Yeh serious post nahi nahi hai.
Journalism as a discipline of verification
-American Press Institute
"Journalists often describe the essence of their work as finding and presenting “the facts” and also “the truth about the facts.”
They also describe using certain methods – a way of working – which Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe in The Elements of Journalism as a scientific-like approach to getting the facts and also the right facts.
Called the Discipline of Verification, its intellectual foundation rests on three core concepts – transparency, humility, and originality.
Transparency means show your work so readers can decide for themselves why they should believe it.
Don’t allow your audience to be deceived by acts of omission — tell them as much as you can about the story they are reading.Tell the audience what you know and what you don’t know. Never imply that you have more knowledge than you actually do.Tell the audience who your sources are, how they are in a position to know something, and what their potential biases might be.
Transparency signals the journalist’s respect for the audience. It allows the audience to judge the validity of the information, the process by which it was secured and the motives and biases of the journalist providing it.
Transparency signals the journalist’s respect for the audience.
“”
This makes transparency the best protection against errors and deception by sources. If the best information a journalist has comes from a potentially biased source, naming the source will reveal to the audience the possible bias – and may inhibit the source from attempting to deceive you as well.
The journalist’s job is to provide information in such a way that people can assess it and then make up their own minds what to think.
This is the same principle that governs the scientific method. By giving the audience the background on how you arrived at a certain conclusion, you allow them to replicate the process for themselves.
Humility means keep an open mind.
Journalists need to keep an open mind — not only about what they hear but also about their own ability to understand what it means. Exercise humility. Don’t assume. Avoid arrogance about your knowledge.
“Assumption,” as a veteran bureau chief once put it, “is the mother of all screw-ups.”
Journalists need to recognize their own fallibility and the limitations of their knowledge. They should be conscious of false omniscience and avoid just “writing around it.” They should acknowledge to themselves what they are unsure of, or only think they understand – and then check it out. This makes their judgment more precise and their reporting more incisive.
Jack Fuller, the author, novelist, editor, and newspaper executive, has suggested that journalists need to show “modesty in their judgment” about what they know and how they know it.
Gregory Favre, a longtime editor in Sacramento and Chicago, says his rule is simple. DO NOT PRINT ONE IOTA BEYOND WHAT YOU KNOW.
First, you have to be honest about what you know, versus what you assume you know, or think you know. A key way to avoid misrepresenting events is a disciplined honesty about the limits of one’s knowledge and the power of one’s perception.
Originality means do your own work.
Information can be viewed as a hierarchy. At the top is the work you have done yourself, reporting you can directly vouch for.
Journalists say the times they most often got something wrong was when they took something from somebody or someplace else and failed to check it themselves (emphasis mine)."
The Hierarchy of Information and concentric circles of sources
American Press Institute
"[...] The next circle is the information you have second-hand. You’re having coffee at an outdoor cafe and someone runs up to get help, saying she just saw a truck hit a bus.
The outer-most circle is the information that’s third-hand. You’re in the newsroom and get a call from someone at the cafe, relaying news that they heard a truck has hit a bus.
Most of the information journalists deal with lies in the second or third circles. But most facts are found that within the first innermost circle, usually from a participant, an eyewitness or from physical evidence.
This does not mean the closest perspective is the most truthful or even the most accurate. Eyewitness descriptions of crime suspects, for example, are often unreliable. Nor does embedding a journalist with a platoon necessarily provide a true picture of a larger war.
But failing to find and verify basic facts is equally problematic. Bad facts produce inaccurate assumptions. In the hierarchy of information, a story that rests on inaccurate assumptions will eventually collapse.
So with each concentric circle of information you move outward, your guard needs to be ever higher for verification.
[...]
The first journalist on the scene was Peter Michaels, the news director of the local NPR affiliate, who’d been alerted by his wife, who was shopping at a nearby store.
Michaels got close enough to observe “at least five bodies, adult bodies, strewn on the sidewalk in front of the store underneath the sign Gabrielle Giffords Congress on your Corner. I saw the congresswoman slumped in the corner with an apparent gunshot wound to the head. She was bleeding down her face. She had a red dress on. Seconds later, they took her on the gurney.” Based on Michaels’ account, NPR became the first national news organization to report the breaking news.
During the first hour of the shooting, information came from sources in or near the concentric circle at the crime scene. The details were about “what,” “when,” and “where” – specific facts that were reported, on the whole, accurately.
But then the story moved to another location, the hospital where doctors were furiously working to save Giffords’ life. This second concentric circle was centered in an operating room and the best sources – her doctors and those close relatives and staff to whom the doctors might talk – could not be reached.
News organizations thus begin to rely on sources at the distant fringes of the circle, in one notable instance distant by a couple thousand miles. They also recycled sources from the shooting scene and began to speculate on what those eyewitness accounts inferred, that Giffords was seriously, perhaps mortally, wounded.
An hour after the shooting, NPR reported, incorrectly, that Giffords had died.
Other news organizations picked up the bulletin and repeated it on air and online, most citing NPR. Fox News and CNN went a step further, saying they had “matched” the NPR story from their own sources (emphasis mine)."
Sorry not sorry for making you read something something serious for this stupid show. But bad journalism has serious consequences.
What Aditya did wrong was he wrote reports based on the evidences provided by four workers out of all the striking factory workers. Did he reach out to the organisers or even the managerial staff of Rathore Pharma? No. It was his sole responsibility to verify his sources, to read against the grain. It was neither the job of the editor — the editor edits, oversees; they don't babysit journalists on most basic journalistic tasks. Journalists don't share no pulitzer with their editors. Nor is it the job of the reader (i.e. Aryan and/or the workers) to know the sources of a news report a priori. Aryan isn't a journalist, it is not his responsibility. The primary responsibility of the piece lies with the author and secondarily with the editor.
Being a "serious journalist" has been Aditya's biggest hubris. And in his hubris he thinks himself infallible. Wrote incendiary pieces that led to mob incitement. He's responsible by accessory. It not only led to a perfect cover for Arvind's death and traumatised an entire family, but dislocated hundreds of workers as well.
Imlie's professional idolisation of this idiot has been breaking gradually; it needs to crash and be dazed.
