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University of Wisconsin–Madison

Category: Feature articles

Join us Friday April 5 for our 5th annual ethics conference: “Who is Shaping the News?”

Save the date! Our 5th journalism ethics conference will be Friday, April 5, 2013 at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in Madison, Wisconsin. It will be our biggest conference yet. This year, a distinguished and dynamic group of journalists and scholars will explore “Who is Shaping the News? Academics, Corporations, Critics.”

Award-winning investigative reporter Lowell Bergman will deliver our keynote speech, and we will present this year’s Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics. Panelists include CBC producer Ira Basen, CNBC senior correspondent Scott Cohn, CJE’s Katy Culver, Andy Hall of WisconsinWatch, media scholar Lew Friedland, Lorie Hearn of Investigative Newssource, investigative journalist Brant Houston, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jan Schaffer, journalist and scholar Lee Wilkins, Continue reading

Of Vultures and Watchdogs

Nelson Mandela is a national treasure for South Africans. Our government recently issued new banknotes with Mandela’s face on it, a daily reminder of the social, cultural and political capital that the country’s first democratic president created. Mandela is also globally admired. So it’s understandable Continue reading

After September 11 . . . 1973: Chilean Journalism at the Crossroads

On the morning of September 11, 1973, as the jet fighters completed their bombing runs, a column of thick black smoke rose from “La Moneda,” Chile’s presidential palace. Tanks and infantry closed in on the rubble-strewn building in preparation for the final assault. The attackers were Chilean military personnel lead by General Augusto Pinochet, Continue reading

The Ethical Character of Public Broadcasting

The presidential election campaign has stirred debate over the role of government, including taxpayer support for public service media. Much coverage has focused on possible cuts to shows like Sesame Street, and its iconic Big Bird. Long-time public broadcaster and executive Bryon Knight reminds us that funding for public media buys us more than Big Bird. It supports a locally based system of public service that is accountable not to advertisers and shareholders. It supports a service accountable to all citizens. Continue reading

Brand Journalism

In this article, journalist Ira Basen asks a pointed question: Is the growing trend of ‘brand journalism’ — corporations producing ‘content’ to promote their brands – good or bad for journalism and the public sphere? Is it ‘really’ journalism, and how do we define journalism anyway? If skilled journalists produce accurate articles for corporation web sites and magazines, who cares if it is not produced by the mainstream news media? Continue reading

Fact-checking a necessary supplement to modern political reporting, panelists say

photo of fact-checking panel

photo by Brett Blaske

Fact-checking has emerged in the past decade as a new media phenomenon with roots in traditional journalism. In the “old days,” said Bill Adair of politifact.org, news outlets and reporters acted as  filters for, political statements, weeding out false messages before presenting information to the public. Today, with a virtually endless supply of news sources across television, Internet and print media that report political messages by the minute, the filter is broken.

Adair made this point as part of a panel at this year’s Annual Conference of the Center for Journalism Ethics, held this past Friday at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. The panel discussed the emergence of independent fact checkers as  necessary components to fight misinformation.

“In the old days you would still get wacky ideas like the president was born in Kenya or is a Muslim,” Adair said, “but the reporters would stop it there and not repeat it.”

In the current media landscape, such messages do get out and gain more attention, at times, than factual political claims.

In addition to Adair, other panelists included Lisa Graves, the Executive Director at the Center for Media and Democracy, and Lucas Graves (no relation), a Ph.D. candidate in Communications at Columbia University whose dissertation has followed the fact-checking movement in American journalism. Christopher Wells,  assistant professor at the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, moderated the panel.

This broken filter has created what Lucas Graves called a “symbiotic relationship” between journalists and fact-checkers, two separate groups that were once a single entity. The panelists agreed that fact checking takes considerable time, time that is not available to reporters in a 24-hour news cycle. Adair said Politifact’s process can take an entire day or more to check a single fact effectively.

Lisa Graves noted that fact checking has recently emerged from an older journalism based on skeptical truth-seeking and genuine curiosity.

“A lot of our work is in the finest traditions of old school journalism,” Ms. Graves said, “which is deep skepticism of what people say versus the reporting you see…in television and newspapers, which is quote versus quote.”

Quoting a politician is an easy way to report what is happening, but the facts quoted may not always be accurate. Fact checkers exist to investigate the truth behind claims when reporters can’t or won’t. The process isn’t easy, nor is it favorable to maintaining a reporter’s interview sources, the panel said. Refuting a claim can be a bridge-burning affair that lessens a particular source’s willingness to speak with the reporter that has corrected him or her in the past.

If the inherent criticism fact checkers aim at political candidates were leveled by reporters, saying “no, you’re wrong, and I can prove it,” candidates might simply stop speaking to those reporters and offer access to other news outlets willing to quote whatever they say. In the current media landscape with a “broken filter,” someone else will always listen.

“This is journalism that you have to have guts to do,” Adair said about fact-checking. “And you have to be willing to make people mad.”

Independent fact-checking sources like Adair’s Politifact are willing to take the heat and provide raw, documented evidence to back up their claims. This is a function journalists used to perform, and one they have recently been improving, according to Mr. Graves.

But the panelists were asked, is this symbiotic or mutually dependent relationship merely a crutch for journalists afraid to burn bridges with sources? Shouldn’t journalists already be checking the validity of statements they publish? The answer is complicated in today’s media sphere, in which campaign-trail articles cover what was said at a debate, while “sidebar” fact-checking pieces cover whether the claims were true.

“On the one hand, that gets more fact-checking journalism … out there in front of the reader. And arguably, it begins to acclimate that news org to this kind of journalism,” Mr. Graves said. “In many news outlets, we’ve seen a parallel increase both in their citations of fact checkers and in their in-house fact checking.”

Mr. Graves acknowledged that while every fact-checking piece is in some sense a “critique of a traditional report that failed to check the claim,” the separate critiques of fact checkers allow traditional journalists to continue producing competitive, timely reporting. In the current media landscape, effective fact-checking is nearly impossible for traditional news sources, so fact-checkers have become necessary whistle blowers to determine just how much truth rests in any given statement. Sometimes, a claim isn’t a cut-and-dried true or false, and sites like politifact.org address this with a “truth spectrum.”

Politifact uses a trademarked “Truth-O-Meter” to provide a quick, easily understandable truth rating of candidates’ claims. Its six-level scale ranges from “Pants on fire!” – very false – to half true, and completely true. Each rating passes through three editors before publication.

Politifact’s data relies on original documented sources and leaves the analysis to reporters and other sources. Adair likened fact-checkers to a baseball umpire, a whistle-blower who examines each call individually without making analyses about the game.

“If you ask an umpire who’s out at home more often … the umpire is going to say, ‘well, I look at every call separately, I don’t know.’” Adair said. “You don’t go to the umpire for analysis of the game.”

The job of analysis is left to citizens and, increasingly, traditional news outlets, which frequently quote independent fact checkers. This novel relationship between the media, candidates, fact-checkers and ultimately voters, will be more important than ever in the upcoming election.

Professor Stephen Ward, Director of the Center for Journalism Ethics, noted the New York Times’ suggestion that the 2012 election will be not only the most expensive in history, but also the most fact-checked. Adair agreed, saying “I think this indeed will be the most fact checked election [in history], and I think that is a very good thing.”

Negative political advertisements: Not to be dismissed

Erika Franklin Fowler speaks on negative political advertisements

Erika Franklin Fowler speaks on negative ads/photo by Brett Blaske

An American family sits on a sofa listening to well-dressed politicians explain with dark apprehension how their opponent will be the downfall of society. The leaders argue that their own credentials are far superior, citing alleged facts regarding their opponent’s decisions. As political scientist Charles Franklin noted, they might also end with a scene showing them playing with a golden retriever.

Franklin, co-founder of Pollster.com and visiting law professor at Marquette University, currently works on modeling election campaigns and polling data. He was part of a panel discussing political advertising at the fourth annual ethics conference held Friday by the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The panel assessed the impacts of negative political advertising. Professor Dhavan V. Shah, moderator of the panel and director of the Mass Communication Research Center, said negative advertisements contain information about politicians that constituents might not otherwise know.

Although negative advertising can present half-truths or leave out information, even pure slash-and-burn attack ads may present substantive challenges. Erika Franklin Fowler, assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, said negative advertisements are usually intended to influence the politically uninformed, and their content deserves to be discussed.

“It would be a shame if we wanted a world without negative ads,” Fowler said.

Negative advertisements have diminishing returns after a certain point, said Lee Wilkins, professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and recipient of the Curator’s Teaching Professorship. Viewers who are overexposed are not as affected, and viewers who lean toward the news media for information tend to dismiss negative advertisements overall.

In contrast to negative advertisements, the panel also mentioned that positive commercials motivate people to research political issues. “Feel good” ads that contain little or no information may spark viewers’ curiosity, so they seek answers elsewhere.

The panel also mentioned that a commercial might be more effective if it lacks a source. If viewers cannot immediately categorize an ad with a particular party, the ad may penetrate more and not be immediately dismissed as bipartisan.

At the local level, mudslinging advertisements may influence viewers more, especially if they are seeing one-sided attacks that go unanswered, said Wilkins.

“The more local, the more likely it is to be the case,” said Wilkins. “Most of those ads win, and it’s the level of analysis that matters.”

Political science professors Robert Jackson from Florida State University, Jeffrey Mondak from the University of Illinois, and Robert Huckfeldt from the University of California, conducted a 2009 analysis that found no empirical support for popular beliefs that negative advertisements discourage voter turnout or foster negative attitudes and cynicism. Franklin argued that public attitudes often correspond with current political affiliations. Partisan viewers more often agree with advertisements supporting previously held beliefs.

“When Democrats see a Democratic add, they’re going to say ‘yeah you bet!’ And when a Republican sees a Republican add, they’re going to say ‘yeah!’ And when they see the other side, they say ‘bull!’”

Despite popular claims that the electorate is evenly polarized because of political advertisements, Franklin stressed that many political issues are widely disagreed upon. Cuts in education and deficit spending are two issues he cited with a wide margin of disagreement between parties.

“It’s easy to conclude we are a deeply polarized electorate and perfectly divided electorate,” said Franklin. Later he added, “There are some areas where Democrats have a strong advantage, and there are others where Republicans have the overall advantage. And so for all the evidence that some voters see what they want to see and reinforce their political beliefs, there are actually variations on where different parties are clear winners on different issues.”