Richard Sambrook and Jay Rosen on responsible reporting when there is ambiguity around the truth
Cardiff University journalism professor Richard Sambrook and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discuss how news organizations should engage reporting during times of "fog," when there is a lack of clarity around the truth.
Richard: “People want answers immediately. And, of course, truth takes a long time to emerge, sometimes. …So, when an event happens, a conventional news gathering practice is to find spokespeople and see what they say about it and find other kind of authorities and ask them what information they have. …and in the ‘always on’ 24/7 environment, … social media takes the first thing they say, ignores the attribution to the spokesman, and just says this organization has affiliated with this viewpoint, when it hasn’t. All it’s done is to make the very first of perhaps dozens of inquiries in order to build up a very complicated picture. And the truth, the final settled view, is going to take hours, if not days or sometimes weeks to emerge. But the expectation is that it’s going to have been settled and emerge in the very first post that anybody makes. That is simply an unrealistic expectation; …news organizations need to explain their work more carefully. …They need to signal this … is only a partial view. …They need to be much more explicit about the process of news gathering."
Jay: “The one simple way of doing that…is to start with ‘what we know’ and ‘what we don’t know’ and to make that a habit.”
Excerpted from the Journalism & Democratic Backsliding webinar, recorded 19 October 2023, available at: • Journalism & Democratic Backsliding: ... .