Journalism as a profession has gone through an amazing number of phases since its inception - from one-page fliers posted in town squares to mass-printed newspapers distributed to hundreds of people by media magnates such as Pulitzer and Hearst. With the advent of television, families at home were treated to live broadcasts by dapper news anchors with cheeky catchphrases. Now, in the internet epoch, we can get our news from hundreds of sites all over the globe with the tap of a finger.
News sites post headlines to Twitter, summarizing their stories in 200 characters or less, catering to our dwindling attention spans. Talk show hosts, musicians, actors, and comedians have the coveted blue checkmark on their accounts where they post video clips and photos of themselves and their pets, interacting with fans worldwide.
Great, right?
On one hand, yes. This allows us to connect globally with like-minded people, to see the news from a different perspective, and to immerse ourselves in other cultures. It lets projects like this one flourish. On the other hand, however, this rapid-fire form of news transmission has opened up new, far less pleasant cans of worms. It has given us many an opportunity to put our feet in our mouths. Oftentimes, once we’ve got our feet in there it’s hard to get them back out.
As journalists, this worries us. It should worry everyone - journalist or otherwise.
Once something goes out on the internet it takes only moments for information to spread. If a mistake is made, even accidentally, unless it’s caught extremely quickly, people are going to see it and spread it and misunderstand it and shout about it until the original meaning is buried under a mound of comments, quotes, memes, and emojis.
In the midst of all this, in the flurry of activity that surrounds news and its reporting, it’s all too easy to slip up - to post a comment without making sure your mental filter is firmly in place - and cause yourself a great deal of suffering without intending to do so. Mistakes are mistakes - they’re a part of human nature.
However, there are numerous incidences of fake news being printed on purpose. In the past, this was called “yellow journalism” in the US, “tabloid journalism” in the UK, and is now more often called “clickbait” - publishing sensationalized articles for the express purpose of gaining attention and drawing in viewers.
Where does journalistic integrity fit in this muddled mess? In some cases, we seem to have lost the memory of the idea entirely. Recent media engagement suggests that some journalists aren’t even aware of it as a concept.
To figure out its place in the modern world, we first have to define journalistic integrity. What is this seemingly abstract concept? It’s an important topic for us at Borasaek Vision as we begin our venture and are working to establish ourselves as a reliable, trustworthy source of information about BTS.
This is an extremely tricky subject, one that people have tried to define before and will struggle with until humans no longer walk the earth. It would be hubris to assume that we could provide the definitive answer to the question in a few blog posts. The goal, therefore, is not to provide the perfect definition of an intangible concept. We could never do it.
What we can do - and will do, throughout this series of blogs - is create a definition of journalistic integrity for us.
To do this, we’ll focus on three primary topics.
Doing your research
Focusing on accuracy
Providing a forum for discussion
Strap in, folks - this slog won’t be an easy one. But it’s a vital one. In the immortal words of Jeon Jungkook: “Let’s get this bread.”
Doing your research
Arguably, without doing proper research before writing an article, nothing else afterward can be done correctly. If you don’t have good sources, it’s impossible to build a solid, factual article. In this new internet age where the prevailing wisdom seems to be that everything must be done instantaneously, it’s easy for journalists to stumble into a trap. It’s easy to take one piece of information and hastily build an article around it without properly vetting it. Haste is born from trying to avoid being “scooped,” and haste leads to mistakes.
Take, for example, this recent tweet from Twickets, which states that BTS is going on an “indefinite” hiatus based on the single tweet from Big Hit which asks that people treat the group with respect if they should happen to encounter the boys while they’re out and about. It would have taken just a little searching to find out that the group did have at least a tentative return date; they have four concerts scheduled in October 2019 (and have since returned from their temporary hiatus).
While this tweet isn’t a full article, the process is the same: a press release was published. An assumption was made. A tweet was written. Misinformation was spread. Happily, if you look at the above-mentioned tweet, the Twickets team does amend their post with an addition to the thread and acknowledges their mistake, but in many cases, issues like these are not addressed, and the damage done isn’t mitigated in any way.
In their highly-acclaimed book “The Elements of Journalism,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel call this research process the “discipline of verification.” They state that “in the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. Entertainment - or its cousin ‘infotainment’ - focuses on what is most diverting. Propaganda selects facts or invents them to serve the real purpose: persuasion or manipulation. Fiction invents scenarios to get at a more personal impression of what it calls truth. Journalism alone is focused on the process employed to get what happened down right.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Additionally, originality of work is an important part of verification. You might think that this would go without saying, but oddly enough, that’s not the case. We’ll say this a couple of times throughout this series, but the internet has changed the landscape of journalism drastically, and this is one of the aspects which it changed. In today’s landscape, it’s easy to use other news sites’ work as a source, making journalists passive distributors of news instead of adding new dialogue to the conversation.
The problem this creates is that if one site gets it wrong and everyone else gets their information from them, all the sites have it wrong. Misinformation is spread through complacency. The bottom line is: stories from other sources should be verified before they are repeated - and if they can not be verified, they shouldn’t be spread.
Research is an essential component to avoid spreading bad info, but also to avoid publishing bad info in the first place. It’s the foundation of any good article, and every foundation has to be strong. But good research is only one part of the chain.
Check back next week to see the next link: focusing on accuracy.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any audio & visual content in this video except for the editing. ALL RIGHTS BELONG TO THE RIGHTFUL OWNERS. No copyright infringement intended.
Written by Anna
Edit by Aury