In this digital age, anyone on the Internet becomes an easy target for fraud. Nowhere is that problem more evident than in the news stream that helps fashion our decisions in so many facets of life. Business, recreation, healthcare, it is all subject to manipulation and misinterpretation of the news, regardless of whether the presentation is nefarious, sloppy or just accidentally incorrect.
The tools that help guard against the harm of bad “journalism” include digital security, credibility, brand reputation, and education. And a single, overarching tool to combat the harm of bad journalism is a simple concept called transparency. Simple, but extremely complex. A small word with big implications. Let us explain.
If a friend tells you “Hey, I hear the government plans to ban dark chocolate!” the first thing you might ask is “Where did you hear that?” Knowing where a piece of information comes from is important for deciding whether to trust it. If your friend saw it in a social media post or read it in the New York Times, that makes a big difference. So what makes a news outlet a trustworthy source?
News professionals are like all those in all other industries: They want you to trust them. They want you to believe that their education and experience qualify them to present news that is most valuable to you. Quite often, that trust is well-founded. Sometimes not! So the question for the discerning consumer of news is, “When?” When is this information I am hearing/reading accurate and non-biased? How often is it inaccurate and biased? For that kind of determination, we need transparency.
If a news publication truly wants its readers to trust the outlet’s degree of accuracy and non-bias, the publication will offer as much transparency as possible into the news gathering/writing process. Let the reader know what internal discussions generated the original idea for the story. Let the reader know who the reporters are, how they determined the most appropriate sources, and how the reporters approached the sources, with what kinds of promises, both pre- and post-publication.
Even the biggest publications with the grandest reputations don’t offer that kind of transparency. Don’t get us wrong: We are not implying any kind of underlying nefariousness here. Sure, malice can exist — but not typically. Those well-meaning publications just don’t have the time, resources or inclination to provide such a level of transparency. It’s easier for them to say, “Trust us.”
Total transparency in news reporting would also illuminate motives behind the original pursuit of the story, and would make readers aware of ALL connections between all parties involved, including the editor’s potential for personal gain, any advertisers’ commercial interests, any history of antagonism between a publication’s employees and any of the parties quoted in the story, etc, etc. And by the way, who is receiving protection from the publication as a result of that party’s OMISSION from the story?
You can see how onerous this concept of complete transparency might become, and what kind of resources would be required to achieve it. And at the end of the day, only a mind-reader could gain complete transparency, because there is no other way to determine a reporter’s mental state at every stage, and what motivations or influences might be creeping in and out.
Many reputable news agencies do indeed make their best attempt at transparency by informing the public of the agency’s protocols. Internal policies might include mandates for a certain number of sources utilized for a single story, how many sources on both “sides” of an issue, and how to handle “anonymous” sources, if indeed they are even allowed. Do the anonymous sources require titles, such as “C-level,” or “licensed professional,” or even just “highly placed?” Is there a requirement for contextual identification or general relationship to the subject of the story? What about age, ethnicity, or gender?
And what about all those “off the record” conversations between sources and reporters? In what ways can reporters use that off-the-record information? Some reporters use it simply as a jumping-off point to pursue information from other sources. Some will report the information without attributing it to the original source. All of these nuances can affect accuracy and objectivity.
Most reputable news agencies will at least publicize their policies in regard to errors, and most promise to correct errors in the most pragmatic way. Honestly, no editor or reporter ever pursues the revelation of those errors as aggressively as they would have their readers believe. It’s just human nature. Every daily newspaper has at least a smattering of errors, mostly minor, in every issue. But the average daily newspaper will “announce” a correction at best maybe once a week.
Of course, the unfortunate nature of news inaccuracies, no matter how minimal, is that they cast a shadow on ALL the surrounding facts and assertions. The issue is a simple matter of credibility.
The everyday person does not have time to investigate a topic but relies on journalists to report on important aspects. We need to be able to trust what is being reported!
Transparency maximizes accuracy and objectivity (non-bias) in two ways. One, transparency allows the reader/viewer/listener to judge the degree of accuracy and objectivity. Two, transparency acts as a constant governor on the sources of the news. We tend to achieve quality journalism when the sources, reporters, editors, etc., know that they are under constant scrutiny AND as long as those sources know that readers/viewers/listeners have viable tools and context with which to hold the sources accountable.
As readers, viewers, and listeners demand transparency in the media, the issues become, “What degree of transparency is reasonable to expect?” and “How do we gain that kind of transparency?”
At the same time, we acknowledge that people often prefer to have biased news for their entertainment and/or personal comfort. Some people even prefer to have “inaccurate” news, but that preference typically would be better described as a penchant for irony or literary hyperbole. (Note: There are various types of “inaccurate” news, including fake news, fabricated news, inadvertent misreporting, and satire. For a description of the distinctions, see our sidebar called, “ The Many Faces of Fake News.”)
AskNews differs from traditional news outlets in that we do not create news, we distill news that other outlets have reported on. We parse articles from all over the world and strive to consolidate them so that you can read about an event from the perspective of numerous different sources, countries, and languages.
We are not alone in this methodology, there are numerous news aggregators out there. What sets us apart is that we don’t pre-assign bias. We don’t tell you that a source is right or left leaning, or present a news story in that same partisan light. Instead, we enforce diversity by ensuring that the news stories we aggregate and report on have a minimum number of different sources; we provide you with the summary of what they all say and let you be the judge.
This meta coverage and distillation of “the news” means that we can’t speak to the motivations behind a story’s origins, nor can we enforce policies governing anonymous sources or how facts are collected. Transparency for us as an aggregate news publisher functions differently than it does for individual publishers. We can only be transparent about how we manage the news reports once they reach our pipeline.
While traditional news outlets typically rely upon human decision-making to determine the news coverage and the makeup of the front page, AskNews does not. For us, volume dictates this aspect of the news presentation. If enough competing perspectives and sources across multiple languages and countries report on a topic, we also report on it.
After the diversity is enforced, our job is to report on the ways that the stories within our database align, and to highlight contradictions with journalistic integrity. For all the news stories that we generate, we attribute the original sources, giving readers the ability to judge the credibility of the information. Details of each source include the country of origin for the news outlet and the language in which the article was published. When the original content is written in a different language, we provide an English summary.
A deeper look at how we support competing perspectives, enforce diversity, and maintain journalistic standards can be found in our companion article titled “ AskNews’ Transparency Protocols”.
We do not believe that these transparency protocols should be controlled by any single company or representative. Instead, we are putting together a governing committee that operates independently of AskNews. This committee will be a diverse group of volunteer experts, students, and common people who are all focused on defining the least biased and most transparent journalistic guidelines and diversity enforcement protocols. Our job at AskNews is to shepherd the technical implementation of these protocols and ensure the news that we generate is widely available to the public.
If you are interested in joining or supporting our governing transparency committee, please send an email to contact(at)asknews.app.
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