Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, Herbert Gans. Vintage Books, New York (1980), 393 pp., $5.95

Climate change has been widely reported as a scientific and environmental issue. In six months' news coverage of climate change in New Zealand, reporting of basic scientific facts was overwhelmingl...

Media (mis)communication on the science of climate change

A survey of 4,800 news sources cited in fourteen newspapers provides a cross-market assessment of newspaper accuracy and the effect of errors on newspaper credibility. Sources found errors in 61% o...

Accuracy Matters: A Cross-Market Assessment of Newspaper Error and Credibility

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of blogging in the news sphere. If blogs represent a genuinely new breed of news provision, then they should adhere to some of the founding principles of mainstream news and journalism. A key principle in this respect is news credibitility.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a review of recent literature about news blogging and assesses whether news blogs manifest many of the core attributes of mainstream news and journalism. The review considers the attributes that have previously been identified as defining good quality news and competent journalism and then applies some of these principles to “news” blogging.Findings – There is no doubt that blogs have emerged as news sources of increasing significance and there have been occasions when they can be influential in setting news agendas. The essential qualities of credibitiltiy and capturing public trust in the news sphere, however, often depends upon the established reputation ...

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Blogs, news and credibility

This case study examines self-efficacy theory as a prescriptive model for helping journalism and mass communication students acquire the skills and confidence they need to learn and apply research methods. Journalism students enrolled in a graduate research methods class widely reported high math anxiety. But students attending optional classes designed to nurture mathematics self-efficacy showed significant improvement in fundamental math skills, overcoming a performance gap with other students in the course. Strategies are proposed for applying self-efficacy theory to research methods instruction.

Self-Efficacy Theory: A Prescriptive Model for Teaching Research Methods:

Research on newspaper accuracy has shown that news sources contend that about half the newspaper articles citing them contain at least one mistake^—usually a misquote, omission or distorted emphasis. But, most ofthe half dozen studies which examined errors in newspapers excluded the reporter from the analysis, concentrating almost entirely on the perceptions of news sources. One study which did look at reporter response found that a reporter's focusing on a particular element of a story, considered an \"extremely newsworthy angle\" by the reporter, can be considered an error of overemphasis by the source.^ Reporter-source disagreement over such things as story angle and even whether the reporter considers a source-perceived error to actually be an error has been neglected in past research. This investigation was designed to look at reporter perceptions of error, as well as source perceptions, and to determine some of the causes of error in newspaper stories. The study examines whether error varies by reporter experience, by deadline, and by type of content or length. Although reporter views are generally not known, the number of stories containing error, according to sources in five major source accuracy studies dating from the 1930s, ranges from 40% to 60% of all locally produced news items.^ The perceived rate of error in these five studies ranges from three to six mistakes in every four stories. Between half and two-thirds of these sourceperceived errors are judgmental determinations, depending on how misquotes are classified. Berry* listed subjective errors as including omissions, distortions of

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Newspaper Errors: Reporters Dispute Most Source Claims:

Newspaper accuracy research typically focuses on sources, news constraints or on the reporter's mental state, generally providing only a cursory examination of the errors that prompted the research. The purpose of this article is to extend the limited research on error classification by examining inaccuracies as they relate to the ability of the source to control the flow of information and to source evaluation of the published account. A 1980 review of accuracy literature' cited fewer than 40 examinations of accuracy in nearly half a century and most of them focused on reader selection of news or on the writing processes of reporters. About half examined constraints or relationships among editors, reporters and sources. The six principal studies which tabulated source-perceived errors in newspapers' did so primarily to determine the amount of error or its relation to constraints on the news. Tabulating errors hasevolved into a 14-category news source classification of error—omissions, underemphasis, overemphasis, misquotes, faulty headlines, spellings, names, ages, other numbers, titles, addresses, other locations, time and dates. The six studies found that between 40% and 60% of all straight news articles are said by sources to contain one or more of these errors. Although there is some dispute about which errors fall into which of two groups,^ the accuracy research tends to examine the traditional 14 errors according to whether they are considered factual mistakes, which are termed objective errors, or mistakes of judgment, which are considered subjective errors. It has also been suggested that the objective errors have been defined too narrowly.*^

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Source Control and Evaluation of Newspaper Inaccuracies

This longitudinal study examined how four news magazines, The Economist from Great Britain, Mclean’s of Canada, and two American publications, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, portrayed climate change during six separate years, four years apart, a 20-year-period (1989-2009), focusing on what frames were used, did they change over time, and were their differences by publication. Major findings are that the publications did not differ from each other, but all four eventually eliminated the term “greenhouse effect” in favor of climate change to go along with global warming. The magazines also changed from their initial episodic, or isolated theme-oriented story structure to a broader, and more connected, thematic form. The dominant frame throughout the 20 years was political. The scientific frame diminished over time and the ecological-meteorological virtually disappeared.

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William A. Tillinghast

Papers

Newspaper Errors: Reporters Dispute Most Source Claims:

Source Control and Evaluation of Newspaper Inaccuracies

Climate Change in Four News Magazines: 1989-2009