Excerpts from The Elements of Journalism

By Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel

(selected and reproduced by Intikhab Amir)

The news is becoming less of a prepared lecture and more of an open-mike conversation, with all the pluses and minuses that implies.
P-xii

…. Objectivity as a unity of method rather than aim.
P-xiii

We need news to live our lives, protect ourselves, bond with each other, identify friends and enemies. Journalism is simply the system societies generate to supply this news. That is why we care about the character of the news and journalism we get: they influence the quality of our lives, our thoughts, and our culture.
P-2

Finally, the later Columbia University professor James Carey offered what many recalled as a summation: “The problem is that you see journalism disappearing inside the larger world of communications. What you yearn to do is recover journalism from that larger world.”
P-3

Journalism provides something unique to a culture: independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information that citizens require to be free. A journalism that is asked to provide something other than that subverts democratic culture. This is what happens when governments control the news, as in Natzi Germany or the Soviet Union.
P-3

Something akin to this may be taking root in the United States in a more purely commercial form, as when news outlets owned by larger corporations are used to promote their conglomerate parent’s products, to engage in subtle lobbying or corporate rivalry, or are intermingled with advertising to boost profits. The issue isn’t just the loss of journalism. At stake is whether, as citizens, we have access to the independent information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves.
P-3

Unless we can grasp and reclaim the theory of free press, journalists risk allowing their profession to disappear. In that sense, the crisis of our culture, and our journalism, is a crisis of conviction.
P-5

In the new century, one of the most profound questions for a democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.
P-7

Journalism evolves continually. At any given moment, one can point to trends of improvement and disorientation simultaneously.
P-7

The solution will be found the same way that athletes perfect performance: in the repetition of doing, until these elements become second nature. This is what will breed clarity of purpose, confidence of execution, and public respect.
P-7

Journalism was for building community. Journalism was for citizenship. Journalism was for democracy. And as Czech president Vaclav Havel told a group of journalists gathered in Prague in 1991, journalism was for taking back the language from a government that had subverted it with propaganda that undermined freedom of thought itself.
P-11

The purpose of journalism is not defined by technology, nor by journalists, or the techniques they employ. As we will show, the principles and purpose of journalism are defined by something more basic: the function news plays in the lives of people.
P-11

The news media serves as a watchdog, push people beyond complacency, and offer a voice to the forgotten.
P-12

“ perhaps in the end journalism simply means carrying or and amplifying the conversation of people themselves. The rise of the internet, blogs, and citizen journalism obviously makes that purpose seem more relevant.”
P-12

It is difficult, in looking back, even to separate the concept of journalism from the concept of creating community and later democracy. Journalism is so fundamental to that purpose that, as we will see, societies that want to suppress freedom must first suppress the press. They do not, interestingly, have to suppress capitalism. At its best, journalism reflects a subtle understanding of how citizens behave, an understanding that we call the Theory of the Interlocking Public.
P-12/13

With new technology, government is more likely to try to subvert the press by trying to discredit its integrity and dilute its influence. It has more tools to do that in the twenty-first century, creating pseudo-journalism in the form of faux news websites, video news releases, subsidies to “media personalities” willing to accept money to promote policy, and more. Government will inevitably also try to imitate citizen journalism as it evolves further. And the threat from government is compounded by a new danger that independent journalism may be dissolved in the solvent of commercial communication and synergistic self-promotion: corporatism.
P-13

Every generation creates its own journalism. But the purpose and the underlying elements of journalism are the same.
P-14

The goal is “to serve the general welfare by informing the people,” says the code of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the largest association of print newsroom managers in North America.
P-14/15

Whether one looks back over three hundred years, or even three thousand years, it is impossible to separate news from community and over time, even more specifically from democratic community.
P-15

This kind (blogs/etc) of high-tech interaction is a journalism that resembles conversation again, much like the original journalism that occurred in the publick houses and coffeehouses four hundred years ago. Seen in this light, journalism’s function is not fundamentally changed by digital age. The techniques may be different, but the underlying principles are the same.
P-21

Most people get their news from local television, a medium that largely ignores the process of governing.
P-21

The job of the news media is to give this more complex and dynamic public what it needs to sort out the truth for itself over time.
P-26

Political coverage that focuses on tactical considerations for the political junkie and leaves the merely interested and the uninterested behind is failing in the responsibilities of journalism. A journalism in which every story is aimed at the largest possible audience – all O.J. all the time – actually leaves most of the audience behind.
P-26

Television aimed at women eighteen to thirty four, or Generation X, or soccer moms, or football fans is likely to alienate larger numbers of the very group at which it is aimed. People are simply more complex than the categories and stereotypes we create for them.
P-27

We are seeing for the first time the rise of a market-based journalism increasingly divorced from the idea of civic responsibility.
P-27

The notion of freedom of the press is rooted in independence. Only a press free of government censors would tell the truth. In a modern context, that freedom was expanded to mean independence from other institutions as well – parties, advertisers, business, and more. The conglomeration of the news business threaten the survival of the press as an independent institution as journalism becomes a subsidiary inside large corporations more fundamentally grounded in other business purposes.
P-30

The third factor driving the new market journalism is globalization. As companies, especially, communication companies, become corporations without borders, the notion of citizenship and traditional community becomes in a commercial sense obsolete. Globalization changes the content these companies produce. It is one thing when Hollywood makes more action movies now because pyrotechnics require no translation and make more money in foreign sales. It is another to consider the implications for journalism of news decisions based on a similarly simplified set of cultural cues. The first reaction of globalization was to favor stories with iconic news vales – about celebrities, disasters, and tragedy – that play across borders both regional and national. These included the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the death of Princess Diana, or the plane crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.
P-31

But September 11 proved that globalization does not occur in a vacuum. The hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center introduced a steady diet of hard news stories of a different nature that transcended national borders: the train bombings in Madrid and London, the widespread protests over cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, and violence throughout the Middle East. While these were now distributed through a global media system, the coverage often had a strongly nationalist flavor. The coverage on Fox and CNN of these events is hardly the as on Al Jazeera.
P-31

The desire that information be truthful is elemental. Since news is the material that people use to learn and think about the world beyond themselves, the most important quality is that it be usable and reliable.
P-37

Truthfulness creates, in effect, the sense of security that grows from awareness and is at the essence of news.
P-37

As it disentangled itself from political control in the nineteenth century, journalism sought its first mass audience in part by relying on sensational crime, scandal, thrill seeking, and celebrity worship, but also by writing the news in plain language for regular people. The move away from party affiliation began with the New York Sun in the 1830s, and journalism gained new heights of popularity and sensation at the end of the century. These were the years f William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, and “Yellow Journalism”.
P-38

Journalists themselves have never been very clear about what they mean by truthfulness. Journalism by nature is reactive and practical rather than philosophical and introspective. The serious literature by journalists thinking through such issues is not rich, and what little there is, most journalists have not read. Theories of journalism are left to the academy, and many news people have historically devalued journalism education, arguing that the only place to learn is through osmosis on the job. As even highly respected TV journalist Ted Koppel once said, “Journalism schools are an absolute and total waste of time.”
P-40

Rather than defend our techniques and methods for finding truth, journalists have tended to deny that they exist.
P-41

On verification, originally, it was not the journalist who was imagined to be objective. It was his or her method. Today, however, in part because journalists have failed to articulate what the are doing, our contemporary understanding of objectivity is mostly confusion.
P-41

“Journalistic truth” is more than mere accuracy. It is a sorting out process that takes place between the initial story and the interaction among the public, newsmakers, and journalists. This first principle of journalism – its disinterested pursuit of truth – is ultimately what sets journalism apart from all other forms of communication. To understand this sorting-out process, it is important to remember that journalism exists in social context. Out of necessity, citizens and societies depend on accurate and reliable accounts of events. They develop procedures and processes to arrive at what might be called “functional truth”. Police track down and arrest suspects based on facts. Judges hold trials. Juries render verdicts of guilty or innocence. Industries are regulated, taxes are collected, laws are made. We teach our children rules, history, physics, and biology. All of these truths – even the laws of science – are subject to revision, but we operate by them in the meantime because they are necessary and they work.
P-41/42

This is what journalism is after – a practical or functional form of truth. It is not truth in the absolute or philosophical sense. It is not the truth of a chemical equation. Journalism can – and must – pursue the truths by which we can operate on a day-to-day basis.
P-42

“We don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect jurors to render fair verdicts, or teachers to teach honest lessons, or historians to write impartial history, scientists to perform unbiased research. Why should we set any lower goals for poor journalists,” Bill Keller, then managing editor of the New York Times told us. “Whether true objectivity is ever possible- I don’t think that is what we’re her for…. We strive for coverage that aims as much as possible to present the reader with enough information to make up his or her own mind. That’s is our fine ideal.”
P-42

A journalism built merely on accuracy fails to get us far enough.
P-42

“It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”
P-42

Accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built: context, interpretation, debate, and all of public communication. If the foundation is faulty, everything else is flawed. One of the risks of the new proliferation of outlets, talk programs, blogs, and interpretative reporting is that these forms have left verification behind. A debate between opponents arguing with false figures or purely on prejudice fails to inform. It only inflames. It takes the society nowhere.
P-43

The individual reporter may not be able to move much beyond a surface level of accuracy in a first story. But the first story builds to a second, in which the sources of news have responded to initial mistakes and missing elements, and the second story to third story, and so on. Context is added in each successive layer. In more important and complex stories, there are subsequent contributions on the editorial pages, discussions on the talk shows, in the op-ed opinions, viewpoints expressed on blogs and other Internet venues, and reactions in letters to the editor or calls t radio shows – the full range of public and private conversation. This practical truth is a protean thing that, like learning, grows like a stalactite in a cave, drop by drop, over time.
P-44

The search for truth becomes a conversation.
P-44

We understand truth as a goal – at best elusive – and still embrace it. We embrace it the same way as Albert Einstein did when he said of science that it was not about truth but about making what we know less false. For this is how life really is – we’re often striving and never fully achieving.
P-45

Historian Gordon Wood put it, “Historians may never see and present that truth wholly and finally, but some of them will come closer than others, be more nearly complete, more objective, more honest, in their written history, and we will know it, and have known it, when we see it.”
Those who have worked in news or in public life say much the same thing: getting news that comes closer to a complete version of truth has real consequences. In the first hour of an event, when being accurate if most difficult, accuracy is perhaps most important. It is during this time that public attitudes are formed, sometimes stubbornly, by the context within which the information is presented. Is it a threat to me? Is it good for me? Is it something I should be concerned about? The answer to these questions determines how carefully I follow a new event, how much verification of the facts I will look for.
P-45

Over the years, some journalists have suggested substitutes for truthfulness. Probably the tow most common substitutes are fairness and balance. Yet both, under scrutiny, are inadequate. Fairness is too abstract and, in the end, is more subjective than truth. Fair to whom? How do you test fairness? Truthfulness, for all its difficulties, at least can be tested.
P-46

Balance, also, is too subjective. Balancing a story by being fair to both sides may not be fair to the truth if both sides do not, in fact, have equal weight. Is global warming fact or fiction? The preponderance of scientists have argued for years that it exists, but press coverage has continued long past the time of the scientific debate to give equal weight to both sides to a story, how does one determine which side to honor? Balance, if it amounts to false balance, becomes distortion.
P-46

In the new media culture of continuous news, the news has become more piecemeal; sources are gaining power over journalists who cover them; varying standards of journalism are breaking down the gatekeeper function of the press; inexpensive, polarizing argument is overwhelming reporting; and the press is increasingly fixated on finding the ‘big story’, that will temporarily reassemble the now-fragmented mass audience.
P-46

These new characteristics called Mixed Media Culture (Internet, blogs, etc) are displacing the classic function of sorting out a true and reliable account of the day’s events. In the continuous news culture, journalists trying to shovel the latest information onto the air or the Web have little time to check things out. Often they are largely passing things along, creating what we have called a new journalism of assertion, which is overwhelming the old journalism of verification.
P-46

Another model of media in the form of talk radio and in some cable news and elsewhere – a journalism of affirmation, whose appeal is not in verifying the facts skeptically but in affirming the preconception of the audience.
P-47

On the Internet, too, websites that merely gather, often by machines using computer algorithms, are giving rise to yet a fourth model – a journalism of aggregation, which may or may not discriminate among rumor, fact, and speculation. That is for the user to sort out.
P-47

Ironically, finding the truth in some ways takes more work than it did precisely because there is so much information available. Call it the paradox of learning in the Information Age. When information is a commodity in over supply – when there is so much more input – knowledge becomes more difficult to acquire, not easier. One must process more information to set things in order. The knowledge acquired may be deeper and better, but it will likely also be more specialized.
P-48

What’s is more when the media become background noise, our capacity to focus is diminished. If Winston Churchill was correct that “ A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” greater technology has only speeded up the process, aiding truth and falsehood alike.
P-48

These factors help to explain why the new partisan journalism of our time, the journalism of affirmation, is even more appealing today for some audiences. It makes things easier. It is a way of achieving order in a more confusing world, without so much sifting and heavy lifting. It offers comfort. All the more, this situation adds to the challenge, and pushes the need for journalism that gets the facts right first.
P-48

Rather than rush to add context and interpretation, the press needs to concentrate on synthesis and verification. Sift out the rumor, the innuendo, the insignificant, and the spin, and concentrate on what is true and important about a story. Give citizens identifiable sources and verify the information, highlighting what is important to know and filtering out what is not.
P-49

Verification and synthesis become the backbone of the new journalist; their role is that of “sense maker,” as John Seeley Brown of Xerox PARC meant it.
P-49

In short, the need for truth is greater, not lesser, in the new century, for the likelihood of untruth has become so much more possible.
P-49

Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens.
P-53

Detachment from outside pressures could bleed into disengagement from the community.
P-57

After Vietnam and Watergate, and later the advent of 24-hour cable news, journalism became noticeably more subjective and judgmental. Coverage was focused more on mediating what public people were saying than simply reporting.
P-57

As journalism business became more difficult, managers began to refashion how they operated. In newspapers, that largely meant cutting costs, not investing more in the news to expand its appeal. In its place, the industry invested more in marketing.
P-60

One of the most basic techniques to create more newsroom accountability was an incentive program called Management By Objective, or MBO. The concept, pioneered in the 1950s by management guru Peter F. Drucker, is simple: by setting goals and attaching rewards for achieving them, a company can create a coherent system for both coordinating and monitoring what its executives are doing.
P-62

Rather than selling customers content, news-people are building a relationship with their audience based on their values, judgment, authority, courage, professionalism, and commitment to the community organization then rents to advertisers.
P-64

The news audience is a consumer, but it is an oversimplification and a confusion to call it a customer. The relationship is deeper than that and is distinct from that of the true business customer of journalism – the advertiser.
P-64

In short, the business relationship of journalism is different from traditional consumer marketing, and in some ways it is more complex. That is, it is a triangle. The audience is not the customer buying goods and services – the advertiser is. Yet the customer/advertiser has to be subordinate in that triangle to the third figure, the citizen.
P-64

Traditionally, journalists in the 20th century often talked about there being a firewall between news and business sides of the news companies. Between church (news) and state (the business side).
P-64

“Quality newspapers provide complete, thorough coverage of local, national and international news and features so that people can be fully informed, participate in civic life and just live a better life – from recipes to the actions of city council and the United Nations, Newspapers are the sole remaining mass medium in each local market, so they are essential in not only informing readers but also in creating a sense of cohesion with a community. No other medium or institution, including government, can play that role given the fragmentation of audiences that has occurred in all other forms of media.” (see the full text)
P-69

One of the keys is to be clear with audiences – clearer than in the past – about how news organizations operate.
P-73

Whatever approach a news organization takes, the question of allegiance is pivotal and usually is ignored or misunderstood. The reason it is so important, however, is precisely that the press has become so unpopular. What is often missed in considering the decline in public trust of the press is that, at bottom, this credibility crisis is about motive. As citizens, we do not expect perfection of our journalists – or even a journalism with every word spelled correctly. The problem is more fundamental.
P-75

Journalists like to think of themselves as the people’s surrogate, covering society’s waterfront in the public interest. Increasingly, however, the public does not believe them. People see sensationalism and exploitation, and they sense that journalists are in it for a buck, or personal fame, or perhaps worse, a kind of perverse joy in unhappiness,
P-75

To reconnect people with the news, and through the news to the large world, journalism must reestablish the allegiance to citizens that the news industry has mistakenly helped to subvert. Yet even this, ultimately, will not be enough. Truth and loyalty to citizens are only the first two steps in making journalism work.
P-75

The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.
P-79

The discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. Entertainment – and its cousin “infotainment” – focuses on what is most diverting. Propaganda selects facts or invents them to serve the real purpose: persuasion and manipulation. Fiction invents scenarios to get at a more personal impression of what it calls truth.
P-79

When critics, including many journalists, reject the notion of objectivity they usually do so on the grounds that no person can ever be objective. As Dan Gillmore, author of We the Media, wrote in a much circulated 2005 essay called “The End of Objectivity,” “ we are human. We have biases and backgrounds and a variety of conflicts that we bring to our jobs every day.” Gillmor was advocating that journalists drop the word objectivity and replace it with thoroughness, accurancy, fairness, and transparency.
P-81

The term (objectivity) began to appear as part of journalism early in the last century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconscious. The call for journalists to adopt objectivity was an appeal for them to develop a consistent method testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.
P-81/82

In the nineteenth century, journalists talked about something called realism rather than objectivity. This was the idea that if reporters simply dug out the facts and ordered them together, the truth would reveal itself rather naturally.
P-82

The solution, Lippmann argued, was for journalists to acquire more of “the scientific spirit…. There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment.” Lippman meant by this that journalism should aspire to “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact.”
P-82

In other words, the journalist is not objective, but his method can be. The key was in the discipline of the craft, not the aim.
P-83

In this original understanding of objectivity, neutrality is not a fundamental principle of journalism. It is merely a voice, or device, to persuade the audience of one’s accuracy or fairness.
P-83

Unity of method rather than aim, as Lippman put it more than eighty years earlier, is the one unity that can be assessed in a diverse culture. And that method relates to the gathering of information, not the style of presentation.
P-84

The public sphere here becomes an arena solely for polarized debate, not for compromise, consensus, and solution.
P-86

Facts have become a commodity, easily acquired, repackaged, and repurposed. In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, journalists now spend more time looking for something to add to the existing news, usually interpretation, than trying to independently discover and verify new facts.
P-86

“Journalism and science come from the same intellectual roots,” said Phil Meyer, University of North Carolina journalism professor, “from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enlightenment. The same thinking that led to the First Amendment”- the idea that out of a diversity of views we are more likely to know the truth – also “led to the scientific method…. I think this connection between journalism and science ought to restored to the extent that we can….I think we ought to emphasize objectivity of method. That’s what scientific method is – our humanity, or subjective impulses… directed toward deciding what to investigate by objective means.”
P-87

What would this journalism of objective method – rather than aim – look like? What should citizens expect from the press as a reasonable discipline of reporting? As we listened to and studied the thoughts of journalists, citizens, and others concerning the news, we began to see a core set of concepts that form the foundations of the discipline of verification. They are the intellectual principles of a science of reporting
1. Never add anything that was not there.
2. Never deceive the audience.
3. Be as transparent as possible about your method and motives.
4. Rely on your own original reporting.
5. Exercise humility.

P-89

Do Not Add
If a siren rang out during the taping of a TV story, and for dramatic effect it is moved from one scene to another, it has been added to that second place. What was once a fact becomes a fiction. P-90


Do Not Deceive
Never mislead the audience. Fooling people is a form of lying and it mocks the idea that journalism is committed to truthfulness. This principle is closely related to the first one. If you move the sound of the siren and do not tell audience, you are deceiving them. P-91
Transparency
This responsibility requires that journalists be as open and honest with audience as they can about what they know and what they don’t. How can you claim to be seeking to convey the truth if you’re not truthful with the audience in the first place? Reveal as much as possible about your sources and methods. How do you know what you know? Who are your sources? How direct is their knowledge? What biases might they have? Are there conflicting accounts? What don’t we know?
Naming the source will reveal to the audience the possible bias of the information – and may inhibit the source from deceiving as well.
Transparency also helps establish that the journalist has a public interest motive, the key to credibility. The lie, or the mistake, is in pretending omniscience, or claiming greater knowledge than we have.
The Spirit of Transparency first involves the journalist asking for each event, “What does my audience need to know to evaluate this information for itself?” This includes explaining as much as is practical about how the news organization got its information.
A second element of transparency involves answering the question, “Is there anything in our treatment of this that requires explanation, including any controversial decisions made about leaving something in or taking something out?” The question of motive and decision making is essential to rethinking the objectivity of the press.
A third element of the Spirit of Transparency involves something that runs contrary to what most journalists do. Journalists should acknowledge the question their stories are not answering. Traditionally, journalists were taught never to raise a question the story could not answer. Make stories seem airtight, even omniscient. Never appear unknowing. Write around the hole in the story.
P-92/93/94/95