Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian
Should The Guardian have destroyed its copies of Edward Snowden’s leaked files rather than go to court? That’s a question raised by Index on Censorship and put to editor Alan Rusbridger by Channel 4 News (from 3.40 in).
Publishing is a practical business, and there are three key duties which a publisher has to consider.
Firstly, a news organisation must try to protect its sources. Continue reading
Is the Daily Mail less impartial than social media? That’s the takeaway from one of the charts (shown above) in Ofcom’s latest Communications Market Report.
The report asked website and app users to rate 7 news websites against 5 criteria. The Daily Mail comes out with the lowest proportion of respondents rating it highly for ‘impartiality and unbiased‘, ‘Offers range of opinions‘, and ‘Importance‘.
This is particularly surprising given that two of the other websites are social networks. 28% rated Facebook and Twitter highly on impartiality, compared to 26% for the Daily Mail. Continue reading
Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war. Or, as an academic might put it:
“Professional journalism takes the nation as its unit of analysis, which [means] journalists employ ‘‘closed’’ language with respect to international issues when the nation is perceived as threatened, encouraging the citizen to read world events and issues from ‘‘our’’ point of view.”
This is the scene set at the start of Robert L. Handley‘s research into collaborative cross-border journalism. Handley wants to tackle the question of whether “global journalism” can result in the more objective outlook that its proponents hope for.
The partnerships that sprung up around Wikileaks‘s warlogs and cables provide an ideal way to explore that.
The overriding finding of Handley’s research is a difference in how European and US newspapers handled the Wikileaks material. European papers, he argues, “behaved as loyal to the nation-as-citizen and, more broadly, to citizens-wherever,” but the reporting of US partner The New York Times “demonstrated a loyalty to nation-as-official.”: Continue reading
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