Chapter 2: Journalism
In the last days of August 1835, readers of a cheap New York daily called The Sun opened their paper to an astonishing report. A famous astronomer, it said, had turned a powerful new telescope on the Moon from an observing station in southern Africa, and had found it alive — forests, shorelines, herds of grazing animals, and winged creatures that walked upright. The series ran over several issues. It was written in the calm, detailed, faintly technical voice of a scientific dispatch, and it presented itself as a reprint from a distant scientific journal that almost no reader in the city could lay hands on.
The paper sold in enormous numbers. The story was talked about, argued over and copied by other papers.
None of it had happened. The astronomer whose name carried the whole account, Sir John Herschel, had made no such observations and learned of the affair only much later. The reports had been composed inside the newspaper office, and The Sun eventually acknowledged that they were invented.
Nothing in the story was impossible to check. But checking took weeks, and believing took a minute. Almost everything you will study in this chapter — the instincts a journalist needs, and the lines a journalist must not cross — exists because of that gap between how fast a story travels and how slowly it can be verified.
Diagram
Fig. 2.0-1 – a generic nineteenth-century news sheet held open by a non-identifiable reader; the sheet’s main panel carries a fanciful engraving of an imagined lunar landscape with winged figures; label the panel “drawing presented as observation”, label a line of small print “source named but unavailable to the reader”, and label the reader’s side of the image “no way to check, and no time to try”
Keep these five questions in mind as you read. Each of them is answered somewhere in this chapter.
2.1 Qualities of a Good Journalist
A journalist does four things, in this order: finds out what has happened, checks it, decides how much of it matters, and tells it to people who were not there. Every quality discussed in this section serves one of those four jobs.
It helps to be clear first about the word at the centre of the work. News is not simply anything that happens. It is information about a recent or newly discovered event that a public has a reason to know, gathered and checked by someone who can be held answerable if it turns out to be wrong.
That last part — someone answerable — is what separates a news report from a rumour with the same content. A rumour may even be true. It carries no one who will correct it if it is not.
Most journalists work a beat: a fixed area of coverage such as the district courts, civic services, health, education, agriculture or sport. Working a beat over months builds the two things news work runs on — background knowledge, and sources, meaning the people and records from which information is obtained.
The syllabus names five qualities: a nose for news, inquisitiveness, language skills, being trustworthy, and empathy. Read them as one working temperament rather than a checklist. A reporter with a fine nose for news and no empathy will find stories and misread the people in them; one with empathy and no language skills will understand a story and be unable to hand it to a reader.
2.1.1 Nose for News
A nose for news is the trained judgement that recognises, quickly, which fact in front of you matters and why. It is not a mysterious gift. It is pattern recognition, built by reading widely, knowing a beat, and having been wrong often enough to learn from it.
Consider an ordinary morning in any town. A road is dug up. A school announces a holiday. A hospital’s power supply fails for two hours. All three happened; only the third is likely to be a story, and a reporter with news sense knows why almost before thinking it through.
The tests a story is put through
Journalists judge a possible story against a small set of rough tests, usually called news values. Does it affect many people, or affect a few people severely? Is it new, or newly discovered? Is it near enough to matter to this audience? Is it unusual, or does it break a pattern? Does it involve someone whose actions the public has a claim to know about? And, sharpest of all — is someone trying to keep it quiet?
No single test decides. A small event close to home may outweigh a large one far away, which is why a local paper leads on a collapsed footbridge while a national bulletin does not. As Fig. 2.1-1 shows, most of what happens in a day never becomes news, and the tests are the sieve.
Diagram
Fig. 2.1-1 – news judgement as a sieve; many small generic event symbols entering at the top (a queue, a meeting, a bus, a classroom, a hospital, a rainstorm); five labelled test bands across the middle reading “affects many, or affects a few severely”, “new or newly discovered”, “near this audience”, “unusual or breaks a pattern”, “someone wants it hidden”; only three event symbols passing through to a labelled tray at the base marked “reported as news”; label the discarded majority “happened, but not news”
That last test — someone wants it hidden — deserves attention, because it is the one that separates journalism from announcement. Information that an organisation is happy to release will reach the public anyway, through its own channels. Information it would rather withhold usually reaches the public only if a journalist goes after it.
A nose for news also involves knowing when there is no story. A reporter who turns every minor event into a headline exhausts an audience’s attention and, more seriously, spends credibility that will be needed on the day something genuinely serious happens.
2.1.2 Inquisitiveness
Inquisitiveness is curiosity that does not stop at the first answer. It is the habit of asking how a person knows what they have just asserted, and of noticing the question that the answer quietly avoided.
Every statement given to a reporter comes from somewhere. An official says a scheme has reached forty villages. The inquisitive question is not whether that sounds plausible; it is where the figure comes from, when it was counted, who counted it, and what “reached” was taken to mean.
This is unglamorous work. Most of it produces nothing. But the story that matters is usually the one where the second question was asked after the first answer sounded satisfactory.
Curiosity has a limit, and it is not a vague one. Persistence directed at people who hold power and public responsibility is the work. The same persistence directed at a private person who has no duty to answer becomes intrusion.
The distinction in Table 2.1 turns on two things: who the person is, and whether the answer serves the public or only the story. A minister declining to explain a decision is itself news. A bereaved neighbour declining to talk is simply a person exercising a right.
2.1.3 Language Skills
Language skills, in journalism, mean the ability to say exactly what is known, in words a reader can take in once and get right. Ornament is not the point. Precision is.
Two skills sit inside this. The first is accuracy of wording — choosing verbs and quantities that carry no more certainty than the evidence allows. The second is structure — putting the most important thing first, because a reader may stop after one paragraph.
The opening sentence of a report is called the lead. It carries the core of the story: what happened, to whom, where, and how it is known. Everything after it adds detail in falling order of importance.
Draft A is not a stronger piece of writing; it is a weaker one wearing stronger words. “Suffering terribly” is the reporter’s estimate presented as fact. “Looks the other way” is an accusation of deliberate neglect, made without evidence and without giving the department a chance to answer.
Draft B is duller to read and far harder to challenge. It gives a place, a duration, a named responsible body, a day on which the confirmation was obtained, a stated cause and a stated timeline. If any of it is wrong, the error can be found and corrected. That is the test a sentence in a news report has to pass.
Notice also what Draft B does with attribution — the naming, in the text, of where a piece of information came from. The failure and the timeline are not asserted by the reporter; they are what the department said, and the sentence says so. If the pump story turns out to be untrue, the report is still accurate about who claimed it.
Two further habits belong here. Avoid jargon — the specialised vocabulary of a trade, such as “sanctioned outlay” or “post-operative morbidity” — or translate it the first time it appears. And prefer the active voice, which names who did the thing: “the department stopped supply” tells the reader something that “supply was stopped” hides.
2.1.4 Trustworthiness
To be trustworthy is to be someone whose report can be relied on without the reader having to check it, and whose word to a source holds. The two go together, and both are built slowly.
Trust with the audience rests on verification — establishing, before publication, that a claim is true, by finding independent evidence for it. A single confident statement from one interested person is not verification. A record, a document, or a second source with separate knowledge is.
The path a claim travels is shown in Fig. 2.1-2. At each step the question is the same: what would make this false, and have I looked?
Diagram
Fig. 2.1-2 – flow: claim heard → who is the source, and how do they know? → independent second source with separate knowledge → document, record or physical check → response sought from anyone the claim accuses → published with attribution; add a return arrow from any step to “hold the story” labelled “not yet verified”
The return arrow matters more than it looks. Holding a story that is not ready is a professional act, not a failure, and it is the point at which competitive pressure does most of its damage.
Trustworthiness also has a second face, which readers never see. A reporter who promises a source anonymity keeps it, including under pressure. Information given off the record — provided on the understanding that it will not be published or attributed — stays off the record, even when publishing it would make a better story.
There is a further, less comfortable part of being trustworthy: publishing corrections. A news organisation that corrects its errors visibly is treated as more reliable, not less, because the audience learns that what it does not correct, it stands behind.
2.1.5 Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand accurately what a situation looks like from inside another person’s life. In journalism it is not softness. It is an instrument of accuracy.
A reporter without it asks a farmer about crop loss and gets a figure. A reporter with it asks what the family stopped spending on first, and learns what the figure means. Both facts are true; only the second is a story a reader can understand.
Empathy also governs conduct. It decides how a question is put to someone who has just lost a great deal, whether a photograph is taken at all, and whether a person who does not understand what “on the record” means is allowed to say something that will follow them for years.
The five qualities as a working set
Taught separately, these five can look like a list of virtues. In practice they check one another. A nose for news finds the story, inquisitiveness tests it, language skills deliver it, trustworthiness makes it worth believing, and empathy keeps it recognisable to the people it is about.
Read down the third column and a pattern appears: every failure of quality shows up first as a failure the reader can feel but not name — a report that is somehow unconvincing, unfair, or about nothing. The professional value of these five qualities is that they turn that vague unease into something a journalist can diagnose and fix before publication.
2.2 Ethical Issues in Journalism
Journalistic ethics are not private virtue. They are a set of professional standards that exist because a news report asks strangers to believe something they cannot check for themselves.
Every ethical issue in this section arises at the same pressure point: something is easier, faster or more profitable than the accurate version. Exaggeration wins attention. Fabrication is quicker than reporting. Payment is steadier than circulation. Copying is faster than writing. Naming these pressures honestly is more useful than condemning them, because a working journalist meets them every week.
Standards are written down. In India, the Press Council of India issues norms of journalistic conduct for the press, and news broadcasters follow codes administered through their own self-regulatory body. These codes carry limited penalties. Their real force is professional: an organisation that ignores them loses the only asset it has, which is being believed.
The syllabus names seven issues. Each is defined below with an example, and each ends at the same question — what would responsible practice have looked like instead?
2.2.1 Sensationalism
Sensationalism is the treatment of news in a way designed to excite feeling rather than to inform — through exaggeration, dramatic language, urgent presentation, or by giving a small event the weight of a large one.
Note what the definition does not say. Sensationalism is not the reporting of dramatic events. A serious accident is genuinely dramatic, and reporting it plainly is not sensational. The fault lies in the treatment, not the subject.
An example makes the line visible. Suppose three cases of a seasonal fever are confirmed in a district. A plain report gives the number, the source, the symptoms and the health department’s advice. A sensational treatment leads a bulletin with a countdown graphic, an urgent musical sting and the suggestion that an outbreak is spreading — without a single additional verified fact.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it explains why sensationalism persists. Attention is what news organisations sell, to advertisers or to subscribers. Alarm holds attention better than proportion does. So the incentive runs one way, and only professional restraint runs the other.
The final row of Table 2.3 is the practical test. Strip a report of its music, its capital letters and its adjectives; if what remains still justifies the position it was given, the urgency was real.
Sensationalism has a long-term cost that its practitioners tend to discount. An audience repeatedly alarmed about small things stops responding, and the alarm is unavailable on the day it is needed.
2.2.2 Fake News
Fake news is fabricated or deliberately misleading content presented in the form of a news report. The form is the point: it borrows the layout, tone and vocabulary of journalism precisely because those signals carry trust that the content has not earned.
Two related terms are worth separating. Misinformation is false information shared by someone who believes it is true. Disinformation is false information spread deliberately, knowing it is false. The same message can be disinformation at its origin and misinformation five shares later.
The most common form is not an invented event but a real one wrenched out of place — a genuine photograph of a flood from another country and another year, recirculated with a new caption during a local flood. Nothing in the image is doctored. Everything about the claim is false.
Why does the false version usually travel further than the correction? Because it was built for travel. It is emotionally charged, it demands a reaction, and it asks to be passed on. A correction is calm, arrives later, and is read mainly by people who were not misled in the first place. Fig. 2.2-1 shows the gap.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-1 – two horizontal timelines on a shared time axis, day 1 to day 7; upper line “false story”, starting at day 1 with a steeply rising audience curve peaking by day 2; lower line “correction”, starting at day 4 with a low flat curve; shade the area of the false curve that the correction never reaches and label it “people who saw the claim and never saw the correction”; label the upper curve’s driver “shared because it provokes” and the lower curve’s driver “read because it is sought out”
The message works by borrowing authority it does not have. “A senior official” is an authority-shaped hole: it sounds like attribution and names nobody, so there is no one to ask and no one to be wrong. “The east zone” is specific enough to feel local and vague enough to fit anywhere.
The final line is the mechanism. An instruction to forward immediately converts each reader into a distributor before the claim has been checked, and the urgency is what removes the pause in which checking would happen. Recognising that pattern — unnamed authority, missing date, and a push to share — is the most useful defence a reader has.
2.2.3 Paid News
Paid news is content that has been paid for by an interested party but published or broadcast as though it were independent journalism, with no disclosure that money changed hands.
The deception is not in the content, which may be flattering rather than false. It is in the concealment of the transaction. A reader assumes that a report appears because an editor judged it worth publishing. Paid news exploits that assumption and sells it.
The standard example is election-time coverage. A candidate’s activities are reported at length, in warm terms, in outlet after outlet, while a rival is barely mentioned — because coverage has been bought as a package. Nothing in the reports announces this. To the reader it looks like news judgement, and it is not.
Paid news is harder for an audience to detect than an ordinary advertisement, because an advertisement declares itself. This is exactly why the practice has been treated in India as a serious concern for electoral fairness as well as for journalism: it converts money into the appearance of public support.
2.2.4 Plagiarism
Plagiarism is presenting another person’s words, reporting or ideas as your own, without acknowledgement. In journalism it takes three ordinary forms: copying passages from another publication; rewriting someone else’s sentences closely enough that the structure is theirs; and taking another outlet’s original reporting — the facts it dug out — without crediting it.
The last of these is the one students most often miss. If a paper spent three weeks obtaining a set of documents, a rival that reports the findings without saying where they came from has taken the work, even if every word is newly written.
Two harms follow. The first is straightforward: someone else’s labour has been taken. The second is less obvious and more dangerous to the reader. When a fact is copied rather than reported, it arrives with no verification behind it — the copier has not spoken to the source, seen the record or tested the claim, and cannot correct it if it is wrong.
Notice the structure of that case. Ethical failure is rarely only a bad person; it is a bad person plus a system that made the shortcut easy and the detection unlikely.
2.2.5 Advertorials
An advertorial is an advertisement written and designed to look like editorial content. The word is a joining of “advertisement” and “editorial”, and it describes exactly what it is.
The commercial purpose is legitimate. Advertising pays for journalism, and few news organisations survive without it. The ethical issue is the imitation — a piece that borrows a publication’s typeface, column width, byline style and reporting voice invites the reader to extend the trust they hold in the publication to a message the publication was paid to carry.
Responsible practice is not to ban advertorials but to label them, visibly and in plain words — as an advertisement, sponsored content or a brand feature — and to keep them out of the typeface and layout reserved for news. Fig. 2.2-2 shows what the reader is meant to be able to tell apart at a glance.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-2 – three generic page blocks side by side, no real brands or mastheads; block 1 “display advertisement” with a bold product panel and no body text; block 2 “advertorial” with news-style columns and a clear top strip labelled “Advertisement — paid content”; block 3 “news report” with the same columns, a byline and no strip; label the shared features between blocks 2 and 3 “identical layout and voice” and the strip on block 2 “the only signal the reader gets”
Reading across Table 2.4, only one row separates a legitimate advertorial from paid news, and it is the disclosure row. That is why the labelling strip in Fig. 2.2-2 is not a formality — it is the entire ethical difference.
2.2.6 Partisan Reporting
Partisan reporting is news coverage that consistently favours one political side, ideology or interest, while presenting itself as neutral reporting rather than as opinion.
The last clause carries the ethical weight. A signed opinion column arguing a case is not partisan reporting; it is opinion, openly labelled, and a reader can discount it accordingly. Partisan reporting is advocacy wearing the clothes of a news report.
It rarely operates by stating falsehoods, which would be easy to catch. It works through four quieter choices. Framing decides which aspect of an event is treated as the story. Selection decides which events are covered at all, and which are left out. Sourcing decides whose voice is heard and whose is summarised. Tone decides whether a decision is “announced”, “conceded” or “forced through”.
An example, kept deliberately abstract: two outlets cover the same public meeting on a proposed factory. One leads on employment estimates and quotes the project’s supporters, mentioning objections in a final line. The other leads on displacement and quotes objectors, mentioning employment in a final line. Every fact in both reports may be true. Neither report is the meeting.
The consequences are studied and debated. Where audiences perceive consistent bias, surveys across several countries report declining trust in news organisations, and readers increasingly select outlets that agree with them. It is worth being careful here: the evidence shows association, and the direction of cause is contested — partisan outlets may harden divisions, or already-divided audiences may simply choose the outlet that fits them. Most researchers now argue that both operate together.
2.2.7 Sting Operations
A sting operation is an investigative method in which journalists conceal their identity or purpose — typically through hidden recording or an assumed role — in order to obtain evidence of wrongdoing that cannot be obtained openly.
It sits inside a genuine contradiction. Journalism’s authority rests on honesty, and a sting is built on deception. That is why it is treated as an exceptional method rather than a routine tool, and why the justification has to be argued before the work begins, not after it succeeds.
Professional codes converge on four conditions, shown as a sequence in Fig. 2.2-3. The wrongdoing must be serious and of genuine public interest — meaning it matters to people’s rights, safety or money, not merely that people are interested in it. Open methods must have been tried and failed. The deception must be the minimum necessary. And the material must be verified, presented in full context, and put to those it accuses for a right of reply before publication.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-3 – flow with a stop branch at each stage: serious wrongdoing of public interest? → open methods tried and failed? → deception minimal and proportionate? → findings verified and put to the accused for reply? → publish with full context; each “no” branch leads to a single box labelled “do not proceed — or publish only what open reporting supports”
The risks are real and well documented. Selective editing can make an ambiguous exchange look conclusive. Covert footage invades the privacy of everyone incidentally recorded. And entrapment — inducing someone to do something they would not otherwise have done, in order to film them doing it — produces evidence of the journalist’s own manufacture. Indian courts have accepted covert reporting as conditionally legitimate where public interest is demonstrable, while defamation and privacy actions remain available to those exposed.
The best-known Indian example is an investigation published by a news magazine in 2001, in which reporters posing as representatives of an arms supplier recorded conversations relating to defence procurement. It led to resignations at senior levels and to years of litigation and political controversy, and it remains genuinely contested — cited by some as a landmark of investigative journalism and by others as an illustration of how far entrapment and selective release can be pushed. Both readings are argued from the same tapes, which is itself the lesson.
Table 2.5 explains why responsible newsrooms exhaust the left-hand column first. Documents can be re-examined by anyone; a covertly recorded conversation can only be re-examined by people who trust whoever holds the full tape.
The seven issues at a glance
Read down the middle column and one word recurs in different disguises: concealment. Something is hidden from the reader — a payment, an origin, a motive, a method, or the ordinary size of an event. Read down the right-hand column and the answer is equally consistent: disclosure, and evidence the reader can weigh. Almost every ethical rule in journalism is a version of telling the audience what they would need to know in order to judge the report for themselves.
2.3 Summary
What the work is
- A journalist finds out what has happened, checks it, judges how much it matters, and reports it to people who were not there.
- News is recent or newly revealed information of public interest, gathered and verified by someone who is answerable for its accuracy. That answerability is what separates a report from a rumour of the same content.
- Most reporting is done on a beat, and a beat supplies the two things the work depends on: background knowledge and sources.
The five qualities of a good journalist
- Nose for news is the trained judgement that recognises which fact matters. It works through rough tests — scale of effect, newness, nearness, unusualness, and whether someone is trying to keep the fact hidden. Knowing when there is no story is part of it.
- Inquisitiveness is curiosity that does not stop at the first answer. It asks how the speaker knows, what record exists, and who else would know. Directed at those with public responsibility it is the work; directed at private people with no duty to answer it becomes intrusion.
- Language skills mean saying exactly what is known, in words a reader takes in once and gets right. Precision, attribution, the active voice, a lead that carries the core of the story, and no jargon left untranslated.
- Trustworthiness has two faces: verification before publication and visible correction afterwards, for the audience; and promises kept, including anonymity and off-the-record undertakings, for sources.
- Empathy is accurate understanding of what a situation looks like from inside another person’s life. It is an instrument of accuracy, not softness, and it is not the same as sympathy — it is compatible with reporting facts the subject will dislike.
- The five check one another. News sense finds the story, inquisitiveness tests it, language delivers it, trustworthiness makes it worth believing, and empathy keeps it recognisable to the people it is about.
The seven ethical issues
- Sensationalism treats news so as to maximise feeling — by exaggeration, dramatisation or disproportionate prominence — at the cost of accuracy and proportion. The fault lies in the treatment, not in the subject being dramatic.
- Fake news is fabricated or deliberately misleading content presented in the form of a news report. Misinformation is false content shared in good faith; disinformation is spread knowingly. The commonest form is a real image or fact recirculated with a false claim attached.
- Paid news is coverage bought by an interested party and published as independent journalism with the payment concealed. Concealment, not falsehood, is the offence, and it is harder to detect than an advertisement because an advertisement declares itself.
- Plagiarism is presenting another’s words, reporting or ideas as one’s own. It takes labour that belongs to someone else, and it delivers to the reader a fact that has never been verified by the person publishing it.
- Advertorials are advertisements written and laid out to look like editorial content. They are legitimate only when clearly labelled and kept out of the layout reserved for news; without disclosure, an advertorial is simply paid news.
- Partisan reporting advances one political side while presenting itself as neutral news. It works through framing, selection, sourcing and tone rather than through false statements, and it differs from an opinion column, which argues openly and is labelled as such.
- Sting operations use concealed identity or covert recording to document wrongdoing that open reporting cannot reach. They are exceptional, not routine, and are justified only by serious public interest, failure of open methods, minimum deception, verification, and a genuine right of reply. Their standing risks are entrapment, privacy invasion and misleading editing.
The thread through the chapter
- Every one of the seven issues involves something being hidden from the audience — a payment, an origin, a motive, a method, or the ordinary size of an event.
- Every professional answer is a form of disclosure: attribution, labelling, correction, right of reply, and evidence the reader can weigh independently.
- Ethical failure is rarely only an individual’s dishonesty. It usually requires a system in which the shortcut is easy, the pressure is constant and detection is unlikely — which is why standards are institutional and written down rather than left to private conscience.
- Speed is the pressure behind most of these failures. A story travels faster than it can be verified, and a correction never covers the ground the claim has already crossed.
2.4 Key Terms
- Advertorial — paid promotional content written and laid out to look like editorial matter, requiring clear labelling.
- Attribution — the naming, within the text, of the source from which a piece of information came.
- Beat — the fixed area of coverage a reporter works, such as courts, health, civic services or agriculture.
- Disinformation — false information spread deliberately by someone who knows it is false.
- Empathy — accurate understanding of what a situation looks like from inside another person’s life.
- Entrapment — inducing a person to do something they would not otherwise have done, in order to record them doing it.
- Fake news — fabricated or deliberately misleading content presented in the form and style of a news report.
- Framing — the choice of which aspect of an event is treated as the story, which shapes how an audience reads it.
- Inquisitiveness — curiosity that does not stop at the first answer, and that asks how the speaker knows.
- Jargon — the specialised vocabulary of a trade or profession, which must be translated for a general reader.
- Language skills — the ability to state exactly what is known, in words a reader can take in once and understand correctly.
- Lead — the opening sentence of a report, carrying the core of the story and how it is known.
- Misinformation — false information shared by someone who believes it to be true.
- News — recent or newly revealed information of public interest, gathered and verified by someone answerable for its accuracy.
- News values — the rough tests by which journalists judge whether an event is worth reporting, such as scale of effect, newness, nearness and unusualness.
- Nose for news — the trained judgement that recognises quickly which fact in front of a reporter matters, and why.
- Off the record — information given on the understanding that it will not be published or attributed.
- Paid news — coverage bought by an interested party and published as independent journalism, with the payment concealed.
- Partisan reporting — coverage that systematically favours one political side while presenting itself as impartial news.
- Plagiarism — the use of another’s words, reporting or ideas without acknowledgement, presented as one’s own work.
- Public interest — what genuinely affects people’s rights, safety, money or governance, as distinct from what merely interests people.
- Right of reply — the opportunity given to a person or organisation to respond to an allegation before it is published.
- Sensationalism — presenting news so as to maximise emotional impact, at the cost of accuracy, proportion and context.
- Source — a person or record from which a journalist obtains information.
- Sting operation — the use of concealed identity or covert recording to document serious wrongdoing that open reporting cannot reach.
- Trustworthiness — being someone whose report can be relied on without checking, and whose word to a source holds.
- Verification — establishing, before publication, that a claim is true, through independent evidence.
2.5 Points to Ponder
If a story is true, verified and fairly reported, but almost nobody reads it because it was told plainly, has the journalist done the job?
A reporter’s news sense is built from experience — but experience of a particular place, language and set of people. Can news judgement ever be neutral, or is it always somebody’s judgement?
An advertorial that is clearly labelled still borrows the trust of the publication it sits inside. Is disclosure genuinely enough, or does it only shift the responsibility onto the reader?
If a sting operation exposes real and serious wrongdoing, does it matter afterwards that the journalist lied to obtain the evidence?
When a false claim reaches ten times as many people as the correction, what should a news organisation owe the audience it misled — and how far does that duty extend?
Empathy makes a reporter understand the people in a story better. Could it also make them less willing to publish what those people would rather keep hidden?
2.6 Objective Questions
- (Which of the following best describes news?) [1 mark]
- Anything that has happened recently in a town or city
- Recent or newly revealed information of public interest, gathered and verified by someone answerable for it
- Information that a large number of people find entertaining
- Any statement issued by an official body for publication
- (A report on a company is published in exchange for payment, in news typeface, with no indication that money changed hands. This is:) [1 mark]
- Sponsorship
- An advertorial
- Paid news
- A review
- (The opening sentence of a news report, carrying the core of the story and how it is known, is called the:) [1 mark]
- Byline
- Lead
- Beat
- Caption
- (Inducing a person to do something they would not otherwise have done, in order to record them doing it, is known as:) [1 mark]
- Attribution
- Verification
- Entrapment
- Framing
- (Assertion (A): An advertorial is considered ethically acceptable while paid news is not. Reason (R): The advertorial discloses that it is paid content, while paid news conceals the payment.) [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R correctly explains A.
- Both A and R are true, but R does not explain A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- (Assertion (A): A journalist should not report an event dramatically. Reason (R): Sensationalism gives an event more prominence and heat than the verified evidence supports.) [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R correctly explains A.
- Both A and R are true, but R does not explain A.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Both A and R are false.
- (Match each term in Column A with its meaning in Column B.) [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Misinformation | i. Naming, within the text, where a piece of information came from |
| b. Attribution | ii. The fixed area of coverage a reporter works |
| c. Beat | iii. False information shared by someone who believes it is true |
| d. Right of reply | iv. The chance given to a person to respond to an allegation before publication |
(Fill in the blank: Information given to a reporter on the understanding that it will not be published or attributed is said to be given ________.) [1 mark]
(Fill in the blank: Establishing that a claim is true through independent evidence, before publication, is called ________.) [1 mark]
(State whether true or false: A signed opinion column that openly argues a political position is an example of partisan reporting.) [1 mark]
2.7 Check Your Concepts
(Define plagiarism as it applies to journalism.) [2 marks]
(Name the five qualities of a good journalist studied in this chapter.) [2 marks]
(What is meant by a beat, and why does working a beat help a reporter?) [2 marks]
(Differentiate between misinformation and disinformation, with one example of each.) [3 marks]
(Differentiate between an advertorial and paid news.) [3 marks]
(Give reasons why plagiarism harms the reader, and not only the journalist whose work was taken.) [3 marks]
(Explain sensationalism with an example, and state two effects it has on an audience over time.) [4 marks]
(Evaluate the claim: “Once an advertorial is labelled, it raises no ethical concern at all.”) [4 marks]
(Describe the conditions under which a sting operation may be ethically justified, and explain the risks that remain even when those conditions are met.) [6 marks]
(Explain how partisan reporting operates through framing, selection, sourcing and tone rather than through false statements, using examples. Include one honest limitation of the claim that biased coverage causes public division.) [6 marks]
2.8 Analyse the Media Text
- (Two openings were written for a report on the same event — the closure of a footbridge outside a busy railway station. Version 1: Commuters were left stranded and helpless yesterday as authorities abruptly shut down a crumbling footbridge, sparking chaos outside the station. Version 2: The footbridge outside the city railway station was closed on Monday evening after a routine inspection found cracks in two support columns, the public works department said. It expects repairs to take about three weeks.) [6 marks]
- Name the ethical issue at work in Version 1, and identify three words or phrases that produce it.
- Explain what Version 2 gives the reader that Version 1 does not.
- State one thing that is still missing from Version 2, and say why a reporter should obtain it before publication.
- (A full page in a newspaper carries a long, warmly written article about a coaching institute, set in the same typeface and column width as the news pages. It carries no byline, only the words “By our team”. Every source quoted works for the institute, and no student or rival institute is quoted. There is no label anywhere on the page.) [5 marks]
- Identify what this page most probably is, and give two features of the page that led you to that conclusion.
- Explain why this is more difficult for a reader to recognise than a display advertisement for the same institute.
- State two specific changes that would bring the page in line with responsible practice.
- (A message circulating widely in a district reads: “ALERT — schools in the whole district will remain shut tomorrow. Confirmed by a senior officer. Please forward to all your groups at once.” A local news website publishes a short report saying that the message is circulating and that parents are anxious.) [5 marks]
- List three signs in the message that should make a reader treat it with caution.
- Explain why this message is likely to spread faster than any correction issued the next day.
- State what the website should have done before publishing, and say whether reporting that a rumour exists is itself responsible journalism.
2.9 Craft Practice
(Rewrite the following opening as a plain, verifiable news lead of not more than 40 words: “Panic gripped the neighbourhood as filthy water gushed out of taps for the third day running, with residents at their wits’ end and officials nowhere to be seen.” Submit the rewritten lead, plus a list of four specific facts you would have to obtain and verify before it could be published.) [5 marks]
(You are covering a state-level school science exhibition for a city newspaper. Write the first 120 words of the report — the lead and the two paragraphs that follow it. Every fact must carry attribution, no adjective may claim more than the evidence supports, and the details are yours to invent. Submit the report along with one line naming the news value that earned it its place.) [5 marks]
(A municipal officer tells you that a new water pipeline “has already reached most households in the ward”. Draft the five follow-up questions you would ask, in the order you would ask them, and against each write in one line what you would be trying to establish. Submit the numbered list.) [4 marks]