Order Cheap Ativan Online - Discount Online Pharmacy

The blog world moves fast – I’ve been a bit slow following up on this post by Martin Moore, on the transparency of journalism (or rather, the lack of it). It’s all about a recent study by ICMPA, the International Centre for Media and the Public Agenda, looking at how transparent news organisations around the world are – i.e. how open are they about their own newsgathering processes, their mistakes etc. I am not particularly surprised to find that news organisations in general are pretty unwilling to publish corrections, to give full information about their ownership (like telling people what other business holdings their owners have, including other media outlets) and to make known their editorial guidelines, i.e. internal guidelines for newsgathering and writing/production. A key feature of modern journalism is in fact the tendency to remove from view the processes of journalism as much as possible – reinforcing the notion that the news reach us more or less unmediated, that news more or less just “happen”, and that there is essentially nothing involved in transforming an event into that product we call “news”. Given this, it is no great surprise that news organisations are unwilling to draw attention to the fact that they are in fact staffed by flesh-and-blood people making daily decisions about what should make the news and how it should be presented based on both formal, internal rules and informal rules acquired by professional socialisation. What is a bit more surprising, then, is that the news organisations studied actually make use of something that has the potential to gravely threaten journalistic authority and the image of news as something that “just happens”: interactivity. Most news organisations, it seems, have some kind of venue where readers, listeners and viewers can respond and comment on what is published – a more direct version of “Letters to the editor”. I wouldn’t be too optimistic about the possibilities of increased transparency through interactivity, though – particularly not when it comes to traditional news organisations. As Deborah Soun Chung writes in a recent article in the journal Convergence:

All in all, the evidence suggests that journalists are undergoing an uncomfortable transition with the active migration of news online. Because the internet fundamentally challenges the existing paradigm of centralized news production, journalism management is understandably apprehensive about the interactive nature of news. (Chung 2007:58).

There’s a saying that there are two things you don’t want to see how they get made: laws and sausages. It seems many journalists would add “news” to that list: or at least, they’d rather you didn’t see how news got made.