This is a sort of book report on Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The problem they are trying to solve is nicely summarized in the subtitle: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload. They propose six steps to evaluating news, regardless of medium of delivery:
1. Determine what kind of content you are looking at.
2. Determine whether the account is complete.
3. Assess the sources.
4. Assess the evidence.
5. Question the reporter's explanation or understanding of the evidence.
6. Explore whether the news is meeting real needs.
The writers identify four kinds of content:
-Verification, which asks whether the material is accurate and fairly contextualized. In this model, it is the reporter's job to fact-check, to know his beat, to distinguish between fact and analysis, and to know what he still doesn't know.
-Assertion, which just passes on as much raw information as possible without evaluation. In this model, there is usually no time to fact-check, analytical statements are tossed off by sources as if they were facts, and not challenged, and sheer quantity substitutes for story.
-Affirmation, which chooses content that will confirm the opinions of its audience. This is distinguished from opinion journalism, as found in, say, The National Review, which does not expect to be your source of news but of news analysis. Affirmation expects you to "hear it here first," but only if it matches what you were expecting to hear.
-Interest-group journalism, which is designed to look like news but is dedicated to serving only the purposes of the funding group. Look for shady funding sources or for repetitive themes and conclusions in every story.
These models can be combined in an aggregate, such as The Week, that collects and edits news and opinion, attempting to tell you both what happened and what people thought about it, but the very act of editing is an act of filtering that can be driven by a desire to inform, affirm, or propagandize.
We all remember the 5 Ws and an H, but here's something that is often missing from reports of all kinds: the Q-- Questions that remain unanswered or that were raised by the info in the story. If the news doesn't even give the who, what, where, when, why and how, it is certainly not complete and is not a good example of verification journalism. If it does answer those questions, it may legitimately go on to try to make sense of those answers. It may also try to authenticate things stated in previous reports. It may even be assembling information in such a way as to draw attention to new paradigm. For example, this article I just read today in the New York Times magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/magazine/the-kids-who-beat-autism.html?_r=0 introduces facts that suggest that there may be a cure for autism available to some children. This is certainly a new idea. Do the facts presented in the story support it? That is what the authors are challenging us to discover.
Wow, see why this is the book I wanted to read? It's not exactly relaxing, but it is very clear and easy to follow and discusses a challenge that I deal with every day: the information that is coming at me. So often those who act like they know what they are talking about get the credit they expect, but really, all they did was Google something-- it's just raw, random, uncontextualized data, or it's spin, or it's sheer fabrication, and it's a big project to really tell which is which. Now I'm going to read about how to evaluate sources.
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