I was a Communications major in college, and that included courses on journalism. With all the attention given today to "fake news," I thought I should try to state in simple terms how to discern the difference between a good news story and a poorly written news story.
A good journalist will verify the information of his or her story before publishing it. A major source of misinformation today is on social media. Many people simply repost something they see without verifying whether it's correct information or not. They see something that they agree with, whether it's true or not, so that's good enough for them to go ahead and repost even though it may be false information. This is how false rumors get spread. There is more misinformation being spread around on social media than accurate information.
I think it's a real problem that the news outlets focus on their commentators more than hard news. It blends opinion with fact and many people can't tell the difference. All of the major news outlets are guilty of this. It's all based on marketing. Media outlets do a tremendous amount of research to find out what their viewers, listeners and readers want to see, read or hear and that's what they publish or broadcast. It keeps them coming back, thus they can charge higher commercial rates. If you think you're getting the political philosophy you want, the reality is you're getting a dose of marketing that is aimed at you to keep you reading or watching. It's the same on social media; those websites gather information about you and your interests so they can target advertising. So, the more you read or post angry political rants, repost false information, or threaten to unfriend someone, the more marketers are gathering information about you to target their advertising. Someone (not me) is even keeping track of the fact that you're reading this blog!
In my journalism classes, I learned the importance of being objective in writing a story and to use the "five W's and an H." Within the story, they ask the questions, "who, what, where, why, when and how, and how?" You need to give both sides of a view, whether you agree or not. Otherwise it's not balanced. You should identify sources and identify speakers when quoting them. If the author of the news story states his or her own opinion, then the story is no longer objective.
Below are clips of two stories that I took from USA Today. After each one, I am giving my review of how objective they are. The first one is a short story:
In this story, the "who" is the student, "what" is what he did, "where" is the school in Florida, "why" is because he is in court being charged with murder, "when" are these events happening and "how," by the actions of a judge. The story does not offer an opinion. It simply states what the judge was doing according to Florida state law. This is a classic example of how a short news story should be written.
The next news clips posted here deal with the controversy involved in this situation. I am not posting the entire news story because it's very long, but just some pertinent parts to describe how this story is written:
In the first paragraph, we see terms such as "political firestorm" and "bloody rampage" being used. While it's hard for anyone to dispute that a mass shooting is bloody, and presumably everyone would agree that the gun debate is a political firestorm, the fact is that these terms do offer an opinion by the authors of the story. The media uses adjectives such as these to create excitement in a story, instill emotion, and ultimately sell the newspaper that it is written in.
The next paragraph includes the Five W's and an H that are part of a news story. It is the basic information of what the story is all about.
The third paragraph gives a description of what the Parkland students did. That continues for several more paragraphs down to where it describes what was happening in Washington at the same time in the Senate.
Then the paragraph after that describes what was happening with the opposite side of the political date by the NRA, the National Rifle Association.
You will see statements given on both sides of the debate, with quotes by students or representatives of each side. The authors do give fair treatment to both sides of the issue by including these quotes. If one side refused to be quoted, then the author should state that an attempt was made but that they declined to comment.
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