tempts an editor to treat them all
as hopelessly partisan. What such people want is not the journalist's neutrality
but his agreement. Still, an honest evaluation of the work that appears in
newspapers today reveals that most of it would not begin to satisfy any
meaningful standard of neutrality of expression.
Political writers regularly evaluate the efficacy of statements by
politicians and government officials. Stories about the economy commonly put
changes in the statistical indicators into perspective (saying that a drop in
unemployment does not mean what it appears to mean, for example) even
when economists show no unanimity on the point. Reports of foreign affairs
include critical discussions of the government's policy or lack of one. Local
news articles contrast antiseptic official statements with gritty recitations of
the reality of the streets. Business writers look at companies' activities in light
of theories of management that are by no means universally accepted. When
great events occur-whether wars or disasters or triumphs such as the breaching
of the Berlin Wall-news organizations try to write directly about the larger
historical meanings and even to imagine the probable consequences some
years down the line, again in circumstances in which there is no consensus
among knowledgeable observers. Either journalism is regularly disregarding a
basic discipline or else neutrality of expression should not be the standard.
There are many reasons to abandon the pretense: journalism needs to
help people understand increasingly complex issues that affect their political
and social decisions, and this is impossible to do without making judgments of
fact and value. People don't usually find perfectly neutral accounts interesting,
because bare recitation of fact can be tedious and leaves too much unresolved.
Busy people expect their newspapers to do much of the analytic work for
them. Neutral writing may actually undermine the relationship between the
newspaper and its community by making it difficult for people to find a
personality in the paper, a unique voice to which they can relate.
The judicial analogy is far from perfect, but it offers a useful place to
begin. Though we expect judges to be impartial and unbiased and to act
without preconception about the case before them, we do not expect them to
end in a state of indecision about the truth and its implications or to leave
readers of their work in a state of confusion about what they have decided.
The best judges recognize the limits of their knowledge and their duty to act in
the face of factual uncertainty in accord with clear rules setting forth the
burden of proof and other tie-deciders. They do make use of their
experience-both as human beings and as lawyers-to try to make judgments that
have some logical coherence with other judgments they have made. But they
do not let partisanship or ideology (which could be thought of as an extreme
case of coherence) prevent them from seeing the exception that might
challenge the structure they helped to build. And when they write, they do not
shy away from making judgments about the weight of evidence and logic. We
only expect that they give due account of the advocates' positions and then
reflect their own true reasoning so that it might be evaluated by others. They
aim to be neutral in their inquiry but not in the expression of their findings.

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY AND THE GOLDEN RULE

The judicial analogy suggests a whole set of virtues — open--

mindedness, impartiality, the duty to be candid about one's reasoning and
about what one knows and does not know, the responsibility to put as
forcefully as possible the positions of those with whom one disagrees. These
virtues all come together in the concept of intellectual honesty, which links the
truth discipline in journalism with the highest standards in scientific and
academic debate. It is as good a statement of aspiration as any I can think of
for journalists.
Intellectual honesty means that in presenting a news report a journalist
may draw certain conclusions and make certain predictions about the
consequences of a particular event, but it also imposes a duty to do justice to
the areas of legitimate debate. This is what separates news from polemical
writing. The former must attempt to represent a matter of public concern in its
fullness. A polemic aims to persuade the audience that one view of the matter
is undoubtedly correct.
The Golden Rule has endured through the centuries as an ethical
proposition of enormous force because it offers a subjective method for
determining the moral direction one's behavior should take. it asks that an
individual treat others the way he would like to be treated, to turn the tables, to
empathize. This is a useful way to look at the requirement of intellectual hon-
esty. In reporting a matter of legitimate debate (How big should the Pentagon
budget be? Did Alderman X take a bribe?), the journalist will surely reach
some conclusions. And, with some constraints described later, he should feel
free to share his conclusions with his readers. But in doing so, the Golden Rule
suggests that the reporter must try to put the case against his conclusions as
forcefully as he would want an opponent to put the reporter's own arguments.
This, like many moral propositions, sets an extraordinarily high
aspiration. If you deeply believe your own position, you will find it very
difficult to express the opposite point of view with the same enthusiasm and
force. But the Golden Rule is a corrective; it points the right direction. And,
with discipline, it is not too much to expect reporters (freed of the impossible
requirement of objectivity and the nonfunctional requirement of neutral
expression) to play square with others' arguments, stating them honestly and
presenting the facts and logic supporting them. The Golden Rule is a
perfectionist goal, toward which to stumble in our imperfect, human way.
Even the unalloyed gold standard does not require a journalist to report
every view of a subject, only those that could be held by informed, reasonable
people. Of course, a journalist's bias may unduly restrict what he considers the
range of reasonable, informed opinion. And illegitimate claims may need to be
reported as important facts in their own right-such as the racist, antisemitic,
and xenophobic views that mar the political landscape from time to time. A
reporter also needs to operate within the constraints of time, space, and reader
attention span that limit everything a newspaper does. But these must not
become excuses for lapsing into the one-sided, polemical approach in the news
columns. A journalist's reputation should turn in large part upon the quality of
his judgment in wisely sorting through these difficult issues so as to produce
work of genuine intellectual integrity.
Too much of what appears in newspapers today fails to live up to the
Golden Rule. Once journalists recognized the philosophical impossibility of
objectivity and the rhetorical weakness of neutral expression, many of them
threw off all traditional restraints against asserting opinion in news reports.
Today many TV correspondents' stand-ups end with a little homily fit to
conclude one of Aesop's fables. You can find plenty of this in the newspapers,
too, though there the moral of the story usually comes at the beginning. In
both media too often arguments that would tend to undermine the journalist's
judgments either remain unreported or else are put forth as straw men that the
reporter easily knocks down. There are a hundred ways to do this. Common to
all is the adversarial unwillingness to permit the audience to make its own
assessment of the contrary position without the journalist's heavy-handed
guidance.

FAIRNESS

Journalists often use the concept of fairness to describe their discipline.

Unfortunately, the idea of fairness has a rich philosophical history. This gives
it implications that may be inimical to the truth discipline. Even as journalistic
cliché, the idea of fairness leads in odd directions.
"Journalism," one saying goes, "should comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfortable." Taken loosely as a call for journalists to concern themselves
with the suffering of the weakest members of society and to have the courage
to tell unpleasant truths about the powerful, the statement makes sense. But it
also can be an invitation to bias, and journalists too often accept the call.
Should journalists always afflict the comfortable, even when the comfortable
are doing no harm? Should they afflict them simply because of their comfort?
And what about the afflicted? What if telling the truth to and about them
would cause them discomfort? Should the truth be shaded or withheld in order
to give them comfort instead? What if truth were the painful antidote that in
the long run would cure the affliction?
Any deep consideration of the idea of fairness leads eventually to
questions of distributive justice of the very sort raised by these tidings of
comfort and affliction. In its simplest terms, the issue is whether fairness
means letting everyone compete on the same terms, regardless of the
advantages and disadvantages they bring to the competition, or whether
fairness requires that players carry a handicap. Is it fair to say that a poor child
from the urban projects and the child of wealth and privilege should be judged
by the same standard when evaluating them for admission to college? What
about when trying to understand the moral quality of their behavior?
John Rawls's Theory of Justice 16 provides an excellent contemporary
example of the idea of distributive justice. Rawls has the courage to face the
whole range of social advantages and disadvantages, as well as natural
abilities and disabilities (with which one may be born and for which one thus
may be said to have no personal responsibility)-not only physical strength and
intellectual acumen, but also creativity, ambition and indolence, beauty and
ugliness. He boldly calls on people's sense of distributive fairness to
compensate for them, as if to repair God's injustice. This leads him a long way
from the idea of fairness as equality of opportunity.
What might fairness in its Rawlsian, distributive sense mean in
journalism? Some participants in the public debate come better equipped for it
than others. Distributive fairness would have to involve some form of
compensation by the journalist for this disparity. He might, for example, call
all close factual issues for the weaker party or shade the way he put both sides'
arguments in order to give the weaker side a chance of persuading the
audience. In more extreme cases, he might have to withhold information
helpful to the advantaged side in order to keep the game even. All of these
compensatory strategies sharply conflict with a journalist's primary duty of
simple candor, and this is why fairness is a poor choice of words to describe a
journalist's discipline.
The ideal of intellectual honesty, tested by the Golden Rule, offers a
much surer guide. But this requires a degree of self-restraint that is not natural
in people who become immersed in a subject and develop strong feelings
about it. The Golden Rule must be taught, and that has been difficult in jour-
nalism because of the lack of clarity and consensus about just what the proper
discipline should be.
One problem has been the shift in weight between fact and value in
news reports. No journalist I know would favor lying to give the weaker party
a more even chance of prevailing in the debate. Far more likely would a
journalist shade his report of a valuative debate to favor an individual
suffering under a disadvantage. Somebody, he might say, has to speak up for
the flood victims, or the physically handicapped, or the urban underclass, or
the Vietnam veteran, or the AIDS victim. And he might even overlook some
strong counterarguments on the assumption that the secure, well-financed
majority interests can look out for their side of the argument very well by
themselves, thank you very much. This helps account, I think, for the populist
streak in American journalism as well as for journalists' reputation for being
more liberal than their audience. It also may be one reason journalists have
seemed to many people to be getting more liberal over time. As self-restraint
against expressing opinion in news reports has fallen, the compensatory
impulse becomes more marked.
It is not always easy to distinguish between fact and value, of course.
In pure narrative, value is expressed solely through the selection of fact. And it
is easy, once one starts handicapping the argument, to start calling more and
more disputes for the supposed underdog. Consider the balance of
environmental reporting over the past few decades. Once journalists became
persuaded that powerful interests were causing danger and using their strength
to cover it up, the tilt set in. It was not easy to learn from news reports about
the evidence suggesting that emissions from tall smokestacks do not cause
widespread acid rain damage to forests or that Agent Orange's dioxin does not
cause severe health problems in human beings or that the white spotted owl
seems to be living happily in unendangered numbers in non-old growth
forests.
Better than attempting to distinguish between fact and value and
applying different standards to each, the discipline of intellectual honesty
applies the same rule across all domains. And with the help of the Golden
Rule it provides appropriate guidance and restraint over the expression of
opinion in news stories without having to forbid the practice outright.

THE LIMIT OF OPINION

But this is not the end of the requirements of journalism's basic

disciplines. Beyond intellectual honesty, journalists reporting the news need to
restrain the expression of their opinions, showing modesty in their judgments
about facts and always withholding ultimate judgment on matters of value. A
political riter should not include in his report on a presidential campaign his
view about whom people should vote for. Nor should he write his story in a
way that would lead a reasonable reader to infer his preference. A reporter
covering a trial should not reveal his conclusions about who is lying or
whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. In an article about the abortion
controversy, the writer should not come out for or against Roe v. Wade.
This departs from the judicial analogy and imposes a tighter constraint
on journalists. But the stricter approach is necessary in order to uphold the
traditional distinction between news reporting and editorializing. (Editorials
are polemical. They make their opinion about ultimate issues plain. And they
need not recite all contrary arguments, though taking them into account makes
for more persuasive editorials.) Preserving this distinction makes good sense
for a number of reasons. People have grown used to it. Withholding ultimate
judgment communicates the reporter's commitment to neutrality in his
approach to reporting a story even as he departs from strict neutrality of
expression. (it is hard to read the comments of an explicit supporter of a
candidate and avoid the thought that he will not give the candidate's opponent
an even break.) Modesty of opinion and holding back ultimate judgments of
value produce a report that invites the audience to weigh information for itself
and at the same time offer the audience some help in getting through the
ambiguities and complexities. These disciplines make it easier for journalists
to put all reasonable positions forcefully. (It is one thing to give all arguments
their due when one does not choose between them explicitly. It is another to
take an ultimate position and then have to give everyone the benefit of the
Golden Rule.) Finally, withholding ultimate judgments makes pluralism in the
reporting staff easier to manage.
It is hard enough under the discipline of modesty of opinion to permit
writers latitude and still produce a newspaper with a sense of coherence. This
would be virtually impossible if reporters were freed to express ultimate
judgments. To make all the judgments in the paper consistent, editors and
publishers would have to impose a political view, story by story, or else
choose only those reporters whose views were essentially consistent with the
paper's editorial positions. The result would be a coherent publication, on the
model of the European press, but not one that reflects a large, geographic
community the way American audiences have come to expect their
newspapers to do.
To illustrate the way intellectual honesty and withholding ultimate
judgment work, contrast Friendly Fire with another book-length
report, America: What Went Wrong? by Donald L. Barlett and James B.
Steele, originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In Friendly Fire the writer had an unmistakable point of view about
the factual truth of the events he described and about their deeper meaning. He
presented his efforts to come to some conclusion in a way that made his
neutrality in approaching the story apparent, even when he became involved in
the action. And he scrupulously permitted everyone in the story to have his
say. There was never a sense that he had left an inconvenient argument out or
shaded it in order to make it weaker. A compellingly readable piece of
work, Friendly Fire went from magazine article to book to made-for-TV
movie, helping those who came into contact with it to understand what the
Vietnam War had done to us.
America: What Went Wrong? also created quite a stir. Readers of
the Philadelphia Inquirer responded with an intensity rare in the newspaper
business when it was published in 19 9 1 during the recession that ended the
Bush presidency. The articles and then the book touched something in the
audience so powerfully that some journalists began talking about it as a model
for how the news could be made relevant. It is not a model that fits with the
disciplines for reporting I have been describing.
Barlett and Steele begin with this premise:

You might think of what is happening in the

economy-and thereby to you and your family-in
terms of a professional hockey game, a sport
renowned for its physical violence. Imagine how the
game would be played if the old rules were
repealed, if the referees were' removed.
That, in essence, is what is happening to the
American economy. Someone changed the rules.
And there is no referee. Which means there is no
one looking after the interests of the middle class.
They are the forgotten Americans.

From that point on the report marches steadily along, marshaling

evidence and emotional anecdotes to drive home the message that the
Reagan-Bush years in America laid waste to ordinary, middle-class America.
The subjects include health care, pensions, corporate raiding, bankruptcy,
foreign competition, lobbying. In each area the approach is the same. Here is
just one example.
Barlett and Steele take the position that deregulation for the American
taxpayer and consumer has meant "fewer airlines and higher air fares, more
unsafe trucks on the highways, and more of your tax money diverted to pay
for the savings and loan debacle." 19 They assert that today there is less
competition in the airline industry than before regulation but never mention
that airlines now can compete on price and do so with a vengeance. Nor do
they report that economists' predictions that deregulation would mean lower
prices and better service have proven correct in almost all industries where
they have been tested .20
Competition did cause the shakeout in the airline industry that Barlett
and Steele decry, complaining that small towns once served by airlines have
lost service because of deregulation, but they do not report that under
regulation the many consumers traveling on the higher volume routes had to
subsidize the few flying from small towns. And on and on. Barlett and Steele
give no quarter to arguments against their position.
My point is not that the Inquirer reporters' work was un-
worthy. America: What Went Wrong? is powerful polemical writing that
understands its audience and speaks in a populist voice to the audience's
deepest emotions. But it does not live up to the discipline of intellectual
honesty in that it does not give voice to contrary facts and arguments. Nor
does it withhold ultimate judgments. It begins and ends with them. To any
moderately skeptical reader this approach leaves the distinct impression that
the marshaling of evidence followed the conviction rather than the conviction
arising from the proof. The lesson of America: What Went Wrong? is this: As
newspapers encourage more analysis and conclusion-drawing, even some of
the best reporters at the best newspapers can lose track of the line between
news and polemics.

DEGREES OF PROOF

It is not a simple matter to specify how much evidence a journalist

should have before he publishes an assertion of fact. Certainty is generally
self-deception. Even the testimony of one's own senses can mislead, as anyone
who has watched instant replays in sports can verify. Most of the time,
journalists do not have firsthand knowledge of the facts they report. They must
rely on others to tell them, others with motives-sometimes pathological
ones-for not telling the truth.
Nearly every journalist has at one time or another faced a consummate
liar and taken what he said to be true. Likewise, nearly every journalist has
experienced the education in skepticism that comes from being deceived by
the government that acts in his and his readers' names.
Still, the basis of news reporting is a kind of trust. It begins with the
trust between a journalist and his sources of information and from there builds
to the trust he wants to establish with his audience. No rule of thumb can
describe the complex factors that go into a judgment of trust. But it is worth
singling out a few of them to establish a balancing test that can form a basis
for evaluating issues of journalistic proof.
Experience is the most useful indicator; a source (either human or
institutional) who has been regularly right in the past generally deserves to be
believed, unless there are specific reasons not to. Experience with particular
kinds of situations also plays a role. If someone tells you that a man got
injured by falling down to the ground, there is no particular reason on the face
of it to doubt the account. But if he tells you the man hurt himself falling up to
the ceiling, it is probably worth doing some more checking.
 There is a fine line, of course, between experience and
closed-mindedness. The unprecedented event is more likely to be news than
the commonplace, and conventional wisdom is often wrong. So a good
journalist must not discount everything that conflicts with what he has
previously known. Nonetheless, experience can send up a warning, that little
nervous feeling in the pit of the stomach that says, "Watch out." Every careful
journalist always heeds that warning.
Verifiability helps establish credibility. Reports that anyone might
check against public sources deserve more trust than accounts that nobody
accessible to the journalist other than the source could refute. Checking
against public sources, of course, always makes sense when there is reason to
doubt. But it is not always necessary For example, when a reputable economist
recites the unemployment rates for the last twelve months in the course of
making an argument about the prospects for a recession, a time-pressed
reporter ordinarily feels comfortable relying on them.
The advantage of using public record materials as authenticators of
information is that their wide and ready availability permits a record over time
to be corrected (which is another reason newspapers as an important part of
this public record need to be aggressive about correcting their errors).
In the absence of public records, private documents should generally
be given more weight than oral accounts. Though documents can be forged,
the embodiment of information in this form creates more ways to discover a
lie. As more and more communication takes place electronically,
sophistication in determining authenticity needs to grow apace or else we will
find ourselves in a state of increased uncertainty as a result of the change. For
example, it is possible now to trick up moving video images to insert or
remove people or objects in a way the eye would never notice. Now more than
before, documentary evidence is highly persuasive but inconclusive.
When a journalist finds no public record or documentary evidence to
support an assertion, he must decide whether he can rely on human sources
alone. It is not rare that he decides to do so. There is no rule that can tell him
when to do it and when not to. Credibility turns on a subtle blend of factors
that includes demeanor and even hunch, which is why law gives the decision
of judges and juries about witnesses' credibility such enormous weight on
appeal. Nonetheless, there are a few obvious guides.
Journalists often say they do not care about the motives of those who
give them information. By this they usually mean they are uninterested in
considering whose cause they promote by disseminating accurate, significant
information. But the statement is misleading, because journalists must take
motive into account in weighing what sources tell them. Motive gives a clue to
the source's biases and reasons for lying or telling the truth only selectively.
The trouble is, news sources always have motives, even when they are passing
on true information. Most leakers do not leak on themselves.
Corroboration by other sources can be helpful. The Washington Post
"two-source" practice during the Watergate investigations reflects this.
Dealing almost entirely with anonymous sources on that story~ Post editors
asked reporters to confirm and reconfirm information through more than one
source when none could be put on the record. I don't know how such a prac-
tice would protect against being deceived by a group of willful people acting
in concert, though in the Post's extraordinary Watergate investigation it
generally worked. Though corroboration is helpful, when all sources are
anonymous, the level of uncertainty in many instances is still too high.
Better to require attribution to a source willing to be identified by
name. At least others will be able to assess the credibility of the source, and if
it later turns out that he lied, he will have to face the consequences, which
tends to deter lying in the first place.
Other reasons not to rely on anonymous sources will be discussed in a
later chapter. But restrictions by news organizations upon their use always
raise the issue of whether the Watergate scandal would have gone unrevealed
under such rules. Almost any self-restraint on the part of journalists might
make it impossible in a particular instance to get or publish valuable
information, but the only way around that is to take the position (which one
sometimes hears when journalists get into swashbuckling postures in public
forums) that any means of getting and publishing a fact is justified. Short of
that, it is possible to recognize that certain kinds of stories require less
restrictive rules than others. This leads to a difficult balancing test in which
journalists must weigh the magnitude of the consequences of publishing along
with the level of confidence in the accuracy of the information and the effect
publication will have on particular individuals, especially those who may be
harmed.
When a report would have the effect of disparaging an identified or
identifiable private individual unconnected with government or public affairs,
the case is strong for requiring a very high degree of proof and forbidding the
use of anonymous sources. The reporting of private activities, while important,
is not as central to the role of the press as the reporting of government. Private
individuals often have less protection against unfair attack and less ability to
fight back. But when the report is about government and politics and does not
single out any individual, anonymity is much more tolerable. (For example,
the articles that so often appear quoting "senior government officials" on
cabinet secretaries' airplanes during overseas missions generally do more good
in letting the public in on the government line than harm in hiding the identity
of the speaker, usually the cabinet secretary himself.)
Likewise, when the potential harm from not publishing vastly exceeds
the harm that might occur if the information published turns out to be in error,
there may be reasons for accepting the accounts of anonymous individuals or
other sources of information that would not pass muster in less grave cir-
cumstances. Perhaps this analysis would have justified the use of sources in
the Watergate reports, though that is still worth debating.
The social gravity factored into this balancing test cannot be measured
on a scientific scale. Journalists will tend routinely to overestimate it and
accept inadequate evidence in the excitement and immediacy of the pursuit of
a fascinating story. So newspapers should establish a strict rule against
publication of disparaging information about individuals based solely on
anonymous sources. They may then permit rare exceptions to be made only by
decision at the highest level of the news organization. This does not guarantee
wisdom; it only reduces the number of occasions for error, since the
cumbersome exception process dissuades reporters from trying and gives them
an incentive to get proof that meets the higher standard. (In my experience
reporters usually come up with attributable proof when they cannot get the
story into the newspaper any other way. This always produces a better story,
because it allows the reader to evaluate the sources.) When newspapers do
permit attribution to anonymous sources, they should attempt to provide the
reader as much information about the sources as they can. it helps to be told
that a piece of information came from a CIA official rather than from a
"knowledgeable source."
The question of how and when one knows enough to publish has
infinite variations. It produces some intriguing newsroom debates. But it is
time for journalists to codify their standards in explicit guidelines.

### Broadcasting Ethics & Morals

1. 1. Broadcasting Ethics & Morals
2. 2. Broadcasting • A medium that disseminates via telecommunications, • It is the act of
transmitting speech, music, visual images, etc., as by radio or television.
3. 3. Ethics is about what is good and how we should think about good:  Logic is about truth 
Aesthetics about beauty  Ethics is about goodness (universal Reality) Ethics
4. 4. Ethics, also known as moral philosophy. It is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions
about morality such as:  good and evil  right and wrong  justice and crime etc. Definition
5. 5. Work ethics You may have heard of the term work ethics, this is how a business or company
thinks you should act and behave. This will most likely include; being polite, being professional,
treating everyone with respect, not talking down to people and working as a team. Personal ethics.
You may have your own ethics, which means that you may strongly believe that you should act or
behave in a certain way; which could be anything from good table manners to the way you speak
to other people or even the way you react to others. Types of Ethics
6. 6.  Ethics is similar to morals except that morals is more to do with right and wrong and ethics is
your beliefs or the companys beliefs rather than what is right or wrong.  Ethics means different
things to different people depending on what their ethics actually are, but there is no wrong or
right ethic as we are all different with our own opinions and beliefs which we should all respect.
Ethics & Morals
7. 7. Meta-ethics : about the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions and how their
truth values (if any) may be determined. Normative ethics about the practical means of
determining a moral course of action. Applied ethics about how moral outcomes can be achieved
in specific situations. Moral psychology about how moral capacity or moral agency develops and
what its nature is. Descriptive /comparative ethics about what moral values people actually abide
by. Major Branches of Ethics
8. 8.  Honesty  Objectivity  Carefulness  Openness  Respect for intellectual property  Privacy
 Responsible publication  Responsible mentoring Ethical Principals
9. 9. • Respect for colleagues • Social responsibility • Non discrimination • Competence • Legality •
Human subject protection
10. 10. Trust Trust is the foundation of the Broadcasting. It is independent and impartial . Truth and
Accuracy Broadcasting seeks to establish the truth of what has happened and are committed to
achieving due accuracy. Accuracy is not simply a matter of getting facts right; when necessary, it
is the measure of relevant facts and information to get at the truth. Impartiality Broadcasting is
impartiality to all subject matter and will reflect a range and diversity of opinion of people output
as a whole, over an appropriate period, so that no significant aspect of thought is knowingly
unreflected or under- represented. Ethics of Broadcasting
11. 11. Editorial Integrity and Independence The broadcasting is independent of outside interests and
arrangements. Serving the Public Interest Its main aim is to serving the public interest. It seek to
report stories of the audiences interest . Fairness Output will be based on fairness, openness,
honesty and straight dealing. Transparency It will be transparent about the nature and provenance
of the content offer . Where appropriate, identity of the person who has created it will given and
use labeling to help online users make informed decisions about the suitability of content for
themselves and their children.
12. 12.  Stealing copyright and credit for intellectual property  Intercepting private e-mail 
Deliberate public wrong information  Misuse of research material  Improper commercial/
personal use of network  Stealing credit / glory information. Unethical / Illegal Behavior
Six TV News Techniques You Can Use
Here are some of the things I learned that also help with digital events.

1. Successful productions have interesting information chunked into

short segments.

2. Presenters are passionate about the topic and their energy level is
contagious.

3. Presenters focus on the audience and look directly into the camera.
On webinars talk directly to your audience like you would with a phone
conversation.

4. The content must sequence together seamlessly. Efficient

transitions eliminate awkward moments.

5. Voice inflections, facial expressions and head movements are

critical! The audience responds favorably to these.

6. Don’t fly solo. Broadcast programs have a team that work together
each with specific roles.

Don’t underestimate the similarities between media broadcasts and

your digital presentations. Learn from the radio and TV pros. By
examining how it’s done in broadcasting, you can pick up some great
techniques that will improve your digital presentations.

Objectives
After going through this lesson, you should be able to:

 Describe the skills for TV news anchor.

 Describe the principles and concept of anchoring Live show.

____________________________________________________________________________

Introduction
An anchor is a person who hosts a show or a program. We can also say that anchor is
the compare of a program. An anchor plays a very important role in broadcasting a
program. Anchors can attract the viewers and keep them tuned to the program that
he or she is anchoring. Anchors can attract viewers by their charming personality and
speaking skills. The anchor should sound very confident while speaking to their
audience.

At the networks the TV news anchors present the news. You know the people – the
ones sitting there behind a desk (or in the field) telling you what’s happening in the
world that day. Whether broadcasting from a small local station or manning one of
the network’s primetime broadcasts TV news anchors compile news stories and
deliver them.

News Anchoring
A news anchor is a television personality who presents material prepared for a news
program and at times must improvise commentary for live presentation. The term is
primarily used in the United States and Canada. Many news anchors are also involved
in writing and/or editing the news for their programs. Sometimes news anchors
interview guests and moderate panels or discussions. And some provide commentary
for the audience during parades and other events.

Anchoring is the art of finding and delivering the best possible expression to any
given content. It includes factors such as use of language, shot composition, choice
and selection of relevant details, and an interesting and engaging way of presenting
one’s subject matter. In other words, it is the skill of capturing and holding the
interest of the audience.

Skills for TV News Anchor

Being a news anchor requires a number of skills, the first of which is a comfort in
front of the camera. There’s an element of show business in the job of a news anchor
— not only do you need to be comfortable in front of the camera but you need to
make people want to watch you. Few more skills are given below:

1. Knowledge base: An understanding of issues, names, geography, history and

the ability to put all of these in perspective for viewers.
2. Ability to process new information: Sorting, organizing, prioritizing and
retaining massive amounts of incoming data.
3. Ethical compass: Sensitivity to ethical land mines that often litter the field of
live breaking news — unconfirmed information, graphic video, words that
potentially panic, endanger public safety or security.
4. Command of the language: Dead-on grammar, syntax, pronunciation, tone
and storytelling — no matter how stressed or tired the anchor or reporter may
be.
5. Interviewing finesse: An instinct for what people need and want to know, for
what elements are missing from the story, and the ability to draw information
by skillful, informed questioning and by listening.
 6. Mastery of multitasking: Take in a producer’s instructions via an earpiece while
scanning new information from computer and other sources.
7. Appreciation of all roles: An understanding of the tasks and technology that
go into the execution of a broadcast, the ability to roll with changes and
glitches, and anticipate all other professionals involved.
8. Acute sense of timing: The ability to condense or expand one’s speech on
demand, to sense when a story needs refreshing or recapping.
9. Writing Your Script Most importantly: write your script to be spoken, not read.
Keep in mind that your audience will hear your words rather than see them, so
it’s important to write in a way that when spoken it sounds natural.
10. Smile: Smiling is perhaps the simplest way to connect with your audience. The
warmth of a smile is a must at the very least at the beginning and very end of
your performance
11. Maintain Eye Contact: The magic of the teleprompter is that it enables you to
look directly into the camera lens, creating the illusion of eye contact with
your audience. Take full advantage of this by not looking away. Your
continuous gaze really does engage your audience. Eye movements away
from the camera can make you look a little bit ‘shifty’.

Roles of News Anchor

An anchor performs a wide variety of roles in a news organization. Apart from the
skills that he or she is expected to have and inculcate, an anchor constantly learns on
the job.

The News Gathering Part of the Job

How much reporting is involved in an anchor’s job is dependent on where the anchor
works and what type of broadcast they work on. Some anchors, especially at local
news stations, will report their own stories (perhaps with help from a producer or
other staffer), and write the scripts they then transmit on the air. In that sense, an
anchor works very much like a reporter with the main difference being that they need
to craft the story in a way that works for television.

Handling Breaking Newswithout a Teleprompter

Handling breaking news is an essential part of 24×7 news. When you are rushing to
the studio to anchor breaking news, grab all the available information you can. Don’t
be afraid to ask for help. You will probably be busy throwing on your make up and
tying your tie. Have someone print you out the latest wire copy or jot down the latest
facts.

Do not wait for someone else to write a script for you. That will just delay your
appearance on the air. Being first is paramount with breaking news. Good anchors
get on the air first and look like they prepared all day. Besides, reading another
writer’s script cold on the air won’t be convincing. Digest the facts yourself and
convey them like a pro.

Reading a Teleprompter
Reading a Teleprompter effectively is a lot more difficult than many people think.
First of all, most people don’t read aloud as well as they think they do. Add to that
the difficulties of the sentences being cut up to two or three words per line and
those lines moving at a distance while you have lights in your face. Meanwhile there
are thousands, maybe millions, of people watching you closely. Deal with all this
while appearing to not to be reading at all.

Use the teleprompter as a guide. Do not try to read every word exactly as it is written
on the teleprompter. Every anchor makes mistakes. Sometimes words are misspelled.
Occasionally a long word will be cut in half because it is too long for a line. Whatever
the problem, if you get lost in your script you will fall apart on camera.

Television Anchor Makeup

Women are better equipped to deal with anchor makeup for the simple reason that
they are used to applying makeup. Women will only need to make a few adjustments
to their makeup routine while men must start from scratch.

Any men who have a problem wearing makeup while anchoring need to get over it
fast. Television cameras and bright lights will change your appearance drastically.
They will wash you out, flatten your features, and bring out all the imperfections in
your skin. The most manly men you see on television are wearing makeup. You
should too.

Anchor Wardrobe
Anchor wardrobe should always start with solid colors. The goal is to minimize too
many conflicting visual images in your clothing when you anchor a television
newscast. Begin with a solid suit or dress shirt. Women can wear solid suits, sweaters
or blouses.

Pay attention to the collar. Collars are very important on TV. When you appear in a
“head and shoulders” shot, your collar frames your face. If your collar spreads apart
wide, it will make your face appear wider. If your collar is long, pointed and close
together it will make your face appear slimmer. Since TV makes most people look
heavier than they are, most people should wear longer point collars. The same thing
applies to lapels. Wide lapels widen. Thin lapels make you appear slimmer.
Punch up your outfit with a splash of color. A bright tie or scarf will brighten your
face without distracting. Go ahead and be bold with red, orange or purple. Even if it
seems “over the top” in person, it won’t appear so bright on the TV news.

Breaking News Live Shows

No skill is more vital to the worth of a television news reporter than their ability to do
a breaking news live shot. They must be able to roll up to a scene, gather as much
information as they can in a matter of minutes, then deliver a live report as if he had
all day to prepare. They key to a great breaking news live shot is preparation in the
face of limited time and resources. Don’t try to do it all on your own. Utilize all
newsroom resources to gather information. The assignment editor who sent you to
the breaking news live shot should have some details. This may only be what and
where the breaking news happened. Press the assignment desk to get you more
information as you head to and prepare for your live shot. Ask them to pull
background information and file video. Biographies and historical accounts are
useful. The details can help you fill time when you don’t have anything new to say.

Points keep in mind during anchoring live show

 When you arrive on the scene, finding witnesses is your first priority. They are
sound bite gold. After that, seek police and other officials. They are less
desirable interviews but will do if you have nothing else. If no one seems to
know what is going on, look for neighbours who can put things into context.
They can tell you that the incident happens all the time or is unusual for the
neighbourhood.
 If you have time, use one of these people as an interview in your breaking
news live shot. If you have a producer or intern with you, send them out to
canvas the area. While you are preparing to be on the air they can gather
more information and find potential interview subjects.
 Write down your bullet points. You don’t have time to write a script so just
outline the points you want to make in your live shot. Keep everything simple,
straightforward and logical. Start with the latest breaking news. It may sound
obvious but many reporters fail to start with what is new. Only then should
you give background and establish context. The chronologic approach is not
always the best way to tell the story.
 Tell viewers what you don’t know. Reporters often do breaking news live shots
without knowing any facts. In local TV news it is more important to get on the
air first than to have all the details. If you are missing important facts that are
essential to the story, explain that you don’t know but are working to find out.
It is a great way to tease that you are advancing the story for a future
newscast. Viewers appreciate this. If you are missing an obvious fact but don’t
mention it they will wonder why.
 Once you are done telling your story… stops. Don’t talk too much. Reporters
often lose track of what they are saying in breaking news live shots and start
to yammer. Often a reporter will do a great breaking news live shot only to
ruin it by dragging it on too long.