essay on journalist

Free Journalism Essay Examples & Topics

A journalism essay is a type of paper that combines personal records and reports. Besides news and facts, it should contain a story. An angle that creates a unique narrative of the events you are describing is crucial. However, let’s start with the definition.

No matter how often people hear about journalism, they still might get confused about what it is. It is an act of informative writing about news stories. It can be digital and non-digital, print and non-print. Journalists strive to present information in an interesting way while staying true to the source.

If you have seen journalistic article examples, you know there are two types. News can cover “hard stories”, meaning world events and politics, and “softer stories” about celebrities, science, etc. Journalism as a profession is multidimensional in nature. It can include texts, photography, interviews, and more. Content varies between different categories, such as literary reportage and yellow journalism.

Here, our experts have combined tips about how to write a good journalistic essay. We gathered information that will be useful for starting research and completing it. Moreover, you will find journalism topic ideas. You can use them for inspiration or to practice. Finally, underneath the article you will discover some stellar journalistic essay examples written by other students.

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

In this section, you’ll find tips that can help you start writing. However, nothing is more vital than choosing an appropriate journalism essay topic beforehand.

Before picking the subject, ask yourself several questions:

• What themes do I want to explore?
• What will my story be about?
• What points do I want to make?
• What is my attitude towards the topic?

Answering these questions can allow you to improve your storytelling. What’s more, look for one that can allow you to write intimately. Personal touches and views will influence your paper immensely. With all that in mind, try our free topic generator to get more ideas.

To write an outstanding journalistic essay, you should try these tips:

• Gather facts and references first.

Collect all the information you may need for your paper. For a story in journalism, you may be required to interview people or visit a location. Most importantly, you’ll have to research online. Also, you can read stories written by other people on the Internet to gain a better perspective.

• Organize your ideas and arguments before writing.

A good story is always organized. The structure of a journalistic should represent an inverted pyramid. The most crucial facts appear on the top, less important details go further, and extra information stays on the bottom. You can reflect in your writing. Organize all your arguments before writing, sticking to a logical structure.

• Rely on storytelling.

The story should become the main focus of your work. The writing should serve it and grab the reader’s attention from the start. Think about storytelling techniques that can keep your reader interested till the very end.

• Work on your style and language.

Another essential technique to keep your work both logical and engaging is to write in short sentences. If you search for any journalistic writing examples, you’ll see that’s how journalists write. The main goal of your paper is to deliver a clear and strong message. So, working on your style is going to help you further this agenda.

21 Journalism Essay Topics

There are so many journalism topics you can write about, and it can sometimes be challenging to stick to one. If you are still unsure what to describe and explore in your paper, this section can help you make this choice.

Here are some original journalism topic ideas:

• The way race impacts the news in different states in the US.
• Super Bowl as a phenomenon is more important than the game.
• Why people refuse to believe in climate change.
• How have sports changed international politics?
• Is creative writing in high school an essential subject?
• How vital is transparency in broadcast journalism?
• Is media responsible for the Covid-19 crisis in the US?
• Journalism as a profession can help change the world.
• A privacy issue between British journalism and the royal family.
• Are social media and blogging the future of journalism?
• The role of religion and race in Hollywood.
• Why has the Chinese economy risen so much over the past decade?
• How can media help in battling poverty in developing countries?
• Can music be used as political propaganda?
• Connections between social media and depression.
• Should mobile phones be allowed in educational institutions?
• Has the Internet impacted the way how newspapers and articles are written?
• Should fake news be banned on social media?
• What are the biggest challenges of investigative journalism?
• Can reality television be viewed as a type of journalism?
• How can athletes impact social awareness?

Thank you for reading the article! We hope you will find it helpful. Do not hesitate to share this article or a list of journalism essay examples with others. Good luck with your assignment!

266 Best Essay Examples on Journalism

Role of ict in communication essay.

• Words: 1962

Traditional Media vs. New Media

• Words: 1393

Successful Interview Skills

Freedom of speech in social media essay.

• Words: 1799

Importance of Investigative Journalism in Today’s World

• Words: 2513

Social Media Replacing Traditional Journalism

• Words: 2390

Analysis of the Magazine Cover

• Words: 1064

David Foster Wallace on 9/11, as Seen from the Midwest

The global media is all about money and profit making.

• Words: 2071

The Efforts and Activities of the Paparazzi are Protected by the Freedom of the Press Clause of the Constitution

• Words: 2824

War and Violence Metaphors in Newspaper Headlines

Print publishing vs. digital media.

• Words: 1930

“Is True Friendship Dying Away?” and “The Price We Pay”

Ann patchett: my year of no shopping, media misrepresentation.

• Words: 1138

Research Project: Interview Analysis

Do people believe everything in the internet.

• Words: 1367

Ethics in Entertainment Journalism

• Words: 5591

Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

• Words: 1253

Media Systems Dependency Theory

• Words: 2740

Plagiarism in the Real World: Jayson Blair and the New York Times

Journalism: media law and ethics.

• Words: 2625

The Elements of Journalism by Kovach & Rosenstiel

Media industry structural changes.

• Words: 3425

Print media is dead

• Words: 3601

News-Gathering and Production Practices

• Words: 1174

The Analysis of the Interview With Lizzo by Terry Gross

Journalism of the future and its improvements, ethical dilemma in journalism.

• Words: 1715

The Place and Importance of the Journalist in the War

• Words: 1009

Journalism Ethical Dilemma: Moral Discourse

• Words: 1108

Essential Foundations of the Public Relations

• Words: 3595

Video and Audio Interviews vs. Personal Interviews

• Words: 3829

Media Law and Ethics: Integrity in Media Broadcasting

• Words: 2257

“Dogs and Monsters” by Stanley Coren

Print media versus digital.

• Words: 2294

Impact of Online Social Media in Conflict Situations

• Words: 1388

Bennett News Model, Its Limitations and Challenges

• Words: 1114

Beyond Description: Writing Beneath the Surface

Internet impact on journalism: print vs. online newspapers.

• Words: 1127

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Play of Dreaming

Unbelievable and fake news: how to convince people, media in development communication, “understanding media and culture” by jack lule.

• Words: 1749

Advertisement From Cosmopolitan

• Words: 1274

Journalism: Visual Media’s Role in News

Journalism’s journey: the key principles, regulatory measures in chinese journalism, evolving journalism ethics in digital era, journal editors’ role regarding social justice issues, ethics of journalism: s.a.d model analysis, diversity in journalism practice, journalism as industrial art: the problem of journalism history, a journalist crisis in slovakia.

• Words: 1446

Reem N.: An Iconic Versatile Journalist

Business-journalism relations: the present realities.

• Words: 1105

Journalistic Accountability and Financial Crash

• Words: 3705

Importance of Ethics in Journalism

• Words: 1144

The Role of Journalism in Exposing Scandals in Ireland

• Words: 2225

Why Google Was Wrong Firing James Damore

• Words: 1119

Article’s Comparison: Genre, Target Audience, and Motivation

Cbs news unemployment report and its future impression, broadcasting authority act 1960 for journalism in ireland.

• Words: 1173

Sade Moore, Journalist’s Biography Issues

Reflection of an interview with the mass media worker, grammar of “digging deeper” article by arnold, alysia steele about interviewing, accident reporting and absence of humanity in media, writing methods in by zinczenko’s article “don’t blame the eater”, the us stand-up commediane williiam “bill” maher jr..

• Words: 3207

Campaigning Journalism – Facts or Specific Interests

• Words: 1093

Nicholas Carr’s Article: Position Statement

• Words: 1385

Kara Miller: Has COVID Made Us Too Clean?

Online vs. print journalism: what is more beneficial, different types of interview, newspaper press apogee in the early 20th century.

• Words: 1913

“The Times Answers Spitzer Scandal Questions” and “Ashley Alexandra Dupree”

• Words: 1676

Critiquing Editorials in The Olympian and Tribune Papers

• Words: 1210

Volcanic Eruption in the “Threatened” Footage

Interview with a financier, the ethics of photo and video journalism, law, media and communication.

• Words: 2845

Financial Interview by Alexander Morrisey

Biases and sources in newspaper articles about the coronavirus, good riddance to the media dinosaurs, news channel’s priorities: fox news special report, designing an influential interview.

• Words: 2591

Interview With Harib Alsheihi

• Words: 1346

US Attorney’s Office Press Release on Birmingham Crimes

The publications on irrodl: review, blog response: developing different kinds of narratives, business knowledge management about journal ranking and it conferences, pestel review of canvas magazine, service encounter: customers interview, ‘the beach of dead whales’ by tatalo alamu: a response to editorial, visual rhetoric: the iraq war and torture of abu ghraib prisoners.

• Words: 1097

Journalism. Commercial Pressures vs. Fourth Estate Model

• Words: 1949

Journalism. Woman Assaulted by Neighbor Dies

Fabricating facts in a daily newspaper, past newspaper articles analysis: the new york times.

• Words: 1126

Journalism: News Access and Source Power

• Words: 2858

The Diversity of Human Experience: An Interview

Assessing the newsworthiness of homicide events, newspapers: commercialism and information.

• Words: 1547

Printed Publications’ Response to Online News

• Words: 2046

“Love Makes You Real” by Gardner and Knowles

• Words: 1535

Persuasive Argument About Journalistic Ethics

Dan rather’s involvement in the “dead air” event, the role of journalists and public relations professionals in information sphere.

• Words: 1625

The Interview With the Manager of Motorola Inc.

Media and communication in journalism firms.

• Words: 1124

MillerCoors Saves While Going Green

The use of reliable sources is crucial for journalism, how do journalists stay honest and not lose confidence, reporter’s privilege controversy.

• Words: 2237

Journalism. Australian Broadcasting Corporation

• Words: 2069

Time Out Group Limited: Research About Magazine

• Words: 1753

The Breakdown of Paparazzi Work

• Words: 1654

William Randolph Hearst’s Personal, Professional and Political Life

• Words: 1082

Quality of the News Analysis

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Does Journalism Have a Future?

By Jill Lepore

The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we’d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car’s way-back with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother’s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver’s seat. “Watch out for the dog!” he’d holler between draws on his pipe. “Inside the screen door!” “Mailbox!” As the car crept along, never stopping, we’d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, into unexpected snowmen. “Back porch!” “Money under the mat!” He kept a list, scrawled on the back of an envelope, taped to the dashboard: the Accounts. “They owe three weeks!” He didn’t need to remind us. We knew each Doberman and every debt. We’d deliver our papers—Worcester Sunday Telegrams —and then run back to the car and scramble onto the tailgate, dropping the coins we’d collected into empty Briggs tobacco tins as we bumped along to the next turn, the newspaper route our Sabbath.

The Worcester Sunday Telegram was founded in 1884, when a telegram meant something fast. Two years later, it became a daily. It was never a great paper but it was always a pretty good paper: useful, gossipy, and resolute. It cultivated talent. The poet Stanley Kunitz was a staff writer for the Telegram in the nineteen-twenties. The New York Times reporter Douglas Kneeland, who covered Kent State and Charles Manson, began his career there in the nineteen-fifties. Joe McGinniss reported for the Telegram in the nineteen-sixties before writing “The Selling of the President.” From bushy-bearded nineteenth-century politicians to baby-faced George W. Bush, the paper was steadfastly Republican, if mainly concerned with scandals and mustachioed villains close to home: overdue repairs to the main branch of the public library, police raids on illegal betting establishments—“ Worcester Dog Chases Worcester Cat Over Worcester Fence ,” as the old Washington press-corps joke about a typical headline in a local paper goes. Its pages rolled off giant, thrumming presses in a four-story building that overlooked City Hall the way every city paper used to look out over every city hall, the Bat-Signal over Gotham.

Most newspapers like that haven’t lasted. Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.” And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News , reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.

Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that’s risen from the ashes of the dead news. “We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,” Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian , writes in “ Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now .” “There are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,” Jill Abramson , a former executive editor of the New York Times , writes in “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse.

First came conglomeration. Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, used to have four dailies: the Telegram , in the morning, and the Gazette , in the evening (under the same ownership), the Spy , and the Post . Now it has one. The last great laying waste to American newspapers came in the early decades of the twentieth century, mainly owing to (a) radio and (b) the Depression; the number of dailies fell from 2,042 in 1920 to 1,754 in 1944, leaving 1,103 cities with only one paper. Newspaper circulation rose between 1940 and 1990, but likely only because more people were reading fewer papers, and, as A. J. Liebling once observed, nothing is crummier than a one-paper town. In 1949, after yet another New York daily closed its doors, Liebling predicted, “If the trend continues, New York will be a one- or two-paper town by about 1975.” He wasn’t that far off. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, as Christopher B. Daly reports in “ Covering America: A Narrative History of the Nation’s Journalism ,” “the big kept getting bigger.” Conglomeration can be good for business, but it has generally been bad for journalism. Media companies that want to get bigger tend to swallow up other media companies, suppressing competition and taking on debt, which makes publishers cowards. In 1986, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle bought the Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette , and, three years later, right about when Time and Warner became Time Warner, the Telegram and the Gazette became the Telegram & Gazette , or the T&G , smaller fries but the same potato.

Next came the dot-coms. Craigslist went online in the Bay Area in 1996 and spread across the continent like a weed, choking off local newspapers’ most reliable source of revenue: classified ads. The T&G tried to hold on to its classified-advertising section by wading into the shallow waters of the Internet, at telegram.com, where it was called, acronymically, and not a little desperately, “ TANGO !” Then began yet another round of corporate buyouts, deeply leveraged deals conducted by executives answerable to stockholders seeking higher dividends, not better papers. In 1999, the New York Times Company bought the T&G for nearly three hundred million dollars. By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned. And only one out of every hundred American cities that had a daily newspaper was anything other than a one-paper town.

Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts—online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free. News aggregators also drew display advertisers away from print; Facebook and Google swallowed advertising accounts whole. Big papers found ways to adapt; smaller papers mainly folded. Between 1994 and 2016, years when the population of Worcester County rose by more than a hundred thousand, daily home delivery of the T&G declined from more than a hundred and twenty thousand to barely thirty thousand. In one year alone, circulation fell by twenty-nine per cent. In 2012, after another round of layoffs, the T&G left its building, its much reduced staff small enough to fit into two floors of an office building nearby. The next year, the owner of the Boston Red Sox bought the newspaper, along with the Boston Globe , from the New York Times Company for seventy million dollars, only to unload the T&G less than a year later, for seventeen million dollars, to Halifax Media Group, which held it for only half a year before Halifax itself was bought, flea-market style, by an entity that calls itself, unironically, the New Media Investment Group.

The numbers mask an uglier story. In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited—has changed, including in ways that have made possible the rise of fake news, and not only because of mergers and acquisitions, and corporate ownership, and job losses, and Google Search, and Facebook and BuzzFeed . There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?

The daily newspaper is the taproot of modern journalism. Dailies mainly date to the eighteen-thirties, the decade in which the word “journalism” was coined, meaning daily reporting, the jour in journalism. Early dailies depended on subscribers to pay the bills. The press was partisan, readers were voters, and the news was meant to persuade (and voter turnout was high). But by 1900 advertising made up more than two-thirds of the revenue at most of the nation’s eighteen thousand newspapers, and readers were consumers (and voter turnout began its long fall). “The newspaper is not a missionary or a charitable institution, but a business that collects and publishes news which the people want and are willing to buy,” one Missouri editor said in 1892. Newspapers stopped rousing the rabble so much because businesses wanted readers, no matter their politics. “There is a sentiment gaining ground to the effect that the public wants its politics ‘straight,’ ” a journalist wrote the following year. Reporters pledged themselves to “facts, facts, and more facts,” and, as the press got less partisan and more ad-based, newspapers sorted themselves out not by their readers’ political leanings but by their incomes. If you had a lot of money to spend, you read the St. Paul Pioneer Press; if you didn’t have very much, you read the St. Paul Dispatch .

Unsurprisingly, critics soon began writing big books, usually indictments, about the relationship between business and journalism. “When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda?” Upton Sinclair asked on the jacket of “ The Brass Check ,” in 1919. In “ The Disappearing Daily ,” in 1944, Oswald Garrison Villard mourned “what was once a profession but is now a business.” The big book that inspired Jill Abramson to become a journalist was David Halberstam’s “ The Powers That Be ,” from 1979, a history of the rise of the modern, corporate-based media in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times , took up his story more or less where Villard left off. He began with F.D.R. and CBS radio; added the Los Angeles Times , Time Inc., and CBS television; and reached his story’s climax with the Washington Post and the New York Times and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971.

Halberstam argued that between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies radio and television brought a new immediacy to reporting, while the resources provided by corporate owners and the demands made by an increasingly sophisticated national audience led to harder-hitting, investigative, adversarial reporting, the kind that could end a war and bring down a President. Richard Rovere summed it up best: “What The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time and CBS have in common is that, under pressures generated internally and externally, they moved from venality or parochialism or mediocrity or all three to something approaching journalistic excellence and responsibility.” That move came at a price. “Watergate, like Vietnam, had obscured one of the central new facts about the role of journalism in America,” Halberstam wrote. “Only very rich, very powerful corporate institutions like these had the impact, the reach, and above all the resources to challenge the President of the United States.”

Link copied

There’s reach, and then there’s reach. When I was growing up, in the nineteen-seventies, nobody I knew read the New York Times , the Washington Post , or the Wall Street Journal . Nobody I knew even read the Boston Globe , a paper that used to have a rule that no piece should ever be so critical of anyone that its “writer could not shake hands the next day with the man about whom he had written.” After journalism put up its dukes, my father only ever referred to the Globe as “that Communist rag,” not least because, in 1967, it became the first major paper in the United States to come out against the Vietnam War.

The view of the new journalism held by people like my father escaped Halberstam’s notice. In 1969, Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, delivered a speech drafted by the Nixon aide Pat Buchanan accusing the press of liberal bias. It’s “good politics for us to kick the press around,” Nixon is said to have told his staff. The press, Agnew said, represents “a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history,” consisting of men who “read the same newspapers” and “talk constantly to one another.” How dare they. Halberstam waved this aside as so much P.R. hooey, but, as has since become clear, Agnew reached a ready audience, especially in houses like mine.

Spiro who? “The press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1970, but “no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew’s personality, nor the impact of his speeches.” No scholar of journalism can afford to ignore Agnew anymore. In “ On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News ,” the historian Matthew Pressman argues that any understanding of the crisis of journalism in the twenty-first century has to begin by vanquishing the ghost of Spiro T. Agnew.

For Pressman, the pivotal period for the modern newsroom is what Abramson calls “Halberstam’s Golden Age,” between 1960 and 1980, and its signal feature was the adoption not of a liberal bias but of liberal values: “Interpretation replaced transmission, and adversarialism replaced deference.” In 1960, nine out of every ten articles in the Times about the Presidential election were descriptive; by 1976, more than half were interpretative. This turn was partly a consequence of television—people who simply wanted to find out what happened could watch television, so newspapers had to offer something else—and partly a consequence of McCarthyism . “The rise of McCarthy has compelled newspapers of integrity to develop a form of reporting which puts into context what men like McCarthy have to say,” the radio commentator Elmer Davis said in 1953. Five years later, the Times added “News Analysis” as a story category. “Once upon a time, news stories were like tape recorders,” the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors commented in 1963. “No more. A whole generation of events had taught us better—Hitler and Goebbels, Stalin and McCarthy, automation and analog computers and missiles.”

These changes weren’t ideologically driven, Pressman insists, but they had ideological consequences. At the start, leading conservatives approved. “To keep a reporter’s prejudices out of a story is commendable,” Irving Kristol wrote in 1967. “To keep his judgment out of a story is to guarantee that the truth will be emasculated.” After the Times and the Post published the Pentagon Papers, Kristol changed his spots. Journalists, he complained in 1972, were now “engaged in a perpetual confrontation with the social and political order (the ‘establishment,’ as they say).” By 1975, after Watergate, Kristol was insisting that “most journalists today . . . are ‘liberals.’ ” With that, the conservative attack on the press was off and running, all the way to Trumpism—“the failing New York Times,” “CNN is fake news,” the press is “the true enemy of the people”—and, in a revolution-devouring-its-elders sort of way, the shutting down of William Kristol’s Weekly Standard , in December. “The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard . . . is flat broke and out of business,” Trump tweeted. “May it rest in peace!”

What McCarthy and television were for journalism in the nineteen-fifties, Trump and social media would be in the twenty-tens: license to change the rules. Halberstam’s Golden Age, or what he called “journalism’s high-water mark,” ended about 1980. Abramson’s analysis in “Merchants of Truth” begins with journalism’s low-water mark, in 2007, the year after Facebook launched its News Feed, “the year everything began to fall apart.”

“ Merchants of Truth ” isn’t just inspired by “The Powers That Be”; it’s modelled on it. Abramson’s book follows Halberstam’s structure and mimics its style, chronicling the history of a handful of nationally prominent media organizations—in her case, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Times , and the Washington Post —in alternating chapters that are driven by character sketches and reported scenes. The book is saturated with a lot of gossip and glitz, including details about the restaurants the powers that be frequent, and what they wear (“Sulzberger”—the Times ’ publisher—“dressed in suits from Bloomingdale’s, stylish without being ostentatiously bespoke, and wore suspenders before they went out of fashion”), alongside crucial insights about structural transformations, like how Web and social-media publishing “unbundled” the newspaper, so that readers who used to find a fat newspaper on their front porch could, on their phones, look, instead, at only one story. “Each individual article now lived on its own page, where it had a unique URL and could be shared, and spread virally,” Abramson observes. “This put stories, rather than papers, in competition with one another.”

This history is a chronicle of missed opportunities, missteps, and lessons learned the hard way. As long ago as 1992, an internal report at the Washington Post urged the mounting of an “electronic product”: “The Post ought to be in the forefront of this.” Early on, the Guardian started a New Media lab, which struck a lot of people as frivolous, Rusbridger writes, because, at the time, “only 3 per cent of households owned a PC and a modem,” a situation not unlike that at the Guardian’s own offices, where “it was rumored that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet.” A 1996 business plan for the Guardian concluded that the priority was print, and the London Times editor Simon Jenkins predicted, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media.” In 2005, the Post lost a chance at a ten-per-cent investment in Facebook, whose returns, as Abramson points out, would have floated the newspaper for decades. The C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, Don Graham, and Mark Zuckerberg shook hands over the deal, making a verbal contract, but, when Zuckerberg weaseled out of it to take a better offer, Graham, out of kindness to a young fella just starting out, simply let him walk away. The next year, the Post shrugged off a proposal from two of its star political reporters to start a spinoff Web site; they went on to found Politico. The Times , Abramson writes, declined an early chance to invest in Google, and was left to throw the kitchen sink at its failing business model, including adding a Thursday Style section to attract more high-end advertising revenue. Bill Keller, then the newspaper’s editor, said, “If luxury porn is what saves the Baghdad bureau, so be it.”

More alarming than what the Times and the Post failed to do was how so much of what they did do was determined less by their own editors than by executives at Facebook and BuzzFeed. If journalism has been reinvented during the past two decades, it has, in the main, been reinvented not by reporters and editors but by tech companies, in a sequence of events that, in Abramson’s harrowing telling, resemble a series of puerile stunts more than acts of public service.

Who even are these people? “Merchants of Truth” has been charged with factual errors, including by people Abramson interviewed, especially younger journalists. She can also be maddeningly condescending. She doffs her cap at Sulzberger, with his natty suspenders, but dismisses younger reporters at places like Vice as notable mainly for being “impossibly hip, with interesting hair.” This is distracting, and too bad, because there is a changing of the guard worth noting, and it’s not incidental: it’s critical. All the way through to the nineteen-eighties, all sorts of journalists, including magazine, radio, and television reporters, got their start working on daily papers, learning the ropes and the rules. Rusbridger started out in 1976 as a reporter at the Cambridge Evening News , which covered stories that included a petition about a pedestrian crossing and a root vegetable that looked like Winston Churchill. In the U.K., a reporter who wanted to go to Fleet Street had first to work for three years on a provincial newspaper, pounding the pavement. Much the same applied in the U.S., where a cub reporter did time at the Des Moines Register , or the Worcester Telegram , before moving up to the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Beat reporting, however, is not the backstory of the people who, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, built the New Media.

Jonah Peretti started out soaking up postmodern theory at U.C. Santa Cruz in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and later published a scholarly journal article about the scrambled, disjointed, and incoherent way of thinking produced by accelerated visual experiences under late capitalism. Or something like that. Imagine an article written by that American Studies professor in Don DeLillo’s “ White Noise .” Peretti thought that watching a lot of MTV can mess with your head—“The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewer’s sense of temporal continuity”—leaving you confused, stupid, and lonely. “Capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos,” Peretti wrote. “The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.” Voilà, a business plan!

Peretti’s career in viral content began in 2001, with a prank involving e-mail and Nike sneakers while he was a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab. (Peretti ordered custom sneakers embroidered with the word “sweatshop” and then circulated Nike’s reply.) In 2005, a year the New York Times Company laid off five hundred employees and the Post began paying people to retire early, Peretti joined Andrew Breitbart, a Matt Drudge acolyte, and Ken Lerer, a former P.R. guy at AOL Time Warner, in helping Arianna Huffington, a millionaire and a former anti-feminist polemicist, launch the Huffington Post. Peretti was in charge of innovations that included a click-o-meter. Within a couple of years, the Huffington Post had more Web traffic than the Los Angeles Times , the Washington Post , and the Wall Street Journal . Its business was banditry. Abramson writes that when the Times published a deeply reported exclusive story about WikiLeaks, which took months of investigative work and a great deal of money, the Huffington Post published its own version of the story, using the same headline—and beat out the Times story in Google rankings. “We were learning that the internet behaved like a clattering of jackdaws,” Rusbridger writes. “Nothing remained exclusive for more than two minutes.”

Pretty soon, there were jackdaws all over the place, with their schizophrenic late-capitalist accelerated signifiers. Breitbart left the Huffington Post and started Breitbart News around the same time that Peretti left to focus on his own company, Contagious Media, from which he launched BuzzFeed, where he tested the limits of virality with offerings like the seven best links about gay penguins and “YouTube Porn Hacks.” He explained his methods in a pitch to venture capitalists: “Raw buzz is automatically published the moment it is detected by our algorithm,” and “the future of the industry is advertising as content.”

Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006. In 2008, Peretti mused on Facebook, “Thinking about the economics of the news business.” The company added its Like button in 2009. Peretti set likability as BuzzFeed’s goal, and, to perfect the instruments for measuring it, he enlisted partners, including the Times and the Guardian , to share their data with him in exchange for his reports on their metrics. Lists were liked. Hating people was liked. And it turned out that news, which is full of people who hate other people, can be crammed into lists.

Chartbeat, a “content intelligence” company founded in 2009, launched a feature called Newsbeat in 2011. Chartbeat offers real-time Web analytics, displaying a constantly updated report on Web traffic that tells editors what stories people are reading and what stories they’re skipping. The Post winnowed out reporters based on their Chartbeat numbers. At the offices of Gawker, the Chartbeat dashboard was displayed on a giant screen.

In 2011, Peretti launched BuzzFeed News, hiring a thirty-five-year-old Politico journalist, Ben Smith, as its editor-in-chief. Smith asked for a “scoop-a-day” from his reporters, who, he told Abramson, had little interest in the rules of journalism: “They didn’t even know what rules they were breaking.” In 2012, BuzzFeed introduced three new one-click ways for readers to respond to stories, beyond “liking” them—LOL, OMG, and WTF—and ran lists like “10 Reasons Everyone Should Be Furious About Trayvon Martin’s Murder,” in which, as Abramson explains, BuzzFeed “simply lifted what it needed from reports published elsewhere, repackaged the information, and presented it in a way that emphasized sentiment and celebrity.” BuzzFeed makes a distinction between BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News, just as newspapers and magazines draw distinctions between their print and their digital editions. These distinctions are lost on most readers. BuzzFeed News covered the Trayvon Martin story, but its information, like BuzzFeed’s, came from Reuters and the Associated Press.

Even as news organizations were pruning reporters and editors, Facebook was pruning its users’ news, with the commercially appealing but ethically indefensible idea that people should see only the news they want to see. In 2013, Silicon Valley began reading its own online newspaper, the Information, its high-priced subscription peddled to the information élite, following the motto “Quality stories breed quality subscribers.” Facebook’s goal, Zuckerberg explained in 2014, was to “build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” Ripples at Facebook create tsunamis in newsrooms. The ambitious news site Mic relied on Facebook to reach an audience through a video program called Mic Dispatch, on Facebook Watch; last fall, after Facebook suggested that it would drop the program, Mic collapsed. Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm—tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons—news organizations drown in the undertow. An automated Facebook feature called Trending Topics, introduced in 2014, turned out to mainly identify junk as trends, and so “news curators,” who tended to be recent college graduates, were given a new, manual mandate, “massage the algorithm,” which meant deciding, themselves, which stories mattered. The fake news that roiled the 2016 election? A lot of that was stuff on Trending Topics. (Last year, Facebook discontinued the feature.)

BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed’s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors, and it began producing some very good and very serious reporting, real news having become something of a luxury good. By 2014, BuzzFeed employed a hundred and fifty journalists, including many foreign correspondents. It was obsessed with Donald Trump’s rumored Presidential bid, and followed him on what it called the “fake campaign trail” as early as January, 2014. “It used to be the New York Times , now it’s BuzzFeed,” Trump said, wistfully. “The world has changed.” At the time, Steve Bannon was stumping for Trump on Breitbart. Left or right, a Trump Presidency was just the sort of story that could rack up the LOLs, OMGs, and WTFs. It still is.

In March, 2014, the Times produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in “the art and science of getting our journalism to readers,” a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed purged from its Web site more than four thousand of its early stories. “It’s stuff made at a time when people were really not thinking of themselves as doing journalism,” Ben Smith explained. Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates.

The Times remains unrivalled. It staffs bureaus all over the globe and sends reporters to some of the world’s most dangerous places. It has more than a dozen reporters in China alone. Nevertheless, BuzzFeed News became more like the Times , and the Times became more like BuzzFeed, because readers, as Chartbeat announced on its endlessly flickering dashboards, wanted lists, and luxury porn, and people to hate.

The Guardian , founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821, has been held by a philanthropic trust since 1936, which somewhat insulates it from market forces, just as Jeff Bezos’s ownership now does something similar for the Post . By investing in digital-readership research from the time Rusbridger took charge, in 1995, the Guardian became, for a while, the online market leader in the U.K. By 2006, two-thirds of its digital readers were outside the U.K. In 2007, the Guardian undertook what Rusbridger calls “the Great Integration,” pulling its Web and print parts together into a single news organization, with the same editorial management. It also developed a theory about the relationship between print and digital, deciding, in 2011, to be a “digital-first organization” and to “make print a slower, more reflective read which would not aspire to cover the entire waterfront in news.”

Rusbridger explains, with a palpable grief, his dawning realization that the rise of social media meant that “chaotic information was free: good information was expensive,” which meant, in turn, that “good information was increasingly for smaller elites” and that “it was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.” He takes these circumstances as something of a dare: “Our generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.”

Has that challenge been met? The Guardian’s own success is mixed. As of 2018, it was in the black, partly by relying on philanthropy, especially in the U.S. “Reader revenue,” in the form of donations marked not as subscriptions but as voluntary “memberships,” is expected to overtake advertising revenue before long. Raising money from people who care about journalism has allowed the Guardian to keep the Web site free. It’s also broken some big stories, from the Murdoch-papers phone-hacking scoop to the saga of Edward Snowden, and provided riveting coverage of ongoing and urgent stories, especially climate change. But, for all its fine reporting and substantive “Long Reads,” the paper consists disproportionately of ideologically unvarying opinion essays. By some measures, journalism entered a new, Trumpian, gold-plated age during the 2016 campaign, with the Trump bump, when news organizations found that the more they featured Trump the better their Chartbeat numbers, which, arguably, is a lot of what got him elected. The bump swelled into a lump and, later, a malignant tumor, a carcinoma the size of Cleveland. Within three weeks of the election, the Times added a hundred and thirty-two thousand new subscribers. (This effect hasn’t extended to local papers.) News organizations all over the world now advertise their services as the remedy to Trumpism, and to fake news; fighting Voldemort and his Dark Arts is a good way to rake in readers. And scrutiny of the Administration has produced excellent work, the very best of journalism. “ How President Trump Is Saving Journalism ,” a 2017 post on Forbes.com, marked Trump as the Nixon to today’s rising generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins. Superb investigative reporting is published every day, by news organizations both old and new, including BuzzFeed News.

By the what-doesn’t-kill-you line of argument, the more forcefully Trump attacks the press, the stronger the press becomes. Unfortunately, that’s not the full story. All kinds of editorial decisions are now outsourced to Facebook’s News Feed, Chartbeat, or other forms of editorial automation, while the hands of many flesh-and-blood editors are tied to so many algorithms. For one reason and another, including twenty-first-century journalism’s breakneck pace, stories now routinely appear that might not have been published a generation ago, prompting contention within the reportorial ranks. In 2016, when BuzzFeed News released the Steele dossier, many journalists disapproved, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, who got his start as a reporter for the Washington City Paper . “It is irresponsible to put uncorroborated information on the Internet,” Tapper said. “It’s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that’s not what we do.” The Times veered from its normal practices when it published an anonymous opinion essay by a senior official in the Trump Administration. And The New Yorker posted a story online about Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior when he was an undergraduate at Yale, which Republicans in the Senate pointed to as evidence of a liberal conspiracy against the nominee.

There’s plenty of room to argue over these matters of editorial judgment. Reasonable people disagree. Occasionally, those disagreements fall along a generational divide. Younger journalists often chafe against editorial restraint, not least because their cohort is far more likely than senior newsroom staff to include people from groups that have been explicitly and viciously targeted by Trump and the policies of his Administration, a long and growing list that includes people of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and anyone with family in Haiti or any of the other countries Trump deems “shitholes.” Sometimes younger people are courageous and sometimes they are heedless and sometimes those two things are the same. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures,” Abramson writes, and that “the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.” Still, by no means is the divide always or even usually generational. Abramson, for instance, sided with BuzzFeed News about the Steele dossier, just as she approves of the use of the word “lie” to refer to Trump’s lies, which, by the Post’s reckoning, came at the rate of more than a dozen a day in 2018.

The broader problem is that the depravity, mendacity, vulgarity, and menace of the Trump Administration have put a lot of people, including reporters and editors, off their stride. The present crisis, which is nothing less than a derangement of American life, has caused many people in journalism to make decisions they regret, or might yet. In the age of Facebook, Chartbeat, and Trump, legacy news organizations, hardly less than startups, have violated or changed their editorial standards in ways that have contributed to political chaos and epistemological mayhem. Do editors sit in a room on Monday morning, twirl the globe, and decide what stories are most important? Or do they watch Trump’s Twitter feed and let him decide? It often feels like the latter. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger; it makes everyone sick. The more adversarial the press, the more loyal Trump’s followers, the more broken American public life. The more desperately the press chases readers, the more our press resembles our politics.

The problems are well understood, the solutions harder to see. Good reporting is expensive, but readers don’t want to pay for it. The donation-funded ProPublica, “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” employs more than seventy-five journalists. Good reporting is slow, good stories unfold, and most stories that need telling don’t involve the White House. The Correspondent, an English-language version of the Dutch Web site De Correspondent, is trying to “unbreak the news.” It won’t run ads. It won’t collect data (or, at least, not much). It won’t have subscribers. Like NPR, it will be free for everyone, supported by members, who pay what they can. “We want to radically change what news is about, how it is made, and how it is funded,” its founders state. Push-notifications-on news is bad for you, they say, “because it pays more attention to the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental, thereby losing sight of the ordinary, usual, positive, historical, and systematic.” What will the Correspondent look like? It will stay above the fray. It might sometimes be funny. It’s slated to début sometime in 2019. Aside from the thing about ads, it sounds a lot like a magazine, when magazines came in the mail.

After we’d shoved the last, fat Worcester Sunday Telegram inside the last, unlatched screen door, we’d head home, my father taking turns a little too fast, so that we’d have to clutch at one another and at the lip of the tailgate, to keep from falling off. “Dad, slow down!” we’d squeal, not meaning it. Then he’d make breakfast, hot chocolate with marshmallows in the winter, orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate in the summer, and on my plate I’d make wedges of cantaloupe into Viking ships sailing across a sea of maple syrup from the Coast of Bacon to Pancake Island. After breakfast, we’d dump the money from the tobacco tins onto the kitchen table and count coins, stacking quarters and nickels and dimes into wrappers from the Worcester County Institution for Savings, while my father updated the Accounts, and made the Collection List.

Going collecting was a drag. You had to knock on people’s doors and ask your neighbors for money—“ Telegram! Collecting!”—and it was embarrassing, and, half the time, they’d ask you in, and before you knew it you’d be helping out, and it would take all day. “So long as you’re here, could you hold the baby while I take a quick shower?” “Honey, after this, could you bring my mail down to the post office on that cute little bike of yours?” I came to understand that the people who didn’t leave the money under the mat hadn’t forgotten to. They just liked having a kid visit on Sunday afternoon.

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths. The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies. “The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again. I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do. ♦

An earlier version of this story misstated the subtitle of Christopher B. Daly’s book “Covering America.” It also misstated the Huffington Post’s advertising revenue.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Ken Auletta

By Nicholas Lemann

By Jay Caspian Kang

Journalism - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Journalism is the activity or profession of reporting about, photographing, or editing news stories for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or online platforms. Essays on journalism could explore its history, ethical standards, and the evolving landscape in the digital age. Discussions might delve into the roles and responsibilities of journalists, the challenges posed by political biases, censorship, and the rapid spread of misinformation. Moreover, analyzing the impact of social media on journalism, the future of investigative journalism, and the interaction between journalism and democracy can provide a nuanced understanding of the vital role journalism plays in a functioning society. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Journalism you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Gender Inequality in Broadcast Journalism

The news media is one of thea most powerful institution whichs that exerts a tremendous amount of influence on society. Although more women females are entering the male dominated newsroom, women are still underrepresented and excluded in many differentmultiple ways. It is evident that females hold a strong interest in journalism; in fact, sixty- five percent of journalism school graduates are female However, women only represent thirty percent of jobs in journalism. , Tand this gender disparity is evident in […]

Yellow Journalism Today

The word 'Yellow Journalism' was first heard in the 1890s to describe the methods and styles used by Joseph Pulitzer concerning the New York City newspaper. His competitor in the field of print media was William Randolph Hearst. Both authors were covering the exclamations of the war that created a lot of alarm among the people. They used powerful words on their headlines such as glory, slaughter, and death on the front page whenever possible to create curiosity and interest. […]

I Want to be a Journalist

The vocation of journalist is exceptionally fascinating and loaded with tremendous freedoms and degree. It is acquiring a lot of significance and renown in the cutting edge society. With the complex expansion in the course of papers and magazines just as beginning of papers and journals, there is an incredible breadth for the young fellows and ladies who need to join this calling. There are many openings every year for the new contestants. The expansion in the flow of papers […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

How Yellow Journalism Resulted to the Spanish-American War

How yellow journalism resulted to the Spanish-American war. The yellow journalism was started by Joseph Pulitzer in 1896 with a carton of yellow kid and sold many paper. It was characterized with emotional words, dramatic sympathy, false information and misleading headlines which had huge print to attract the attention of people. I had a lot of drawing, pictures and images. Now William Hearst the owner of New York stole the writers from Pulitzer to complete the yellow journalism (Wilkerson, 1932). […]

Analysis of the Watchdog Role in Journalism

Chapter 10 of The Press explores the definition, key elements, and importance of Watchdog Journalism. Watchdog Journalism is a concept that has been and currently still is used in public journalism. It is an important foundation for bringing forth news to the public that may otherwise stay hidden. To begin, journalism has due-diligence to the public to report news that not only matters but affects them either emotionally or physically. Journalists implement the watchdog role in order to bring forth […]

News and Democracy in Different Media Systems

Many decades ago, Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1959) posed a question related to the concepts of the press and its role in society, “Why is the press as it is? Why does it apparently serve different purposes and appear in widely different forms in different countries?” The answers to these questions led the authors to present the Authoritarian, the Soviet communist, the Libertarian, and the Social Responsibility models, which explain what the press should be and do in different countries. […]

The Yellow Kid and the Birth of Yellow Journalism

In 1895, the first comic strip was printed in an American newspaper. Called "Hogan's Alley, this popular cartoon made by Richard Outcault featured a buck-toothed, beady-eyed and big-eared boy wearing a yellow nightdress. Fittingly called The Yellow Kid, this loveable character began to gain popularity in an era full of consumerism, commercialization, urbanization and social reform. Newspapers in the late 1800s started to engage heavily in sensationalism and the reporting of exciting stories without full regard to objectivity and truth. […]

How Journalism has Affected our National Narrative

In this age of journalism there are numerous factors that play into the production and reliability of the information we receive. Taking into account a time where our country was less technologically advanced, "current news was primarily accessible to those who had seen it first hand or lived within a proximal distance. The evolution of technology has allowed a secondary source on one side of the world to present news and information to a consumer on another side of the […]

Rebecca Skloot: Unearthing Truths and Giving Voice to the Voiceless

When one thinks of the contemporary literary world, few authors resonate with the powerful interplay of science, ethics, and humanity quite like Rebecca Skloot. With a keen journalist's eye and an empathetic storyteller's heart, Skloot navigates intricate realms, shedding light on tales that might have otherwise remained in obscurity. Skloot's magnum opus, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," is a prime exemplification of her dedication to in-depth research and commitment to telling stories that matter. The narrative centers around Henrietta […]

The Future that Journalism Holds

Journalism continues to evolve at the same rate as the country's interpretations of the First Amendment. Because of the continual advances in technology around the world, society must question the state of journalism, and whether or not its older principles are still applicable to modern standards. As Stephen J.A. Ward highlights in his article Digital Media Ethics: "Most of the principles were developed over the past century, originating in the construction of professional, objective ethics for mass commercial newspapers in […]

The Jayson Blair Scandal: a Cautionary Tale in Journalism

Journalism, often deemed the "fourth estate," is expected to be a watchdog of society, upholding standards of truth, objectivity, and accountability. However, when its very foundations are shaken by controversies like the Jayson Blair scandal, it forces the world to re-examine the integrity of the news we consume and the institutions that deliver it. Jayson Blair, a young and promising journalist, made headlines in 2003, not for his exemplary reporting but for the elaborate web of deception he spun while […]

The Philippine Government Protects Journalists

Journalists are responsible for shining light on all events that happen in the society. Their work is of great importance to the society who depend on them for news. However, the job becomes dangerous when a journalist comes across a piece of a controversial story. The stories usually are characterized by powerful individuals who want to protect themselves from the government and wrath of the society. These individuals and organizations will go to great lengths to protect themselves from being […]

Journalism in the Digital Age: the Rise of Online Newspapers in Nigeria

Nigeria has experienced a notable paradigm shift in the domain of journalism and media in recent times, primarily attributed to the proliferation of online newspapers. The transition from conventional print media to digital platforms has brought about a significant transformation in both the consumption and distribution of news. This essay delves into the progression of online newspapers in Nigeria, examining their ramifications on journalism, society, and politics, in addition to the obstacles and prospects they introduce. The proliferation of online […]

Ethics in Public Relations and Journalism: the Imperative for Truth-Telling

Ethical Shifts in Journalism Journalists are known in movies and media as vigorous, committed watchdogs of the press, trying to get hard-hitting stories to spread to their community, whether it’d be for a rural town in Ohio or the Big Apple of New York. With that being said, journalism has taken an ethical turn in the past couple of decades. From leaking unclassified government documents to networks spreading half-truths and one-liners for citizen attention, the Media has taken a toll, […]

The Post: Question of Shyness, Journalism Ethics, and Gender Bias

The movie The Post gives a unique perspective on the background and journalism process. It takes viewers inside the story of upholding the nation’s civil liberties. Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, and editor Ben Bradlee join forces to expose a decades-long cover-up. Although this may ruin their career and change the face of journalism, they pull through and bring the truth to light. Throughout the movie, many important concepts about the process of journalism appear. The lessons include […]

The Effects of Photography and Journalism during the Civil War Essay

Long before the invention of the camera, warfare was largely romanticized and those who participated in it were seen as heroes. War was seen as the ultimate test of manhood and a way to prove one's self. Even in America, those who fought in the revolutionary war were praised by the public who did not know the truth. However, after the invention of the camera and the widespread news about the war, the brutal realities were revealed and everyone could […]

The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture

In The Digital Age, by Astra Taylor, presents two significant views that Taylor argues against the debate of how social media takes effect in the work of social production. The first view of position is the techno-optimist view which illustrates a positive view and can also be described as the Utopian view for technology and social production. The notion of free culture is for the techno-optimist view which is represented through social media openness that creates an equalized social ground […]

Objectivity the Core to Professional Journalism

No matter your political views, gender or age, America loves to bash the news media. Once the nations most trusted initiation the news media have fallen from favor.The media has been around since 1927 people have trusted the media for news,and factual information on daily events.After reading about the topic of media it is clear that the change in media's objectivity has changed since it's upcoming According to Gallup, evan as recently as 200 a majority of America trusted the […]

Three Major Ways Social Media has Advanced Journalism

Since leaving Chapman University I have held three different positions in the field of Journalism. I have worked as a Production Assistant for Dateline News, I have worked as a writer for the local CBS News Station in Los Angeles, and currently I am working as a Broadcast Associate for 48 Hours. Though the job requirements for each of these positions and broadcast vary one the common thread they all share is the dominance of social media in order to […]

What do we Call Investigative Journalism?

Investigative journalism It's almost morning and the grass is wet with the morning dew, everything is calm and quiet and it seems like nothing can ruin the silence. And in that silence there is a man walking with a cart with clothes and empty boxes in it. Homeless. A car drives by and stops at the stop sign the homeless man is at. The man in the car looks at him and then turns his head, like he's not even […]

The Yellow Journalism of the Internet Age

Fake news is a terminology that erupted in popularity on social media during the 2016 United States presidential elections. Despite its apparently recent etymology, in an article on Huffington Post, Claire Fallon explains that "prior to the late 19th century, English speakers used an obvious alternative to refer to what we now call fake news: 'false news' (2017). Furthermore, the term originates from exploitative and sensational journalistic practices of yellow journalism that found its start in the late 1800s. These […]

Muckrakers: Journalism’s Role in Shaping Progressive Reform

In the tumult of the early 20th century, a group of intrepid journalists emerged, wielding their pens like swords against the goliaths of corruption, poverty, and social injustice. These journalists, known as muckrakers, embarked on a crusade to expose the dark underbelly of American society, igniting the flames of reform that would shape the Progressive Era. Their stories, deeply rooted in investigative journalism, not only enlightened the public but also pressured lawmakers to enact significant changes. This discussion aims to […]

Journalism Unveiled: Muckrakers Pioneering Voices of American Reform

In the tumultuous landscape of the early 20th century, a group of fearless journalists emerged as the catalysts for social and political change – the muckrakers. This term, coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, aptly captured the essence of these investigative writers who delved into the metaphorical muck and mire of society, exposing corruption, inequality, and injustice. During the Progressive Era, muckrakers wielded their pens as powerful tools for reform, bringing to light the dark corners of American life that were […]

Unveiling the Hanford Sentinel: Navigating the Realm of Grassroots Journalism

Situated amid the sun-drenched expanses of California's Central Valley, the Hanford Sentinel emerges as a distinctive emblem of local journalism's endurance and adaptability. In this sprawling tapestry of community newspapers, the Hanford Sentinel proudly stands as a linchpin, meticulously weaving the stories that echo through the lives of Hanford's inhabitants. Far removed from the digital cacophony, the Hanford Sentinel serves as a quiet custodian of community bonds, delving into the minutiae of local life. From quirky events and poignant narratives […]

Yellow Journalism: Sensational News from Yesteryear to your Feed

Remember the days when newspapers screamed scandalous headlines and stories seemed too wild to be true? Welcome to the world of yellow journalism, the great-granddaddy of clickbait. Let's dive into the melodramatic past of this news style, where facts often took a back seat to juicy stories, and see how it still echoes in today's media buzz. Back in the 1890s, New York's newspaper scene was like the Wild West of journalism. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph […]

Journalism through a Unique Lens: Exploring ‘What the Dog Saw’

Malcolm Gladwell's 'What the Dog Saw' is a collection of essays that does more than just explore various facets of society; it offers a unique perspective on understanding everyday phenomena. The title, inspired by one of the essays in the collection, metaphorically asks us to see the world from an unconventional viewpoint - akin to understanding what a dog observes in its daily life. This compilation is not just about canine perception but is symbolic of Gladwell's approach to dissecting […]

Related topic

Additional example essays.

• Homeschooling vs Traditional Schooling
• Should Teachers Carry Guns
• The Need for More Women in STEM Fields
• My favorite toys as a child
• My Experience as Teacher
• Why I Want To Be A Mentor
• What Kind Of Student Are You
• Followership and Servant Leadership
• Logical Fallacies in Letter From Birmingham Jail
• Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X
• Positive Effects of Social Media
• Importance Of Accountability

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Journalism’s Essential Value

The debate around “objectivity”—if that’s even the right word, anymore—has become among the most contested in journalism. In recent years, CJR has served as a forum for that discussion, through numerous pieces , and even a conference , last fall, exploring approaches to the question. This essay, from the publisher of the New York Times , and the chairman of the New York Times company, is the latest in that ongoing conversation. Email us your thoughts at [email protected] .

As long as independent journalism has existed, it has angered people who want stories told their way or not at all. But I can pinpoint the moment when I realized how contested the very idea of journalistic independence had become.

It was the fall of 2018, my first year as publisher of the New York Times . I had spent my career until then as a reporter and editor steeped in the methods, values, and stylistic quirks of traditional journalism, covering small towns for the Providence Journal and local government for the Portland Oregonian before joining the Times . Even after years of watching these traditions come under intensifying pressure from the internet and social media, I was struck by how frontally the old journalistic model was being challenged by the dynamics of covering a new president unconstrained by precedent and social norms—sometimes even reality itself.

At the time, the country was waiting for the results of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign. Many of the president’s critics believed that the investigation would force the removal of a man they regarded as unfit to lead the nation. They were also convinced that the last safeguard against the president’s relentless efforts to undermine the investigation was Rod J. Rosenstein, the second-highest-ranking official in the Justice Department, who had assumed oversight of the investigation when the attorney general recused himself.

After months of careful reporting, two reporters in the Washington bureau of the Times , Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt, uncovered a startling story. The previous spring, Rosenstein himself had been so concerned about Trump’s erratic behavior that he had suggested secretly recording the president and even raised the possibility of invoking a constitutional mechanism contained in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that had never been used, to declare Trump unfit and remove him from office.

There was no question about whether to publish the story. It was based on extensive interviews with high-level players in the administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI and backed up by a paper trail. It seemed like exactly the type of journalism the public should expect from an independent press.

The article appeared on September 21. Given that the reporting raised profound concerns about the president’s ability to serve—from one of his own appointees, no less—the swift and angry response from the right was not at all surprising. Some saw our reporting as a validation of their theories about a “deep state coup.” Many others dismissed the reporting as entirely untrue and attacked us for publishing the story. Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a response to the piece that proved typical: “When it comes to President @realDonaldTrump….. BEWARE of anything coming out of the @nytimes.”

What caught me by surprise was the outrage from the left. Here the criticism was not so much that the reporting was untrue—though some did jump through hoops to make that assertion—but that the information was too dangerous to publish.

From Twitter to magazines to cable news, these critics charged that our reporting had effectively armed Trump with the pretext to fire Rosenstein and end the inquiry into his own conduct. On her show that night, Rachel Maddow attacked the credibility of the story at length before warning: “They have provided President Trump this headline and this fully cooked, fully baked New York Times –approved headline inviting the president to fire Rod Rosenstein and thereby end the Mueller investigation.”

Even those who regularly espoused support for independent journalism suggested that in this case our values had led us to a misguided neutrality that jeopardized democracy. Readers accused the reporters of journalistic recklessness and even of treason. “I suppose you would argue that your job is to print the news, whatever it is,” one reader wrote in one of the thousands of online comments and letters to the editor protesting the article. “However, thinking so narrowly is an abdication of your responsibility, and I’m not sure this was really news anyway. To ignore the consequences of your stories is not ethical and is no service to democracy. You have a profound duty to consider whether the news value is worth the damage the reporting will do. In this case, I do not believe it was.”

As I watched the reaction unfold, I found myself increasingly concerned not just by the growing pressure on independent journalism, but by the troubling demand implicit in the criticism. A leading news organization had discovered that a top law enforcement official had such profound concerns about the fitness of the president of the United States that he discussed whether unprecedented steps should be taken to remove him from office. And many people, even some journalists, wanted this information actively hidden from the public.

The Challenge to Independence

American journalism faces a confluence of challenges that present the most profound threat to the free press in more than a century. News organizations are shrinking and dying under sustained financial duress. Attacks on journalists are surging. Press freedoms are under intensifying pressure. And with the broader information ecosystem overrun by misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and clickbait, public trust in journalism has fallen to historical lows.

There is no clear path through this gantlet. But there will be no worthwhile future for journalism if our profession abandons the core value that makes our work essential to democratic society, the value that answers the question of why we’re deserving of the public trust and the special protections afforded the free press. That value is journalistic independence.

Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth—and the search for it with an open yet skeptical mind—above all else. Those may sound like blandly agreeable clichés of Journalism 101, but in this hyperpolarized era, independent journalism and the sometimes counterintuitive values that animate it have become a radical pursuit.

Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

This approach, tacking as it does against the with-us-or-against-us certainty of this polarized moment, requires a steadfast, sometimes uncomfortable commitment to journalistic process over personal conviction. Independent journalism elevates values grounded in humility—fairness, impartiality, and (to use perhaps the most fraught and argued-over word in journalism) objectivity—as ideals to be pursued, even if they can never be perfectly achieved. And crucially, independent journalism roots itself to an underlying confidence in the public; it trusts that people deserve to know the full truth and ultimately can be relied upon to use it wisely.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched the arguments against this model of independent journalism become more widespread and more insistent, even within the ranks of established news organizations, including the Times . This critique has been accompanied by calls to instead embrace a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction.

Many have made thoughtful arguments in favor of this shift. Some say that journalists are incapable of controlling for their own biases and hide behind a false objectivity that masks, for instance, liberal worldviews (the critique from the right) or privileges a straight, white, male perspective (the critique from the left). Others suggest that the model leads journalists to make unequal things seem equal—sometimes to the point of rationalizing nonsensical or dangerous positions—in performative displays of balance, often mocked as “false equivalence” or “both-sidesism.” Some argue that the posture of journalistic independence has evolved into a self-serving justification for powerful gatekeepers to protect business as usual, including the invisible assumptions and biases that prop it up. Still others assert that this model of journalism is poorly matched for the perils of the moment, arguing that more than just describing the world, journalists should do everything in their power to fix it.

In responding to these arguments, let me first acknowledge that my background may make me uniquely, perhaps even comically, unpersuasive as a participant in this particular debate. I am the publisher of one of the most scrutinized media institutions in the world; a wealthy white man who succeeded a series of other wealthy white men with the same first and last name; and someone whose family has starred in a full century of shadowy media conspiracy theories. At the same time, the Times is a 172-year-old human enterprise that publishes more words every week than Shakespeare wrote in his entire life. Despite our best efforts, it will not be hard to find examples where the Times has fallen painfully short of the independent ideal I defend here, from our early coverage of the Soviet Union to the run-up to the Iraq War. And I can also already hear critics dusting off their arguments about whether we wrote too much about Hillary Clinton’s emails, or too little about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or whether I personally mishandled my response to a now notorious opinion essay by Senator Tom Cotton.

On the other hand, there may be few people for whom this subject is of greater personal and professional concern. My great-great-grandfather, the founder of the modern New York Times , helped establish the model of independent journalism—“without fear or favor,” in his now famous motto—and entrusted his successors “to maintain the editorial independence and the integrity of the New York Times and to continue it as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” For more than 125 years, generations of my family have made it our explicit mission to promote and defend that vision of independent journalism.

I hung our century-old mission statement on my office wall on my first day as publisher. In the years since, it’s become clear that maintaining journalistic independence through this polarized moment will be as difficult and unpopular as any challenge I will face in this job—and, I believe, as urgent as any challenge the broader news industry faces. Indeed, even as I prepared this essay for publication, three influential figures in the profession separately published major explorations of the topic, most recently a piece in these pages by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery.

My own view is illustrated using examples from the Times . But there are many outstanding news organizations that exemplify the type of independent journalism I’m describing, from newspapers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to wire services like the Associated Press and Bloomberg News to broadcasters like the BBC and NPR to digital publishers like ProPublica and Politico .

My defense of journalistic independence doesn’t come from reverence for some golden age of journalism. Each generation transforms journalism and the institutions that make it, almost always for the better, and I’m proud to have played a part in some of those transformations . It is certainly not rooted to a belief that journalism should be unmoored from values. Independent journalism has a natural and welcome affinity for the classic tenets of liberal democracy—the rule of law, honest governance, equal rights, free expression—as well as universal principles of human dignity, freedom, and opportunity. That’s why journalists tend naturally toward stories that shine a light on injustice, especially as they pertain to the most vulnerable among us. But independent journalism also rests on the bedrock conviction that those seeking to change the world must first understand it—that a fully informed society not only makes better decisions but operates with more trust, more empathy, and greater care.

In this way, independent journalism is the exact tonic the world needs most at a moment in which polarization and misinformation are shaking the foundations of liberal democracies and undermining society’s ability to meet the existential challenges of the era, from inequality to political dysfunction to the accelerating toll of climate change. When the stakes feel highest—from the world wars to the red scare to the aftermath of 9/11—people often make the most forceful arguments against journalistic independence. Pick a side. Join the righteous. Declare that you’re with us or against us. But history shows that the better course is when journalists challenge and complicate consensus with smart questions and new information. That’s because common facts, a shared reality, and a willingness to understand our fellow citizens across tribal lines are the most important ingredients in enabling a diverse, pluralistic society to come together to self-govern. For that, as much as anything, we need principled, independent journalists.

How We Got Here

It is no coincidence that maps of the world’s healthiest democracies and maps of the world’s freest press environments are essentially identical.

The press plays a straightforward informational role: who’s running for office, how tax dollars are used, what legislation aims to achieve. It plays an accountability role, exposing corruption and incompetence, ensuring that the law is administered evenly and justly, and shedding light on institutions that don’t want their secrets out in the open.

In a pluralistic democracy like ours, an independent press plays another crucial role. It binds society by providing the connective tissue of a common fact base that can be discussed and debated and by exposing people to a wider range of experiences and perspectives. “Democracy’s legitimacy and durability depend on dialogue and deliberation, on process as much as on outcomes,” Carlos Lozada, a Times columnist, wrote in a recent piece on this topic.

The history of the Times is intertwined with this vision of an independent press. For much of the early life of the country the press was, in the main, openly partisan, with newspapers aligning with various factions, ideologies, and politicians, championing supporters and attacking opponents. The Times itself was part of this tradition when it was cofounded, in 1851, by one of the men who helped form the Republican Party three years later. That changed when the small, struggling newspaper was sold out of bankruptcy to my great-great-grandfather Adolph Ochs in 1896. He embraced a journalistic model that contrasted sharply with the sensationalistic (and much more financially successful) newspapers of the era, like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal . Ochs vowed to his readers that the Times would instead be fiercely independent, dedicated to journalism of the highest integrity, and devoted to the public welfare. His vision for the news report: “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” His vision for the Opinion report: “to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

This approach helped lay the foundation for the model that became known as journalistic objectivity. The most prominent champion of this approach was the journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann, whose writing almost always makes an appearance in pieces like this. He argued that journalists “ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good.” Recognizing that journalists inevitably carried personal biases and blind spots, Lippmann called for controlling them by professionalizing journalistic processes and, in particular, embracing lessons from the scientific method. He entreated journalists to focus as much as possible on facts and to actively pursue evidence that could challenge, rather than simply confirm, their own hypotheses. In this conception, words like objective and impartial are not a characterization of an individual journalist’s underlying temperament, as they are so often misunderstood to mean, but serve as guiding ideals to strive for in their work. “The idea was that journalists needed to employ objective, observable, repeatable methods of verification in their reporting—precisely because they could never be personally objective,” Tom Rosenstiel, coauthor of The Elements of Journalism and one of the leading defenders of the model, explained in 2020. “Their methods of reporting had to be objective because they never could be.”

In the decades that followed, this model would become the dominant approach to American journalism, taught in universities and practiced at news organizations from the local to the national level. Today, however, the word objectivity is so contested inside the journalistic community that it is viewed by many as self-discrediting in the debate over the role of journalism. I continue to believe that objectivity—or if the word is simply too much of a distraction, open-minded inquiry—remains a value worth striving for. But independence, the word we use inside the Times , better captures the full breadth of this journalistic approach and its promise to the public at large.

How Independence Works in Practice

What does independence look like in practice, and what choices does it require of journalists?

Prioritizing process. The most important ingredient is treating independence as a discipline, backed by processes and ethics designed to foster it. At the Times , as with many other traditional news organizations, the commitment to independence is reflected at every stage of our journalistic efforts. Our goal is to only publish what we know; we would rather miss a story than get one wrong. We correct our errors openly because mistakes should be transparent and, honestly, painful. We talk to the people we write about whenever possible and give those accused of wrongdoing the opportunity to respond. We use multiple sources to confirm information and display a healthy skepticism of everything we learn. We review pieces not just for factual accuracy but for fairness. We enforce ethical guidelines designed to prevent conflicts of interest (for example, we prohibit supporting politicians and political causes) as well as stylistic guidelines designed to minimize bias (for example, we avoid the use of partisan terminology and provocative labels in our news pages).

Language is constantly shifting, and news organizations should shift too. But one of the ways propagandists and advocates try to steer coverage to advance their agendas is to win the battle over terminology. For this reason we generally try to use the everyday language of the public, what we call idiomatic English, rather than the specialized language embraced by academics, activists, and marketers. That means typically waiting until specific terms have gained broad societal acceptance (generally using the widely recognized terms “Latino” or “Hispanic” over the little-used “Latinx”) and trying to avoid market-tested phrases that have been designed specifically to shift public opinion (generally avoiding terms like “pro life” or “pro choice” and instead describing such views as for or against abortion rights). This can be contentious—when a Palestinian carries out an attack in Israel, the Times generally calls this person a “militant” and often hears protests from one side that considers the attacker a “freedom fighter” and another that considers the attacker a “terrorist.”

As with other professions that have adopted explicit systems and ethical norms to support independence—science, medicine, and the judiciary, for example—the journalistic process described above doesn’t guarantee perfect results. Personal biases and agendas can still distort the work reporters and editors produce—just as people’s personal experiences and backgrounds can elevate it. But good journalistic processes reduce the frequency of mistakes and create mechanisms for self-correcting when we err. That stands in contrast to alternate models guided by political objectives, partisan loyalty, or, most obviously, self-interest—all of which are more vulnerable to mistakes, hypocrisy, and corruption. As with scientists, doctors, or judges, it is far better to have journalists imperfectly striving for independence backed by a defensible process than choosing not to bother because total independence can never be fully achieved. “Failure to achieve standards does not obviate the need for them. It does not render them outmoded. It makes them more necessary,” wrote Marty Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post , in a recent essay on this theme. “And it requires that we apply them more consistently and enforce them more firmly.”

Following facts. Independent journalism can be morally straightforward and satisfying. Journalists hold power to account by exposing corruption and abuse. Journalists reveal injustice and inequality. Their work regularly leads to a society that is freer, fairer, and more just. This is the type of journalism seen in movies like All the President’s Men , Spotlight , and She Said .

Independence protects journalism from being distorted by business incentives. The fact that Harvey Weinstein was a longtime advertiser in the Times didn’t keep us from revealing the abuses that set off a cascade that ultimately landed him in prison. Independence protects journalism from being distorted by government pressure. The fact that China promised severe repercussions not long after we spent millions to launch a new Chinese-language website there did not keep us from publishing a major investigation into government corruption. And independence protects journalism from being distorted by various forms of self-interest. Even our own leaders , investors , and journalism are not immune from receiving unflattering coverage in the Times . These protections are not simply a matter of ethics and values; they are rooted in systems and processes and are reflected in the structure of the company itself—by ensuring, for example, that journalists are walled off from advertisers or that reviews of books by Times journalists are written by independent freelancers.

These commitments are widely accepted as necessary principles of an independent news organization. But a true commitment to independence—and the insistence on putting journalistic process ahead of a preferred outcome—isn’t always easy or comfortable. One of the surest signs of independence is that readers are frequently told things they don’t expect and would prefer not to hear. Take two recent examples:

For years, the Times has documented the brutal persecution of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar, that human rights experts have called a genocide. This was the story one of our reporters was prepared to tell when she interviewed four young sisters in a refugee camp, who recounted how soldiers burned their home, killed their mother, and abducted their father, who was now feared dead. But days of additional reporting revealed that little of what they said was true. The girls had shared heart-wrenching stories to compete for the limited attention of aid groups. In an overcrowded camp, four orphaned sisters were more likely to win sympathy than an intact family that lost all its possessions. In this case, following the facts didn’t simply confirm the larger moral truth but also exposed a smaller, less expected one: these refugees were incentivized to one-up each other in suffering to get much-needed support. And not without a cost. The reporter, Hannah Beech, later explained in her searching piece: “Such strategies are a natural survival tactic. Who wouldn’t do the same to feed a family? But false narratives devalue the genuine horrors—murder, rape and mass burnings of villages—that have been inflicted upon the Rohingya by Myanmar’s security forces. And such embellished tales only buttress the Myanmar government’s contention that what is happening in Rakhine State is not ethnic cleansing, as the international community suggests, but trickery by foreign invaders.”

A year later, on the other end of the world, an American aid convoy headed to Venezuela erupted in flames after being blocked at the border by the country’s repressive security forces. The idea that the government had ordered the torching of desperately needed supplies in the midst of a devastating famine appeared to fit the narrative of President Nicolas Maduro’s brutal authoritarian rule. Many prominent global leaders quickly denounced him. But as we reported on the calamity, video footage revealed the fire had apparently not been carried out by Maduro’s security forces; it had most likely been caused by an anti-government protester throwing an errant Molotov cocktail.

That’s the counterintuitive commitment of independent journalism. It must be open to the idea that a suffering refugee child may not be telling the truth, or that a tyrant who is persecuting millions may be accused of a crime he didn’t actually commit. In both cases, critics asked who could possibly benefit from such journalism. Society benefits, of course, since it depends on credible information to make any number of related decisions, from distributing aid to relief organizations to imposing sanctions for human rights violations. The truth benefits, too, as does the credibility of those sharing it. The next time the Times reports on Maduro’s offenses (as we’ve done here , here , and here ) or the horrors that the Rohingya suffer (as we did here , here , and here ), readers can be sure that those are the facts as best we could ascertain them.

This commitment to putting facts above outcome is easy to caricature as amoral, perhaps even as nihilistic. But it is grounded in a foundational optimism about people and democracy. Independent journalism is predicated on the belief that democracy is stronger when people have trusted sources for reliable facts. And that people should be trusted to comprehend these facts, process their complexity, and make up their own minds. Information empowers, and empowered people are more likely to make better decisions.

Covering uncertainty. Even if it’s not always popular, the discipline of following the facts wherever they lead is far more straightforward than grappling with the tricky questions that emerge when the facts cannot be fully established. The number of topics that are factually or morally unambiguous is dwarfed by the number of topics marked in some way by uncertainty, where facts are unresolved or questions are still subject to debate. The role of independent journalists in such cases is to help the public understand and examine the broadest possible range of intellectually honest positions.

In cases in which the facts have been established beyond reasonable dispute, journalists should not quote a fringe position to check a box or shield their work from accusations of bias. There is, for instance, no serious debate in the scientific community about the reality of climate change. The world is warming, with devastating consequences. There are plenty of other examples: The Holocaust happened. COVID vaccines work. Trump lost the 2020 election.

But even in moments when the facts are beyond reasonable dispute, there can be reasonable differences of opinion about how society should interpret and act on those facts. What specifically should be done to mitigate the effects of climate change? Should people espousing anti-Semitism be barred from social media? Should vaccine requirements be linked to employment? Should specific legislative measures be taken to safeguard elections? Independent journalism should not shy away from fully examining such contentious questions, even if some insist that the truth has already been established.

There are also some moral issues that we, as a society, have rightly come to view as settled and beyond reasonable debate: Racism is wrong. Women deserve equal rights. People shouldn’t be tortured. At the same time, there are many related questions society is debating and independent journalism must explore, even if the larger principle is beyond question. Should race be a factor in college admissions? Under what circumstances should abortion be allowed? What methods of coercion are acceptable in a war zone?

There can be a temptation to attempt to steer these debates based on our personal views or our sense of how history will settle the matter, thinking that represents a more honest and authentic form of journalism. However, independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry. (And even in cases where debates are broadly recognized as closed, there is often added benefit to understanding the motivations and tactics of those who continue to push the issue to the fore.)

Prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate forces disagreements to fester beneath the surface. In even more damaging cases, it allows conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society. Deference to such popular narratives—as the Times has learned the hard way—is as dangerous as any personal bias: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; Trump has little chance of winning a general election; inflation isn’t a significant risk in modern economies. The problem in each case, and many more like them, was that conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and even when it turns out to be, it benefits from probing and testing.

Evaluating these debates is one reason why the journalistic process is designed around hearing from a diversity of voices. That’s most obviously true in reporting, which requires talking to people and representing a range of perspectives. But it also is why reporters benefit from the additional eyes of editors, not just for style and accuracy, but to ensure the issues they include are fairly represented and contextualized. When journalism succeeds in illuminating questions and debates, it not only helps people better understand those with whom they disagree, it helps them better recognize the differences they have with people they thought they agreed with—and it can help society move conversations about these issues toward resolution.

Navigating criticism . Criticism is a natural and important part of the journalistic process. That’s partly because independent journalism, with its commitment to exposing problems and holding power to account, often upsets the people it’s about, as well as their supporters. It’s also because the business of making these types of editorial decisions, especially on deadline, is imperfect work.

Intense barrages of criticism were once reserved for a handful of the most polarizing topics in public life, like presidential politics, abortion, and the Middle East, where every word and image was tracked for signs of bias and loudly contested as inaccurate or harmful. Now nearly every issue sets off that level of reaction. The dynamics of social media have enabled pushback to be quicker, louder, and better organized, as supporters and opponents become more entrenched in their narratives and more aggressive in assailing anything that runs counter to their views or objectives.

This often reflects genuine anger and disappointment. Even those who appreciate the vast majority of our reporting often feel that our coverage is uniquely off the mark in its portrayal of the very subject they care most about—and where they naturally have the strongest views on how the story should be told. But such frustrations are often harnessed by interest groups in an effort to make coverage more favorable and to make it uncomfortable to report things these groups—or subsets of these groups—don’t like.

In the past, most of those without access to a printing press or a presidential pulpit could only hope that a news organization would police itself through corrections or letters to the editor. Today anyone with a Twitter handle or an email address can have their concerns heard. That shift has brought a welcome increase in accountability, but it has also created a challenging dynamic. Journalistic decisions are continually being criticized in public by leaders, activists, journalists, celebrities, and influencers speaking for themselves or, just as often, for a broader community. These communities are often tied to personal identity, whether it’s derived from race , religion , gender , ethnicity , nationality , or partisan affiliation. But the same dynamic applies to groups of all types, like climate activists , Silicon Valley rationalists , economists , and Taylor Swift fans. Even those whose identity centers on warning about the dangers of tribalism sometimes succumb to their own forms of groupthink. Navigating such criticism has become among the most challenging parts of the practice of independent journalism.

Journalists are often accused by these groups of misrepresenting their communities, perpetuating stereotypes, or increasing risks for people who already have good reason to feel vulnerable. Sometimes these criticisms have merit—a look back through the archives of any news organization will find a wealth of examples that were bad in the moment and look worse today. Many minority groups continue to think mainstream news organizations do not fully capture their communities and too often focus on moments of controversy or tragedy. And it is understandable that anyone who has personally experienced particular hardships—from enduring anti-Semitism or racial discrimination to fleeing one’s homeland or terminating a pregnancy—would have strong views about how these issues should be covered and what downstream consequences of that coverage they’d like to see.

Sometimes such groups will entreat journalists to lift up their communities by focusing on positive stories. Sometimes they will assert that their community can only be fairly covered by a member of it. Sometimes groups will offer to retrain reporters on what language and framing to use in covering their communities. And many times they will look past an entire body of coverage that addresses many of the issues they raise to instead find fault with a single article, headline, image, source, or phrase—sometimes a single word. (Even our personnel decisions are at times read through an ideological lens, with a departure taken as a sign that we’re caving to a progressive mob or a conservative one, or a hiring offered as evidence that we can’t fairly cover one side of a conflict or the other .)

Often the central criticism is not so much about the accuracy of the coverage itself, but whether it could be misused. Recently, for example, the Times described how scores of Hasidic Jewish schools were failing to provide students a basic education. The coverage was called anti-Semitic and dangerous even before it was published because it could be misused to demonize a highly visible population at a moment when they already faced rising prejudice. A group representing Orthodox Jews highlighted this line of criticism in a recent letter , arguing that “a free press can be an incredibly powerful force—for good or otherwise. Particularly so when these words appear, sometimes on the front page, of a prominent newspaper. The Times has misused this incredible power. And the victims of this reporting—Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in New York—are a marginalized minority already subject to a rising, frightening number of hate crimes.”

Independent news organizations should strive to cover every community with respect, nuance, and sensitivity. That is especially true in the context of the risks and prejudices marginalized communities or vulnerable people in particular face. But even when doing so, journalism will not always reflect the way these groups want to be seen or emphasize the issues they would prefer to talk about. When coverage features different groups engaged with directly conflicting narratives—for example, the anti-Muslim violence coming from Hindu nationalists in India today—it’s easier to see the impossibility of covering each group exactly as it would like to be covered.

And the care independent news organizations should take in reporting on every such group doesn’t overwhelm the value to the public—and often to the community itself—of reporting difficult but important facts and issues. In the example above, we also heard from many Hasidic readers who felt their school system had failed them and their children and were relieved that future students may be better served because of our reporting.

The attacks on this type of work sometimes take aim at the natural fear of journalists that their work, often called “the first draft of history,” will later be regarded as on the wrong side of it. But these attacks also confront journalists whose work explores subjects that divide the public or upsets a specific interest group with more pressing concerns. In this new environment, journalists—in particular female journalists—routinely receive threats of rape and death. Menacing visits to their homes and offices. Campaigns to get them fired. Harassment of family members. And a never-ending stream of insults and personal attacks, from racial slurs to accusations of bigotry, that can arrive by the thousands in a single day. With such a high price to their reputations and sense of security, journalists often wonder whether pursuing a given story would be worth the potential backlash. The silence that can stem from these fears is, of course, the goal of these attacks. The responsibility of independent journalists is to not be intimidated and to continue to report without fear or favor.

Critiques of the Model

The arguments against this model of journalistic independence have become far more persistent in recent years amid the reshaping of the journalism industry and the broader information ecosystem.

Inside the industry, newspapers continue to shutter and the number of working journalists has dropped by tens of thousands over the past fifteen years. The newspapers that endure, embracing the approach of many of the digital news organizations that have emerged, have often felt compelled to shift increasingly scarce resources away from expensive original reporting to far cheaper but less journalistically nutritious efforts like punditry, aggregation, and clickbait. As a result, the journalists who managed to keep their jobs now often find themselves stuck at their desks aggregating and opining on others’ work, instead of coming face to face with new people and perspectives through on-the-ground reporting.

At the same time, newsrooms have become more diverse, with far greater numbers of women, people who identify as LGBTQ, and people of color—though there is far more progress still needed. As this has happened, there’s been an overdue reckoning with the dominance of straight white men in our industry, a dominance that has long contributed to missing and distorted coverage. As a result, minority groups often carry deep skepticism that the same institutions and institutional values that badly served them in the past can now do better and actually capture the breadth of the world they live in. The conversation about those failures has left lingering uncertainty inside newsrooms as to whether those failures should be blamed on lack of representation or on outmoded values that may no longer fit the moment.

The shifts for the public have been no less dramatic. The fracturing of the media’s gatekeeper role, in which a handful of outlets in print and television were able to set the national agenda, means that proliferating publishers and individual commenters are increasingly built around specific niches and more focused on catering to their audiences’ identities, passions, and politics. The gatekeeper approach was far from perfect, but the unmediated nature of the internet has led to a surge in content aimed at driving engagement by playing to people’s hopes and, especially, their fears and resentments. The more conversational style of writing for the internet and the obvious dissonance between the carefulness of some reporters’ published work and their informal, sometimes injudicious social media commentary have exacerbated the sense that standards are shifting. These trends further confused the public’s understanding of the role of the press, making journalism seem partisan and unreliable. Today, barely over one-quarter of Americans trust the news, according to a Reuters Institute report, a figure that now ranks lowest of the countries they surveyed. The numbers from a Gallup survey were even more abysmal, with 16 percent expressing a high degree of confidence in newspapers and 11 percent in television news. In many studies like this, journalistic bias was a top concern cited.

The current pushback to the model of journalistic independence typically takes three main forms.

“Objectivity” as a myth : One of the most persistent critiques asserts that journalists should own up to their biases rather than pretending to be able to meet an impossible ideal of being truly objective or impartial.

The primary argument from the right, a staple of Republican stump speeches and conservative media for decades, alleges that reporters and editors use statements of journalistic independence to disguise a consistent bias against conservative views and more negative treatment of conservative leaders. This stretches from long-standing critiques of coverage of topics like gun rights and rural America, same-sex marriage and faith, and it extends to the ongoing national conversation about slavery’s role in our history that was, in part, sparked by the Times ’ groundbreaking 1619 Project.

It’s true that the two populations that make up the vast majority of journalists—college graduates and people who live in big cities—have become more likely in recent decades to hold liberal views, particularly on social issues. These groups tend to be more secular and less likely to own guns; they engage with a different mix of culture and hobbies; they are typically more embracing of racial, gender, and sexual-orientation diversity. Those qualities—everyday assumptions in a place like New York City, our hometown—are why my predecessor, even as he pushed back on accusations of political bias, sometimes talked about the Times having a metropolitan sensibility .

This type of journalistic culture, the norm in most large newsrooms today, sometimes leads to journalistic decisions that many conservatives regard as picking a side in what they consider to be open debates, like the existence of climate change or the frequency of voter fraud, but which newsrooms treat as settled. On the many more issues that are obviously unsettled and subject to robust debate, the model of journalistic independence is explicitly designed to help correct for the narrowness of a journalist’s own experience and worldview, including by intentionally seeking out and attempting to fairly convey a much broader range of views. It doesn’t deny personal experience; it provides a method not to be trapped by it. If you look at coverage of abortion, as an example of an issue where society has been conflicted for decades but where the urban professional class has been disproportionately on one side of the debate, you’ll see the Times grappling with a fair representation of views from across many backgrounds and political orientations.

It is also true that the MAGA-era Republican Party has become more challenging to cover in a way that the party and its supporters would recognize as fair. On some subjects, a significant portion of the party has become untethered from fact and science, and it has made startlingly direct attacks on democracy and its foundations. Journalists have an obligation to report on this shift plainly, even if that leads our coverage to be accused of bias. If a majority of Republican voters believe—as polls have consistently shown—that Trump won the 2020 election, it’s safe to assume that those same voters would be skeptical of a news organization that clearly labels that belief false. But this heightened skepticism can at times go too far, and that risk can be compounded in moments of premature consensus among experts journalists rely on. Here the early coverage of the COVID pandemic is instructive. The press was confronted with the challenge of the president and others in his party sharing inaccurate information about the disease and the toll of the pandemic while also undermining the efficacy of vaccines and peddling sometimes dangerous alternatives . Those stories required the press to be intensely skeptical of the administration’s claims and actions. But there was insufficient skepticism of an emerging scientific and bureaucratic consensus that presented itself as more settled than it actually was. That combination sometimes created blind spots, like an overly quick dismissal of the lab leak theory or insufficient questioning of the wisdom of extended school closures.

Critics on the left also argue that supposedly objective journalists are anchored to a point of view, but in this case one that privileges a straight white male perspective and the status quo. This critique takes many forms, but often centers on the belief that notions like objectivity—the very idea of it, not just the failure to achieve it—exist to maintain and insulate existing power structures from change or scrutiny.

The assertion that newsrooms, like virtually all of the nation’s institutions, have long been overly dominated by straight white men is obviously true. Even with significant progress in diversifying in recent years, few newsrooms look like the communities they cover, leaving gaps in the stories they find and the insights journalists bring to them. That’s the case not just with race and gender, but with groups like evangelical Christians, military veterans, or people who attended community college. It is also true that at times, news organizations have wielded the objectivity label to wrongly suggest that minority journalists couldn’t fairly cover issues crucial to their own communities, even though they rarely questioned whether white men could fairly cover white men.

These shortcomings should be seen as a failure of independence rather than an indictment of it. In all kinds of coverage, reporters bring their experience and expertise to bear. More diverse newsrooms—armed with a broader range of backgrounds, experiences, relationships, skills, and expertise—spot more stories and imbue them with greater nuance and insight. A reporter who studied physics will be a better science reporter for it. An editor who grew up in the Great Plains will have a sharper eye for nuance in a story that takes place there. And a journalist from an underrepresented group can bring life experience and direct knowledge to stories involving that group. “Our eyes are connected to our bodies, which often shape the way we experience the world and how the world experiences us. My eyes will see some things yours never will,” as Lowery put it in his recent CJR essay. “The ‘story’ we seek to tell is in fact a mosaic that must be filled in piece by piece. While one journalist may supply many tiles, seeing the entire scene requires others to fill in the rest. Thus, understanding objective reality requires a diversity of contributors.”

It’s striking how often these two ideals—a diverse newsroom and an independent newsroom—are pitted against each other, as if one or the other must be chosen. What’s clear is that representation alone is not enough; it needs to be backed by a culture that invites a broad range of views into conversations about story choice and story framing. Many journalists from underrepresented groups have stories about being recruited in part because of the different perspectives they bring but, once on board, being told to put aside those perspectives to avoid being dismissed as biased.

Independence doesn’t mean that a reporter has to be a blank slate. A reporter who grew up in a neighborhood where racial profiling or police violence was a daily concern can bring an invaluable depth of knowledge and understanding to those topics. That experience might lead to a healthier dose of skepticism of police accounts or a greater understanding of the ways these injustices damage communities. Independence is only compromised if a reporter’s preconceptions undercut the goal of genuinely open-minded inquiry, like dismissing all police statements or downplaying rising crime. The public is best served when journalists—regardless of personal identity, personal political views, and personal life experience—approach each story with an open mind, ready to seek out information that might upend expectations or present a more complicated picture.

Both-sidesism: One of the most common criticisms of independence is that it leads journalists to treat unequal things equally.

False equivalence—today often derided as “both-sidesism,” a phrase popularized by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU—is when journalists make opposing views appear similarly credible, even when they are not, to leave the impression of down-the-middle reporting that doesn’t take sides. Once again, it is not difficult to find historical grounding for this critique. News organizations long included comments from outlier scientists casting doubt on the reality of climate change, even after the vast majority of scientists had concluded it was real. Several factors drove such failures. Newsrooms often cared not just about being independent but about being perceived as independent, by readers and sources alike. The mechanics of deadline journalism also played a role, as inserting a quote from all sides was a quick and simple way to signal both fairness and completeness. There is good reason to disparage a model that elevates a pantomime of fairness over demonstrations of good judgment. It’s lazy journalism that fails readers and is easily exploited by bad-faith actors. As a previous publisher of the Times remarked: “Although I favor the open mind, I certainly do not advocate that the mind should be so open that the brains fall out.”

But this line of criticism misses the profound ways that traditional news organizations that believe in the independent model have shifted. Journalists today use plainer language, show a greater willingness to expose lies, and produce more analytical work grounded in their own reporting and expertise, even when doing so opens them up to calls of bias. While that shift was already well underway, it was solidified through the norm-shattering presidency of Trump, whose statements—whether they were about crowd sizes, the birthplace of his predecessor, the COVID pandemic, or election results—were often demonstrably untrue and were typically called out as such without euphemism or counterpoint.

Today, the both-sidesism argument thus has the feel of media critics fighting the last war . But the both-sidesism line of attack has been happily embraced by activists and partisans who want to pressure the media to minimize any alternative to their views. By demanding that journalists treat a topic as settled fact, they attempt to win a debate by avoiding one. This is why people often invoke both-sidesism when journalists interview a voter for a candidate they oppose, explore the opposite side of an issue to the one they hold, or take the journalistically responsible course of giving those accused of wrongdoing a chance to explain themselves.

This charge is particularly common on issues where participants have staked out zero-sum positions—as with abortion rights or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—in which open-minded coverage of each side is seen as undermining the other. For example, despite Russia’s attempts to make it a criminal offense to report the truth, it is undeniable that Russia invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked act of war and that its troops have carried out a huge number of shocking atrocities . It is also true that Ukrainian forces appear to have used internationally banned cluster munitions . Reporting this does not amount to a moral judgment asserting “on the other hand, Ukrainians do bad things too,” but reflects an attempt to fully capture the conflict. Without such independent assessments it would be impossible for Ukrainians, Russians, foreign leaders, or ordinary people to understand the true state of the war and its costs.

As that example shows, the both-sidesism argument is wielded most powerfully when the stakes are highest. We often hear a version like this: Trump is a threat to democracy, and you’re asking about his opponent’s age or emails? Or, the world is facing a climate catastrophe and you’re wondering if gas prices are too high? Or, the human rights of my group are under systemic attack and you’re focusing on one bad actor on our side? In the end, these efforts attempt to reduce wide-ranging lines of coverage into a single statement about what is most true and important, rather than to reflect the reality that many things can be true and important at the same time. Journalists should be alert to the risk of false equivalence. But today I believe the greater journalistic risk is for reporters to close themselves to the possibility of new and evolving facts that may reveal other aspects of a story or, worse, to actively embrace a journalistic one-sideism to signal that they are on the side of the righteous.

Bad outcomes: Another line of criticism asserts that when journalists report information that makes a negative outcome more likely, they are complicit in that outcome. This argument typically takes two forms: that news organizations should not publish information that bad actors might misuse and that they should not offer airtime to views that should be excised from the public square.

It is true that journalists should not be blind to the potential impact their reporting may have. And in limited cases we do change a specific story or alter our approach to a broader area of coverage with an eye toward minimizing any resulting danger. For example, we are careful in quoting dissidents in countries where such an action may lead to reprisal, particularly when it comes to ordinary people who may not fully appreciate the risks they are taking. Similarly, our coverage of subjects like mass shootings and suicide has been informed in part by research looking at how media attention can inspire others to do the same thing. And on rare occasions, we will hold publication of a national security story when we are told the release of certain secrets could directly endanger lives.

But, in general, independent reporters and editors should ask, “Is it true? Is it important?” If the answer to both questions is yes, journalists should be profoundly skeptical of any argument that favors censoring or skewing what they’ve learned based on a subjective view about whether it may yield a damaging outcome. Do we overlook the corruption of a US ally because it could embolden an anti-American opposition? Do we fail to explore legitimate questions about the physical or mental health of a political candidate because some believe the other candidate might be worse? Do we not report that the government has been secretly wiretapping US citizens without warrants because the Bush administration argues the disclosure would put lives at risk by undermining a critical antiterrorism tool? That last argument succeeded in delaying a story for the better part of a year—a decision many now view as the wrong one—but its eventual publication made clear that this information was needed to open up an important debate about how the country was balancing national security and civil liberties.

More recently, we’ve heard similar arguments about journalism putting lives at risk emerging from our coverage of the debates inside the medical community over care for transgender children. Critics have accused our work of “‘both sides’ fearmongering and bad-faith ‘just asking questions’ coverage” and have suggested that even acknowledging a broader range of views on this topic has legitimized—wittingly or not—a repressive legal effort to undermine the rights and the safety of a group that faces significant prejudice. “The pretense of objectivity—the newsroom ideal that all ‘sides’ of an issue should be heard—often harms marginalized people more than it helps them,” wrote one critic of our coverage. “If you say ‘I want to live,’ and I say ‘No,’ what happens next isn’t a debate; it’s murder.”

The Times has covered the surge of discrimination, threats, and violence faced by trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, including the rapidly growing number of legislative efforts attacking their rights. We’ve also covered the many ways in which people challenging gender norms are gaining recognition and breaking barriers in the United States and around the world. Yet our critics overlook these articles—and there are hundreds of them —to instead focus on a small number of pieces that explore particularly sensitive questions that society is actively working through, but which some would prefer for the Times to treat as settled.

In the long run, ignoring societal disagreements or actively suppressing certain facts and viewpoints—even with the best of intentions—turns the press into an overtly political actor, encourages conspiracy theories about hidden agendas, and validates accusations that the media is dishonest. That, in turn, undermines trust in journalism and limits its ability to have an impact when we reveal injustice, corruption, or other wrongdoing.

The second bad outcome that is often raised is “platforming,” the concept that including people with bad or dangerous views in articles—or allowing them to write guest essays in the opinion section—makes the world a worse or more dangerous place. The central concern in this argument is that the very act of examining or sharing disliked or repugnant opinions, without explicitly condemning them, amounts to promoting and legitimizing them.

This reflects the heated societal debate about what to do about views one finds questionable, offensive, or dangerous. The Times has been criticized along these lines for everything from a profile of a Nazi sympathizer to an opinion essay from a Taliban leader, not to mention the essay “Send in the Troops” by Senator Cotton that roiled the Times like nothing else that has happened in my tenure. It is true that a soft feature or an unrebutted essay can effectively misinform by failing to provide needed context and thus obscure a larger truth. And it is certainly true that news organizations don’t serve readers well by flooding them with a cacophony of information and perspectives in the hope that they stumble upon the truth on their own. Everything we publish should meet basic standards of verification and intellectual honesty. Exercising journalistic judgment about which voices to include and how does not amount to censorship.

But there is just as much risk to a journalistic model that aggressively narrows the field of acceptable speakers and comment. When we err, we would rather err on the side of inclusion, not exclusion. For example, as part of our extensive coverage of COVID vaccines, we published an article about vaccine skeptics, which clearly stated that the vaccines were safe and gave careful context about conspiracy theories. But why bother to understand skeptics’ views at all if they are wrong, even dangerous? The United States has the lowest full-vaccination rate of any of the world’s wealthiest democracies, and the anti-vaccine movement was strengthening in ways that raised profound public health questions that society continues to grapple with.

It’s also worth briefly noting two more criticisms that are more specific to the structure of the Times , though they are shared by many other news organizations as well.

The first is that the existence of our opinion section can appear to be in direct tension with our promise of independence. It’s easy to see why some people would make this argument, given that every opinion piece promotes a personal point of view. But opinion journalism can actually represent another valuable way to meet this core commitment to independence by helping readers explore ideas and develop and challenge their own views on important subjects. That’s why we employ a diverse group of columnists who bring a range of backgrounds, interests, and political leanings to their work. And it’s why we make a point to solicit guest essays from an even wider range of perspectives. For many of our readers, the voices and pieces they’ve come to appreciate most are the very ones they agree with least.

Indeed the original goal of inviting outside writers and experts onto our pages was based on the belief that exposing readers to a diversity of opinions would have the effect of “stimulating new thought and provoking new discussion on public problems.” Even if each piece, including our editorials, is rooted to an individual view, reading across the section offers a broad and diverse collection of views that together should serve as a guide through the big debates in society. The best opinion writing embraces many of the same values as an independent newsroom—with columnists and other opinion writers using reporting, analysis, and expertise to inform their work and editors holding it to high standards of accuracy, fairness, and intellectual rigor.

Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet. For that reason, we’ve long kept the opinion department intentionally small—it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff—and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom. In recent years we’ve also gone to increasing lengths to make its work both less prominent on our homepage and more visually distinct from news reporting to avoid confusing readers about the difference between news and opinion.

The second criticism centers on our subscription-based business model. In this time of institutional skepticism, it’s easy to assume cynical business motives when executives espouse high-minded ideals. Conservative critics assume we are incentivized to cater to a liberal audience. And progressive critics assume that our insistence on independence is motivated by a desire to acquire more conservative subscribers. In truth, the value of a fair representation of the world—and the people and ideas shaping it—isn’t just for the believer, it’s for the skeptic. A diverse society should aspire to understand the lives and motives of all people, as well as the range of arguments shaping the public debate. Thankfully, we’ve found that readers generally agree. Though I’m often asked about the cancellation campaigns led by interest groups upset with our coverage, the actual numbers are vanishingly small. Instead, studies of our readers show that across all their diversity, their most consistent shared quality, compared with the broader public, is a desire to be challenged, confronted with information, ideas, and perspectives that expand rather than merely validate their sense of the world. Even as our coverage has upset every part of the political spectrum, the number of people who value independent journalism enough to engage with it and pay for it has grown significantly at the Times and elsewhere.

The Risks of the Alternatives

Much as with democracy itself, to borrow a quip from Winston Churchill, the case for independent journalism is made stronger by the weakness of the alternatives.

Independent journalism is not a neutral platform. Rather than simply deluging readers with a cacophony of voices and hoping the most valuable rise to the surface, it makes countless journalistic choices, large and small, that aim to actively guide readers to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the world grounded in fact. These choices include contextualizing information, discerning which voices would be most relevant in capturing a debate, and helping people put the significance of an event in perspective.

But independent journalism is also not advocacy journalism. To be clear, the model of advocacy journalism—whose practitioners wear their leanings openly—has shown its value in a long and honorable history. News outlets focused on specific ethnic or racial groups, for example, have played an essential role for more than a century of forcing attention on issues, celebrating people, and championing reforms too often ignored by the mainstream press. Today many high-integrity news organizations are open about their politics and objectives, from Mother Jones on the left to The Dispatch on the right to a host of podcasts and newsletters catering to every imaginable subject and viewpoint. The Marshall Project has not let its core goal of remaking the criminal justice system allow it to skew the facts. CoinDesk broke a story that threatened the very cryptocurrency industry it was launched to support.

But this advocacy model is dangerous when treated as independent journalism’s replacement rather than its supplement. The revelations from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News underscore the dangers of the advocacy model when fully unchecked. In trying to satiate its audience’s desire for validation—or to advance its preferred political outcome—Fox and those who have embraced its model ultimately unhinge themselves from a fair-minded pursuit of the truth. Facts that match their ideological leanings or preferred political outcomes are often hyped up while those that undermine them are downplayed. Instead of broadening understanding, this model misleads its audience—seen in the fact that Fox News viewers are more likely to believe, incorrectly, that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11, Barack Obama wasn’t a US citizen, and the 2020 election was stolen.

Putting ideology front and center is frequently promoted as more honest (isn’t it better to announce one’s biases than to hide them?) and more honorable (isn’t it better to push for solving problems rather than just describing them?). But this can stoke false confidence that one’s personal opinions are actually fundamental truths. What it means to fight for justice is different for everyone. For some it means defending the right to openly carry a weapon, for others the right of migrants to cross unfettered into another nation. But what are the facts about whether carrying guns makes people safer? What impact has tightening or loosening immigration laws had on people, jobs, and culture?

Journalists, no matter how wise and well intentioned, who believe in their own righteousness can find their conviction hardening in ways that obstruct rather than illuminate the world they cover. Even if journalists can navigate all these hazards, journalism driven by a desire to shape outcomes struggles in the inevitable moments when the facts they discover sit in conflict with a larger political goal that they—or their employer—is committed to advancing. And there are further risks when those views are motivated not by genuine principle but by self-interest or partisan advantage.

Contrast the advocacy model with the independent model and you’ll see how different the approaches are. The same Times reporter who broke the story that Donald Trump had asked the director of the FBI to pledge his personal loyalty also broke the story that Hillary Clinton used her personal email account as secretary of state. Similarly, just months after a Times investigation revealed large payouts to silence sexual harassment allegations against Bill O’Reilly, a leading conservative commentator, we published a similar investigation into Harvey Weinstein, a leading liberal donor. And we’ve vigorously reported on everything from personal misconduct to gerrymandering efforts by both Republicans and Democrats. We didn’t write these stories to balance a ledger; we wrote them because each one was individually true and individually important.

The pushback we get on every such piece makes clear that one of the most profound journalistic choices of the era is to either pick a tribe or prepare to upset people. A commitment to independence means the latter is the only defensible option, even though it comes at a substantial short-term cost. At a moment in which forces are attempting to exploit classically liberal ideals—like the journalistic model I am defending here—toward illiberal ends, independent news organizations shouldn’t do their work for them by forsaking those values ourselves.

The Path Forward

How do we protect independent journalism, as challenges arrive from nearly every corner?

The most important safeguard of an independent press is a strong and sustainable press. We need to build up the business model for reported journalism, particularly at the local level. We need to secure legal protections for reporters and their sources to ensure the free flow of information to the public. We need to address the deepening crackdowns against journalists overseas—like Russia’s recent arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—and the growing harassment of them at home.

But focusing more narrowly on the question of independence, a few steps are clear for journalists and leaders of journalistic institutions, the Times very much included.

First and foremost, journalists should remember that our core purpose, as I have been saying, is to follow the facts wherever they lead, even when we would prefer for them not to be true, and to fairly represent people and perspectives, even when we disagree with them. Any compromise on this is likely to further erode the public’s already shaky confidence in journalism and ultimately hobble the ability of journalists to serve a society desperately in need of reliable information. I’ve seen countless instances in which people want journalists to bury reporting, twist the facts, or embrace speculation—all to demonstrate allegiance to some higher cause. Instead, journalists should interrogate the world with curiosity, not certainty. We should remain skeptical, humble, searching, as we explore every story, no matter how well we think we know a topic. We should complicate seemingly tidy narratives, embrace nuance, and continually question what we find.

Second, journalists should recommit to reporting as the most valuable service we provide to the public. Reporting—not commentary or aggregation—is the essential ingredient of new ideas and new insights and allows every part of the journalism ecosystem to flourish. This requires journalists to get out of our bubbles. One insidious side effect of the collapse of local news is that journalism jobs are increasingly dominated by highly educated people living in blue coastal cities: according to the Pew Research Center, more than one in five journalists lives in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington. And far too many over-rely on Twitter, mistaking it for a public town square rather than a journalistic echo chamber. Reporters need to work harder to go to unfamiliar places, meet with unfamiliar people, and challenge our own assumptions with unfamiliar perspectives, experiences, and ideas.

Third, journalists need to better recognize how public criticism can manipulate coverage. In today’s hyper-connected environment, the response to our work is more immediate and intense than ever. The increase in transparency and greater accountability for our mistakes and missteps is a welcome shift. But the reaction to our work now often arrives through attacks designed to intimidate by questioning journalists’ legitimacy or morality. The critics here don’t want to set the record straight; they want to cajole, shame, and scare journalists into providing more favorable coverage. At the same time, cheers, like jeers, can be used to co-opt. Self-respecting journalists don’t take marching orders from politicians and corporations; they need to equally resist shaping their coverage to win the praise of activists and interest groups, even those engaged in admirable work. As Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of the Times , often says: Watchdogs cannot allow themselves to become lapdogs.

Finally, journalists should more actively reckon with the uncomfortable reality of widespread distrust in the media. It will take years, if not decades, to win over people who have been told again and again by those they admire and trust—including a former president of the United States—that the media hates them and hates this country. But news organizations can’t act as if they are powerless to reverse the growing distrust in journalism more broadly. They need to do a far better job fighting for their reputations and explaining how they make journalistic decisions. Many of the profession’s conventions—the inverted-pyramid article structure, datelines and bylines, and contortions to excise the writer from the work— are relics of an era when faith in journalistic institutions was assumed. I’m not convinced people ever really understood these conventions. But today we can say with certainty that they don’t. The Times ’ own research suggests that even many loyal readers did not understand that our journalists—who, in a normal year, report on the ground from more than 160 countries, often in difficult and dangerous conditions—actually go to the places they write about. That is a failure not of readers’ understanding but of our communication. We haven’t consistently and clearly shown what goes into our reporting, adequately explained our process, or fully clarified how we view our role.

Beyond the journalism industry, others must do their part if we are to protect independent journalism and the role it plays to nurture an informed society. Three groups stand out.

Search engines and, especially, social platforms—most notably Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok—have played an outsize role in creating the conditions that threaten independent journalism. I’m not talking about the shift of advertising dollars from news organizations to tech giants, though that hasn’t helped. I’m talking about the profound shifts in how people find and engage with information, shifts that have exacerbated groupthink, fostered antipathy, and fractured people’s understanding of reality. These platforms and others have largely treated facts as indistinguishable from opinions, allowed reality to mix with conspiracy, and given propaganda equal footing with journalism. And the use of likes and shares to assess engagement and determine promotion has incentivized publishers to produce content that affirms rather than informs, that inflames divisions rather than promotes understanding. I’m sympathetic to the challenges the platforms face in regulating their environments, but they will continue to foster misinformation and polarization until they do more to both differentiate and elevate reputable independent news sources, even if it comes at the cost of user engagement or political backlash.

If journalism was the unintended casualty of the platforms, it’s been the political establishment’s explicit target. Our country’s founders largely defended the free press, even as they knew that its scrutiny wasn’t always comfortable. But particularly in the past few years, a sustained and escalating campaign from the American right has focused on attacking the press to win votes and inoculate itself against criticism or scrutiny. Rather than responding to the substance of unflattering reporting, they’ve labeled reporters “enemies of the people” and our work “fake news.”

This campaign has widened what was long a modest partisan gap in trust in journalism to a chasm. Today, 70 percent of Democrats say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media; 14 percent of Republicans do. The anti-press rhetoric has also inspired legal action. The Times has faced four times as many libel suits in the six years since Trump’s election than in the six years before—many from right-wing activists who want the Supreme Court to overturn what were long assumed to be bedrock legal protections for the press. A not-so-subtle goal of this effort is to make it easier to sue news organizations and, as a result, harder for journalists to bring information to the public.

This may be an effective tactic. Few professions today evoke more widespread scorn than journalism. But attacking the free press is reckless and unpatriotic. In countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, similar anti-journalism rhetoric and action have presaged broader dismantling of democratic norms, efforts made far easier without the transparency and accountability provided by a free and independent press. In the United States, this amounts to a dangerous incursion not just on the spirit of the First Amendment, but on the special formula that has made this country the most successful on earth. Our nation’s history shows independent journalism not only makes our society more informed, it makes our nation more secure, our economy stronger, our people healthier, our society more just. Systematically undermining independent journalism—and seeking to replace it with self-serving propaganda from powerful interests—weakens the nation.

No one stands to lose more from these trends than the American people. For decades, spreading a newspaper on the kitchen table or gathering to watch the nightly news was an essential part of being a good citizen. The rituals may have changed, but the need hasn’t. Citizens still benefit from a shared set of facts. They still benefit from understanding their neighbors and their nation and caring enough to peek beyond the boundaries of their own lives to engage with the larger world.

It is Americans themselves who will need to insist that there is a future for independent journalism. Amid all the distraction, confusion, and chaos of the digital world, it’s more important than ever that citizens develop relationships with news organizations that inform and challenge them, commit to finding a daily place in their lives for independent journalism, and use it to expand, not merely reinforce, their worldview. If the press holds fast to journalistic independence, I am confident that over time more people—of all backgrounds and perspectives—will come to see the value of journalists serving as fair-minded guides through a complex world at a consequential moment.

The voice of journalism, since 1961

• Privacy Policy

Support CJR

• Become a Member

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

What is journalism for? In today’s world, here are four key purposes

Faced with huge competition from social media, here are things that, to me, remain worthwhile in a free society

I f, as Hilary Mantel memorably proposed , history is the way we organise our ignorance of the past, how might we tackle our ignorance of our radically changing communications present, to keep the future bright? Hope may be power, as the Guardian’s recent promotional campaign slogan asserts it is, but nurturing hope requires some shared vocabulary.

Let’s start small: what is journalism for? Besides making money and influence for a few, what purposes do media serve in societies that want to call themselves free? Even a rough consensus about that might help us assess how well those purposes are being fulfilled, and to know better how to adjust in an era of huge but clumsy social media entities and data-hungry, ethically unaccountable artificial intelligence. Four purposes of journalism, familiar even if usually expressed differently, seem to me to remain worthwhile:

Help civil society to cohere Media, especially local media, serve as public forums, information collectors and disseminators and conduits through which many of the routine activities necessary to a healthy civil society happen – unnoticed until they are gone, or no longer sufficiently open. Crucially, these processes foster tolerance in the sense that they make it possible to observe the diversity, the “otherness”, around us, without requiring us to join in, or even approve. They help us rub along together – no small achievement.

Facilitate democratic processes From campaigning, debating and voting to extracting accountability and forcing into view public interest issues which we do not want to see, but which will fester to our detriment unless we face them.

Lubricate commerce Through advertising and specialist business, finance and economics reporting, since the earliest days of newspapers, journalism has served this purpose – and while it can create conflicts of interest, its byproduct is financial independence from the state, which is essential to other purposes of journalism. (How media power is held accountable is a legitimate topic, but for another day.)

Make and mix the culture It sells journalism short not to acknowledge that its finest practitioners make a distinct contribution to the culture. But the emphasis here is on how journalism mixes what others make. Artists will create and cultural rituals will be acted out (and believed in) regardless of whether anyone observes, records, disseminates, applauds, tuts or hisses. But through reviews, listings, previews, interviews, profiles and their “nose for the new”, journalists do much to raise awareness, generate opportunity and magnify.

These verbs matter: help, facilitate, lubricate, mix. Journalism has always been self-interested, but it has done, and still does, a lot of collateral good. As communications continue to change and other players take increasingly powerful roles, we will all be affected by what they decide they are for.

Most viewed

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Communication and Culture
• Communication and Social Change
• Communication and Technology
• Communication Theory
• Critical/Cultural Studies
• Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)
• Health and Risk Communication
• Intergroup Communication
• International/Global Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Journalism Studies
• Language and Social Interaction
• Mass Communication
• Media and Communication Policy
• Organizational Communication
• Political Communication
• Rhetorical Theory
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Journalists’ professional roles and role performance.

• Claudia Mellado Claudia Mellado School of Journalism, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.832
• Published online: 25 February 2019

Professional roles are a key topic in journalism research along with the fundamental elements in defining journalism as a profession. For many decades, scholars have devoted their efforts to analyzing normative standards and journalistic ideals, while their analysis through the lens of professional performance has remained in the background. Nevertheless, considerably more attention has been paid over the past decade to the theorization of the different concepts in play when analyzing professional roles in journalism, especially the study of journalistic role performance (i.e., the manifestation of professional roles in both news decisions and the news outcome that reaches the public). Studies on journalistic role performance are able to tell us how or to what extent news professionals have enough autonomy for their role conceptions or perceptions to be manifested in journalistic practices, as well as in the news product made available to the public.

So far, research on journalistic role performance has systematically found patterns of multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures across and within advanced, transitional, and non-democratic countries. Several studies have also shown significant discrepancies depending on societal, organizational, and individual factors, as well as a wide gap between journalistic ideals and professional practices. Some of these studies have also found significant discrepancies between journalists’ role conceptions and their perceived role enactments.

Future studies need to address the intrinsic capacity of social media platforms to deinstitutionalize communication through parallel channels, which may turn out to be a crucial element when it comes to performing both traditional and new journalistic roles.

• professional roles
• journalistic role performance
• journalistic cultures
• role conception
• role perception
• perceived role enactment
• comparative journalistic research
• professionalism
• journalism studies

Introduction

As an object of study, professional roles are one of the key topics in journalism research (Mellado, Hellmueller, & Donsbach, 2017a , p. 3). They are also the fundamental elements when it comes to defining journalism as a profession. In this respect, journalistic roles become essential components of journalistic cultures.

Journalistic cultures represent the cultural capital that, as “interpretive communities,” journalists share. They may manifest themselves in values and ideals as well as in journalistic practices (Mellado et al., 2017a ; Schudson, 2003 ; Zelizer, 1993 ).

For many decades, the study of professional roles in journalism was addressed mostly from the perspective of normative standards and journalistic ideals, while their analysis through the lens of professional performance remained in the background.

Through surveys of and interviews with journalists, an extensive array of studies around the globe have analyzed both the different roles that they should normatively fulfill in society (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009 ) as well as the roles that journalists consider important for their profession (Hanitzsch, 2011 ; Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007 ; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 , 1996 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ; Weinacht & Spiller, 2014 ; Willnat, Weaver, & Choi, 2013 ). Among the classic empirical typologies of roles are the “neutral” and “participant” roles found by Cohen ( 1963 ); the “neutral,” “watchdog,” and “analytical” roles found by Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman ( 1976 ); the “disseminator,” the “interpreter,” the “watchdog,” and the “populist mobilizer” roles found by Weaver and his team at Indiana University (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 , 1996 ; Weaver et al., 2007 ), or the “bloodhound” and “missionary” functions proposed by Köcher ( 1986 ).

Studies on professional role conceptions have been Western-oriented (Josephi, 2005 ; Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ; Mellado, 2015 ). Most early studies on role conceptions were designed and conducted in advanced democracies (especially the United States). 1 Later, researchers from other regions such as Latin America, Asia, and Africa became interested in applying these surveys to their own journalists to establish which professional roles were most important to them (e.g., Deuze, 2002 ; Herscovitz, 2004 ; Muchtar, Hamada, Hanitzsch, Masduki, & Ullah, 2017 ; Pasti, 2005 ; Ramaprasad, 2001 ; Wilke, 1998 ; Zhu, Weaver, Lo, Chen, & Wu, 1997 ). However, most of them relied on measurements or conceptual approaches developed in the West, basically because they were already available.

Over the past six decades, most of these studies have typically shown that journalists worldwide endorse professional roles and values that emphasize neutrality, objectivity, and the scrutiny of official behavior, holding those in power accountable (e.g., Donsbach & Patterson, 2004 ; Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Weaver, 1998 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ).

One of the basic assumptions of role conception research is that the way in which journalists understand their roles shapes the news content they produce. This assumption is mostly based on psychological studies that have shown a significant relationship between attitudes and behavior in specific working and personal environments (Kim & Hunter, 1993 ).

Indeed, earlier studies on role conceptions argued that there was a significant relationship between role conceptions and journalistic decisions (Kepplinger, Brosius, & Staab, 1991 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Starck & Soloski, 1977 ). However, those studies did not compare the rhetoric on roles with actual journalistic performance but only journalists’ perceptions of different professional roles, as well as what they thought they actually did. However, as we know, surveys will never measure actual behavior.

Moreover, the extent to which journalistic ideals can manifest themselves in practice in the journalistic field depends on myriad factors that frequently yield differences and sometimes contradictions between what professionals would like to do and what they actually do in their work (Mellado et al., 2017a ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Shoemaker & Reese, 2013 ; Van Dalen, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2012 ).

As far back as the 1930s, Rosten ( 1937 ) had already warned of the tension between professional ideals and practical constraints. Since then, gatekeeping theory and the hierarchy-of-influences approach have analyzed a variety of constraints that might influence how journalists perform their roles, suggesting that explanations of journalistic cultures based solely on role conception research should be questioned rather than assumed (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013 ; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009 ).

Due to the problem of taking survey data as valid measurements of journalistic practice (Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Schudson, 2003 ; Vos, 2002 ) and the lack of theorization of professional roles within the journalistic field (Mellado et al., 2017a ), considerably more attention has been paid over the past decade to the study of journalistic role performance, that is, the manifestation of professional roles in both news decisions and the news outcome that reaches the public (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ; Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Mellado, 2015 ; Mellado, Humanes, Scherman, & Ovando, 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2017a , 2017b ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Stępińska, Jurga-Wosik, Adamczewska, Selcer, & Narożna, 2016 ; Vos, 2002 ; Tandoc, Hellmueller, & Vos, 2013 ; Wang, Sparks, Lü, & Huang, 2017 ).

The concept of role performance focuses on the connection between journalists’ beliefs about the role of journalism and the actual practice of producing the news (Mellado, 2015 ). It connects studies on the professionalism of roles with those on news production and the sociology of news.

In accordance with gatekeeping and hierarchy-of-influences studies, more recent research measuring both role conceptions and actual role performance has systematically shown a wide gap between professional ideals and professional practices at different levels (Brüggemann & Engesser, 2014 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Tandoc et al., 2013 ; Vos, 2002 ).

Different studies assert that although journalistic role conception research is an important component for the study of professionalism, where “ideals and values are the tools and skill sets that set journalism apart from other fields and guarantee its autonomy from heteronymous forces, and serve to legitimatize and define journalism” (Mellado, 2015 , p. 596), the constraints to which they are exposed within the profession limit the possibility of living up to their normative standards (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ), even though journalists may have clear ideas about which professional roles are most important to them.

Research on journalistic role performance has also shown that the practice of the profession seems to vary much more widely than the current findings on journalistic ideals would suggest. The most recent empirical studies have found patterns of multilayered hybridization in professional role performance worldwide, with journalistic cultures displaying multiple “types of journalism” that do not fully resemble ideal typologies of roles or media systems (Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2017b ; Mellado, Márquez-Ramírez, Mick, Oller Alonso, & Olivera, 2017e ; Stępińska et al., 2016 ; Wang et al., 2017 ). In other words, these studies have found that when considering the performance of essential roles of journalism in society, ideal or conventional assumptions about journalistic role conceptions in different societal settings fail to work.

Such results reported by the international literature on journalistic role performance in recent years have undeniably re-opened the opportunity to discuss the extent to which professional roles are contingent upon different levels of influence (Mellado et al., 2017a ). In this context, the concept of journalistic role performance becomes quite valuable since it focuses attention on issues relating to structure, agency, culture, and political economy. These issues are key to the understanding of journalism as a social practice (Esser, 2008 ). Journalistic role performance also raises the problem of the connection between journalism’s normative ideals and practice (Schudson, 2003 ), and encourages us to think about how ideals arise and function within a larger social context and how they relate to journalistic performance.

It is relevant to consider that although this entry is squarely positioned in the quantitative research tradition—as it is the tradition of most role performance, role conception, and role perception studies—there is a lot of newsroom and ethnography research that actually addresses these specific issues using a different conceptual framework. Indeed, reading authors from media sociology like Goffman ( 1959 ) or Tuchman ( 1972 ) clearly shows us that the notion of role performance has been quite close to qualitative and ethnographic research that has dealt with how journalists actually “operationalize” their own ideals in their daily practice.

Professional Roles as Object of Study

One of the main challenges of quantitative studies on journalistic professional roles over time has been the lack of theorization and empirical focus on analyzing the link between role conception and journalistic practice. Basically, journalistic roles have mostly been used as an empirical concept to study the functions on which journalists place more importance in society, while the definitions given to the construct “professional role” have varied quite widely (Mellado, Hellmueller, & Weaver, 2017c ).

Overall, role theory defines a role as the expected behavior of people who occupy a particular social status and position in society (Biddle, 1979 ; Montgomery, 1998 ). In other words, a role has been conceptualized as the function undertaken by an individual in accordance with the normative demands placed upon that individual in his or her position (Goffman, 1961 , p. 85). It should be noted, however, that roles might take different forms depending on the level of analysis applied to them.

Mellado et al. ( 2017a ) distinguished four different concepts within the construct of professional roles in journalism: role conception, role perception, (perceived) role enactment, and role performance (see Table 1 ), taking into account the dual empirical and evaluative aspect thereof. The differences between these concepts are not only about how they are defined but also about how they can be empirically measured (Blumer, 1969 ; Lynch, 2007 ; Turner, 2006 ).

Role conception: The purposes of the profession that a journalist conceives as most important at the individual level, and where the journalists’ evaluation of a specific role is not necessarily related to social consensus.

Role perception: Perceived role expectations in society. Role perceptions do not form a mental picture of a role for a particular journalist and do not necessarily have a location in the conceiver. They may instead follow a script that has been internalized and is located in a larger social structure. For example, journalists who perceive a watchdog role as important may have internalized the way of thinking expected by the media outlet where they work.

Role enactment: The implementation of a journalistic role focusing on the individual journalist only. Here, of course, there is a need for consistency between the journalist’s role conception/perception and his or her behavior. Within journalism studies, role enactment has been addressed mostly at the evaluative level of analysis, referring to what journalists think they do (Culbertson, 1983 ; Oi, Fukuda, & Sako, 2012 ; Patterson & Donsbach, 1996 ; Skovsgaard, Albæk, Bro, & de Vreese, 2013 ; Weischenberg, Malik, & Scholl, 2006 ). Some studies have used the term “role enactment” to analyze the manifestation of journalistic roles in news content (Carpenter, Boehmer, & Fico, 2015 ; Tandoc et al., 2013 ; Vos, 2002 ). Nevertheless, given the internal and external constraints that impact journalism, the concept of role enactment may never be fully applied within the journalistic profession. In this respect, role enactment differs from role performance in that it is more difficult to accomplish in journalism, since it implies that journalists have autonomy and freedom over their work, thereby being able to individually put into practice what they think are the most important roles of their profession.

Role performance: The collective outcome of concrete newsroom decisions and the style of journalistic reporting, taking into consideration the different factors that influence journalism as a professional practice (Mellado et al., 2017a , p. 5). Role performance deals with behaviors (Biddle, 1979 ; Burke & Reitzes, 1981 ), and it can be seen as an outcome of dynamic negotiations influenced by different internal and external constraints that potentially inhibit, but may also enable, the practice of journalism (Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 ). Within this context, role performance can explain the extent to which journalists’ news decisions and reporting styles are influenced by a journalist’s specific role conception, perception, or perceived enactment, or by other variables that are not in the mix of expectations perceived as legitimate.

The performative level of professional roles is the level most likely to be observed by the public and different reference groups through the outcome of newsroom decisions (e.g., the news story). Nevertheless, the study of role performance also enables an analysis that captures the so-called backstage of news production, that is, the negotiations with different reference groups, the search for sources, styles of data gathering, and the verification process.

It should be borne in mind that although its relevant components are inevitably determined by normative criteria, the concept of role performance is not a normative one (Mellado, 2015 ; Mellado et al., 2017a ).

Indeed, roles are not universal, so they are not good or bad per se. They are historical, are situational, and can be mediated constantly depending on the specific contexts. Journalists in advanced democracies, for example, may perform a more detached watchdog role or a more adversarial watchdog role, as happens in the cases of the United States and Spain. Likewise, journalists from transitional democracies may perform a more civic role or stick to performing a disseminator role if, for example, they are still fearful of a dictatorship regime. At the same time, journalists working for a very commercialized media outlet or in specific news beats may use the infotainment role in a much more prominent way, while in non-democratic countries the adversarial role or the loyal-facilitator role (depending on what type of dictatorship it is, of course) would be more appropriate.

Table 1. Role Conception, Perception, Enactment, and Performance in Journalism

Source: Mellado et al. ( 2017a , p. 7).

The differences in the way roles are conceptualized are limited by the applied perspective. The functionalist approach—the one used for most studies on professional role conceptions—sees a role as the set of expectations that a society places on an individual, creating regular rules and patterns of behavior. This definition stresses normative expectations and social consensus, where the performance of a role tends to be taken for granted. 2

This excess of normativism has meant that most research is still limited to “hard” news, giving the impression that journalistic professional roles are more relevant to specific groups of the profession that interact with the power elites, while ignoring those that report on other issues or topics. Indeed, the emphasis that the field has put on the link between politics and journalism has diminished other areas and elements of journalism that do not belong to this relationship (Zelizer, 2011 ). This has certainly affected the configuration of professional roles that are now addressed from both the normative and the empirical levels, and the way in which they have been studied. For example, social media raises important questions about journalists’ roles and their identity in a shared media space (Duggan, 2015 ; Hermida, 2014 ).

Meanwhile, the interactionism perspective—the one used by studies on role performance—does not see roles as being fixed but instead as negotiated and changeable within a particular social context (Blumer, 1969 ; Lynch, 2007 ; Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 , 2017 ). As it has been already mentioned, role performance studies conceptualize professional roles as flexible, situational, and independent sets of functions that can be combined in various ways across space and time, often subject to adaptation and combination (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 , p. 28). This approach is closer to the one used by earlier research that tackled some of these issues using a different methodology, e.g., newsroom ethnography studies.

The Gap Between Professional Ideals and Journalistic Performance

The gap between ideals of roles or normative values and role performance is measured as the degree of congruence or discrepancy between role conception, role perception, or perceived role enactment and professional performance (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

Understanding the gap and the relationship between what journalists want to do (or think they ought to do) and what they and the media actually perform is crucial to the analysis of forces affecting news production.

Journalists may see their main role as that of providing information that citizens need in order to be active in political life, yet they may be unable to perform that role because political stories do not necessarily attract large audiences. They may also see their main role as that of acting as a “watchdog” over those in power, yet they may be unable to perform that role in most countries due to obstacles such as government control, corporate control over the media (e.g., owners have veiled corporate interests that might become compromised by watchdog stories), among others constraints. For journalists, this situation is the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, the threats and harassment that these professionals face are a global challenge, even for advanced democracies (Löfgren & Örnebring, 2016 ).

In this respect, it is important to bear in mind that when the performance of individual journalists differs from the characteristics of their role conception or perception, it is not necessarily an indicator of a malfunctioning news organization. Indeed, such journalists may perform roles that conflict with those they think they do or like or ought to do with those their colleagues perform, those expected by the media outlet where they work, and even those embedded within the macro-organizational structure in which the media is located.

While systematic studies dedicated to measuring the gap are relatively recent and evidence of the forces explaining such a gap is still insufficient, I discuss here several reasons that may explain the distance between professional ideals and journalistic practice.

Professional roles are not mutually exclusive (Mellado, 2015 ); they are historically constructed and sometimes conflicting (Vos, 2017 ), so journalists have to combine them in various ways when they produce a news story. They may praise specific ideals of the profession, but their practices are guided by roles that are context specific and not fixed, which can be applied in different ways, as already exemplified in the section “ Professional Roles as Object of Study ” (Mellado, 2015 ).

Traditional approaches assume that professional roles are fully contracted by behavior and categorized by norms, values, and beliefs (Ashforth, 2001 ). Nevertheless, previous studies have suggested that journalistic roles cannot be considered discrete categories (Mellado, 2015 ; Vos, 2005 ). Indeed, while at the normative level it is possible to talk about ideal types of roles in journalism, in practice this becomes impossible, since professional roles at all stages (conception, perception, perceived enactment, and performance) may overlap in practice (Lynch, 2007 ). In this respect, unlike ideals and values that are easier to transfer, and unlike media system characteristics that have shown more discernible patterns in comparative studies, such as legal frameworks, the size and scope of their media markets, the nature of state intervention, or the extent to which political instrumentalization and parallelism are present, the actual manifestation of journalistic roles is more difficult to fit into existing ideal typologies, since they are constantly changing, being mediated not only by social, organizational, and individual factors, but also by the local context of the news (Mellado et al., 2017b ).

The existence of multiple roles partly reflects the institutional context within which journalists work. Also, since news professionals write for many different audiences simultaneously, journalistic role ideals are often rooted in conceptions of the audience, which often means that several roles overlap when writing a single story.

The gap may also be partly due to differences in the conceptualization of the ideal–practice connection. While some research focuses on the ideal–practice connection as a relationship (Scholl & Weischenberg, 1998 ) (e.g., studying whether journalists who place more importance on the infotainment role of journalism are more likely to perform that role), other studies address the connection between ideals and practice as a gap, by focusing on the distance between the two. Of course, different conclusions may be drawn depending on which of the two approaches are used (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

Another possibility is that the gap is, in part, a methodological artifact that may be due to the fact that previous research has not measured role conceptions correctly. For example, in the surveys typically used to measure role conception, the wording of the questions might be too abstract, meaning that journalists do not actually have a common basis on which to reply, thus resulting in non-comparable responses. Another flaw of survey-based research is that journalists might give socially desirable responses that fit normative expectations. Their responses therefore might be about what they would like or are expected to do instead of what they actually do. It is also common for journalists from different contexts to understand concepts differently or give different meanings to concepts such as neutrality or partisanship. For example, the translation of Western ideals such as truth and freedom does not really capture the ways in which those norms are articulated within other contexts. Thus, the fact that they are implemented and understood according to local realities suggests that there are no straightforward universal journalistic practices with unanimous and stable meanings.

It may also be the case that journalists interviewed for studies measuring role conceptions do or do not have great influence over the most important decisions on news content and that the gap should be also addressed at the organizational level (Mellado, Mothes, Hallin, Humanes, 2019 ). Finally, the lack of validation of some of the scales used to measure professional roles at the evaluative level (e.g., Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ) may have contributed to such a methodological artifact too.

There is no doubt that the gap also reflects the heterogeneity of the profession. Not all journalists, media organizations, or news beats embrace the same journalistic role conceptions and/or perceptions, and often there are struggles within the field over which role conceptions should prevail. Advising the consumer, for instance, is a paramount role in soft news and sections such as lifestyle or travel, as much as infotainment is a paramount role for sports or gossip. But even the so-called hard news sections are subject to forces of commercialization, and the inclusion of elements of roles like the infotainment one is becoming more and more common (Mellado, López-Rabadán, & Elórtegui, 2017d ; Uribe & Gunter, 2007 ).

The size of the gap obviously varies by situation, historical period, and social context, resulting in journalistic role conceptions being more or less coupled with role performance in different contexts (Vos, 2017 ). This is undeniably one of the most important advantages of the concept of role performance over the concept of role conception, since it focuses attention on the sources of such variation.

Studying Professional Roles

An important issue when studying not only every stage of professional roles but also the gap between ideals and practice is the way in which these concepts are empirically measured.

The very first studies to measure professional roles by content analysis were important efforts that laid the foundations for the study of journalistic role performance. Nevertheless, most of those studies were not clear about the operationalization of their measurements and were dependent on subjective interpretations rather than an investigation into specific practices that could potentially reveal professional roles in news content. For example, Weaver and Wilhoit ( 1996 ) and Vos ( 2002 ) studied role conceptions and separately evaluated news stories written by the surveyed reporters. However, the operational definition of roles in news content comprises several statements that are the same as the questions put to those journalists (Mellado, 2015 ).

Other studies on reporting styles that indirectly address different functions of the media tended to focus on isolated indicators (Benson & Hallin, 2007 ; Esser, 2008 ; Van Dalen, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2012 ), making it difficult to establish the reliability and validity of scales.

In order to overcome these serious limitations, initiatives like the international Journalistic Role Performance Around the Globe (JRP) Project have generated a common methodology, with valid scales to measure journalistic role performance in news content. Using these scales, scholars are able to analyze different dimensions of journalistic performance in different contextual settings to enable cross-national comparative research.

The performative level of journalistic cultures represents the level most likely to be observed by the public and different reference groups through the analysis of the outcome of newsroom decisions (e.g., the news story). Journalistic role performance as a product, then, is normally measured by content analysis.

Nevertheless, the performance of roles can also take the form of actions performed prior to the output, the so-called backstage of news production (Goffman, 1959 ), where the negotiations with different reference groups, the search for sources, and the verification process are crucial. Journalistic role performance as a process, then, should be measured by techniques such as ethnography and/or in-depth interviews.

The JRP Project focuses on the final output, analyzing how different dimensions of professional roles manifest themselves in news content across different countries and cultures. This project has been the starting point for other related studies, which have also addressed the disconnect between journalists’ norms and professional performance (e.g., Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ), as well as comparisons of role performance among media platforms (e.g., Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ).

Based on standardized content-based measures (Mellado, 2015 ), different studies have looked at the practice of six journalistic roles that run along the presence of the journalistic voice in the news, the relationship between journalism and those in power, and the way journalism approaches the audience. Relevant literature has previously suggested similar perspectives as three dimensions to be used for the analysis of journalistic roles (Donsbach, 2008 ; Hanitzsch, 2007 ). Based on this previous work, studies on role performance have indicated and then corroborated (e.g., Mellado et al., 2017b ; Mellado et al., 2013 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017 ; Mellado & Vos, 2017f ; Mellado, Hanusch, Humanes et al., 2013 ) that, instead of dimensions, these are three interrelated domains from which six independent roles emerge: the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, civic, and infotainment roles.

Following role theory research, studies on role performance also emphasize that these are not the only domains from which role performance can be studied, nor are they the only possible roles that can emerge from these domains (Mellado, 2015 ). Indeed, recent studies on journalistic performance analyze specific sub-dimensions that emerge from those roles (e.g., Márquez-Ramírez et al., 2019 ) as well as new domains of journalistic roles in social media spaces (Hermida & Mellado, 2019 ).

The measures used to analyze the manifestation of different journalistic roles in the news in different political, historical, and cultural contexts, have been inspired by both content analysis on journalistic practices mentioned throughout the text and important qualitative studies of newsroom practices (Bantz, McCorkle, & Baade, 1980 ; Bogaerts, 2011 ; Tuchman, 1972 ; Usher, 2014 ).

The journalistic voice domain deals with the presence of the journalists’ voice in the news. The passive stance of journalists in their reporting has been associated with the neutral and disseminator roles (Cohen, 1963 ; Weaver & Wilhoit, 1986 ), while the active stance has been linked to the participant (Donsbach & Patterson, 2004 ; Johnstone et al., 1976 ), advocate (Janowitz, 1975 ), and missionary roles (Köcher, 1986 ).

The power relations domain deals with the relationship between journalists and those in power. Journalists might defend the idea of monitoring de facto powers and denouncing wrongdoings (Waisbord, 2000 ), but, at the same time, they may see their role as acting as loyal spokespersons for those in power, conveying a positive image of them, supporting official policies, and portraying a positive image of one’s country, thereby encouraging the sense of belonging (Donohue, Tichenor, & Olien, 1995 ; Donsbach, 1995 ; Pasti, 2005 ; Mellado, 2015 ).

The audience approach domain deals with the way in which journalists address the audience. Based on this different understanding of the audience, they can be addressed as citizens, clients, or spectators (Eide & Knight, 1999 ; Rosen, 1996 ; Weaver et al., 2007 ).

Within each of these domains, professional roles can be measured in the news by specific indicators that resemble specific reporting styles. The journalistic voice domain involves the role of the journalist as interventionist vis-à-vis disseminator . The power relations domain involves the watchdog and the loyal-facilitator roles. Finally, the different understanding of the audience can be associated with three independent dimensions of professional roles: the civic, the infotainment, and the service roles.

All these roles—with the exception of the interventionist and the disseminator roles, which are part of a one-dimensional structure (Mellado, 2015 )—have been proved to be independent but relate to each other to some extent (Mellado et al. 2017b ; Mellado et al., 2013 ; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017 ; Mellado & Vos, 2017 ; Mellado, Hanusch, Humanes et al., 2013 ). A news story may include, for example, elements from the watchdog role and from the loyal role at the same time. They cannot, therefore, be considered poles of a continuum as previous studies have suggested (Hanitzsch, 2007 ).

Each of the six dimensions of role performance is operationalized in terms of its practical manifestations in news content.

Figure 1. Dimensions of journalistic role performance.

As a template for empirical studies, roles are seen as empirical constructs to study role performance in news content within different cultural contexts. However, these are not the only perspectives from which role performance can be analyzed in the news, nor are they the only dimensions of journalistic performance that can be found in news content, particularly in the new media landscape. Moreover, taking into account that several concepts are inevitably culturally bound, it is likely that not all the indicators emerging from the literature will work in the same way in all societies, especially when considering that professional roles can be seen as reflective measurement models, in which the dimensions exist independently from the measures used, and where adding or removing an item does not change the conceptual domain of the dimension (Wirth & Kolb, 2012 ).

Professional Role Conception, Perception, and Perceived Enactment

While it may be true that measuring professional role performance by content analysis or ethnographic work is far more complex than measuring professional roles by surveys of journalists, the challenge of measuring role conceptions/perceptions or perceived role enactment properly is also very big.

Looking at the studies on role conception, role perception, and perceived enactment carried out over the past decades, the operational definition of roles mostly takes the form of abstract statements—such as being a detached observer—that journalists are asked to rate by indicating the extent to which such statements are important to them or to their media outlets, or the extent to which they believe they accomplish those functions. However, they do not take the form of specific practices—such as taking sides in a news story—that journalists may find easier to understand. Of course, what it means “to be a detached observer” for an Indian journalist, for example, is not necessarily the same for an American journalist. In contrast, the terms “opinion” or “interpretation” are globally shared. The same may happen among colleagues from different, or even the same newsroom or news beat. Indeed, the preliminary results of the JRP Project have shown, first, that there is more consistency in journalists’ responses to the questions addressing specific practices than those on abstract aspects of the profession, and second, that abstract and empirical indicators of role conceptions do not belong to the same role dimensions, that is, they do not measure the same thing (Mellado & Helmueller, 2015 ). I mentioned this issue in the section “ The Gap between Professional Ideals and Journalistic Performance ,” when remarking that the gap was a possible methodological artifact.

This critical aspect suggests that (a) possibly, role conceptions have not been measured correctly, and (b) the lack of clarity on the meaning of professional roles at the normative level leads to confusion between role conception, role perception, and perceived role enactment in studies on journalistic professional roles.

Finally, measuring the gap between role ideals and professional practices requires a combination of methods (e.g., surveys or interviews for role ideals and content analysis and/or newsroom observation or ethnography for role performance). The impact of other variables on news decisions and reporting styles can also be assessed through the interviews or data collected at the organizational and/or societal level.

Studying journalistic professional roles through the lens of not only evaluations of journalists’ work but also the way in which they perform their professional roles is far from being a mere academic exercise, since the way in which journalists cover news has a profound impact on shaping public and private spheres, on citizens, on governance, and on the democratic construction of a specific national system.

Studies on journalistic role performance move things a step forward because they are able to tell us how or to what extent news professionals have enough autonomy for their role conceptions to be manifested in journalistic practices as well as in the news product made available to the public. Indeed, one of the advantages of studying the performative level of journalistic roles is that it can help to measure journalistic autonomy in a more indirect yet objective way, by analyzing the extent to which journalists are able to put their professional roles and ideals into practice (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ).

In this respect, unlike studies on professional role conceptions alone, journalistic role performance studies appear to offer different perspectives on the practice of journalism around the world, particularly in countries where evaluative elements are less articulated in practice (Mellado et al., 2017a ).

So far, while international studies on professional role conception/perception support the idea that journalists from different media systems conceptualize their roles as expected (Hanitzsch et al., 2011 ; Weaver & Willnat, 2012 ), research on journalistic role performance has systematically found patterns of multilayered hybridization in journalistic cultures across and within advanced, transitional, and non-democratic countries (Mellado et al., 2017b ). Several studies have also shown a significant gap between journalistic ideals and professional practices, particularly in roles more closely related to the professional ideal of the Fourth Estate; in countries with less press freedom; among journalists who cover “hard” news topics and those who feel more economic and political pressures. Also, some of these studies have found discrepancies between journalists’ role conceptions and their perceived role enactments (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014 ; Roses & Humanes, 2019 ).

Likewise, studies on role performance have found significant differences in the performance of a variety of professional roles depending on the media platform (Hallin & Mellado, 2018 ), although the latest research suggests that the thematic beat and media audience orientation are more crucial variables in explaining differences in role performance (Humanes & Roses, 2018 ; Márquez- Ramírez et al., 2018 ; Mellado et al., 2018 ). Similar studies have also revealed a significant correlation between the prevalence of different sources and journalistic roles in news (Márquez- Ramírez et al., 2018 ).

One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles, and, specifically, the performance of such roles today, is that the conceptual boundaries of journalism have become increasingly blurred in the current digital ecosystem. Social media’s intrinsic capacity to deinstitutionalize communication through parallel channels may turn out to be a crucial element when it comes to performing both traditional and new journalistic roles. Professional roles can certainly evolve and be redefined—in both discourse and practice—since their emergence and development not only have historical and contextual components but also a strong grounding in the logic that journalists use to communicate with the audience, and in the expectations of various reference groups. Future studies need to address all these elements.

• Ashforth, B. (2001). Role Transitions in Organizational Life: An Identity-Based Perspective . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Bantz, C. , McCorkle, S. , & Baade, R. (1980). The News Factory. Communication Research , 7 (1), 45–68.
• Benson, R. , & Hallin, D. (2007). How States, Markets and Globalization Shape the News: The French and US National Press, 1965–97. European Journal of Communication , 22 (1), 27–48.
• Biddle, B. (1979). Role Theory: Expectations, Identities and Behaviors . New York: Academic Press.
• Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Bogaerts, J. (2011). On the Performativity of Journalistic Identity. Journalism Practice , 5 (4), 399–413.
• Brüggemann, M. , & Engesser, S. (2014). Between Consensus and Denial: Climate Journalists as Interpretive Community. Science Communication , 36 (4), 399–427.
• Burke, P. , & Reitzes, D. (1981). The Link between Identity and Role Performance. Social Psychology Quarterly , 44 (2), 83–92.
• Carpenter, S. , Boehmer, J. , & Fico, F. (2015). The Measurement of Journalistic Role Enactments: A Study of Organizational Constraints and Support in For-Profit and Nonprofit Journalism. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 93 (3), 587–608.
• Christians, C. G. , Glasser, T. L. , McQuail, D. , Nordenstreng, K. , & White, R. A. (2009). Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Cohen, B. (1963). The Press and Foreign Policy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Culbertson, H. M. (1983). Three Perspectives on American Journalism. Journalism Monographs , 83 , 1–33.
• Deuze, M. (2002). National News Cultures: A Comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian and U.S. Journalists. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 79 (1), 134–149.
• Donohue, G. , Tichenor, P. , & Olien, C. (1995). A Guard Dog Perspective on the Role of Media. Journal of Communication , 45 (2), 115–132.
• Donsbach, W. (1995). Lapdogs, Watchdogs and Junkyard Dogs. Media Studies Journal , 9 (4), 17–30.

• Donsbach, W. , & Patterson, T. (2004). Political News Journalists: Partisanship, Professionalism, and Political Roles in Five Countries. In F. Esser & B. Pfetsch (Eds.), Comparing Political Communication: Theories, Cases, and Challenges (pp. 251–270). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Donsbach, W. (2008). Journalists’ Role Perception . In W. Donsbach (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication . London: Blackwell.
• Duggan, M. (2015). Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015 . Pew Research Center.
• Eide, M. , & Knight, G. (1999). Public-Private Service: Service Journalism and the Problems of Everyday Life. European Journal of Communication , 14 (4), 525–547.
• Esser, F. (2008). Dimensions of Political News Cultures: Sound Bite and Image Bite News in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. International Journal of Press/Politics , 13 (4), 401–428.
• Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . New York: Anchor.
• Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction . Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
• Hallin, D. C. , & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics . New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hallin, D. , & Mellado, C. (2018). Serving Consumers, Citizens or Elites: Democratic Roles of Journalism in Chilean Newspapers and Television News. International Journal of Press/Politics , 23 (1), 24–43.
• Hanitzsch, T. (2007). Deconstructing Journalism Culture: Towards a Universal Theory. Communication Theory , 17 (4), 367–385.
• Hanitzsch, T. (2011). Populist Disseminators, Detached Watchdogs, Critical Change Agents and Opportunist Facilitators: Professional Milieus, the Journalistic Field and Autonomy in 18 Countries. International Communication Gazette , 73 (6), 477–494.
• Hanitzsch, T. , Hanusch, F. , Mellado, C. , Anikina, M. , Berganza, R. , Cangoz, I. , . . . Wang Yuen, E. K. (2011). Mapping Journalism Cultures across Nations: A Comparative Study of 18 Countries. Journalism Studies , 12 (3), 273–293.
• Hermida, A. (2014). Tell everyone: Why we share and why it matters . DoubleDay Canada.
• Hermida, A. , Lewis, S. , & Zamith, R. (2014). Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 19 (3), 479–499.
• Hermida, A. & Mellado, C. (2019). The Dimensions of Social Media Logics: Mapping the Impact of Twitter and Instagram on Journalistic Performance . Paper presented at the annual International Association for Media and Communication Research, Madrid, July 7–11.
• Herscovitz, H. G. (2004). Brazilian Journalists’ Perceptions of Media Roles, Ethics, and Foreign Influences on Brazilian Journalism. Journalism Studies , 5 (1), 71–86.
• Humanes, M. L. , & Roses, S. (2018). Journalistic Role Performance in the Spanish National Press. International Journal of Communication , 12 , 1032–1053.
• Janowitz, M. (1975). Professional Models in Journalism: The Gatekeeper and the Advocate . Journalism Quarterly , 52 , 618–626, 662.
• Johnstone, J. , Slawski, E. , & Bowman, W. (1976). The Newspeople: A Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Josephi, B. (2005). Journalism in the Global Age: Between Normative and Empirical. Gazette , 67 (6), 575–590.
• Kepplinger, H. M. , Brosius H. , & Staab, J. F. (1991). Instrumental Actualization: A Theory of Mediated Conflicts. European Journal of Communication , 6 (3), 263–290.
• Kim, M-S. , & Hunter, J. (1993). Attitude-Behavior Relations: A Meta-Analysis of Attitudinal Relevance and Topic. Journal of Communication , 43 (1), 101–142.
• Köcher, R. (1986). Bloodhounds or Missionaries: Role Definitions of German and British Journalists. European Journal of Communication , 1 (1), 43–64.
• Löfgren Nilsson, M. , & Örnebring, H. (2016). Journalism under Threat . Journalism Practice , 10 (7), 880–890.
• Lynch, K. (2007). Modeling Role Enactment: Linking Role Theory and Social Cognition. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour , 37 (4), 379–399.
• Márquez-Ramírez, M. , Mellado, C. , Humanes, M. L. , Hellmueller, L. , . . . . Wang, H. (2018). The Detached vs. Adversarial Approaches to Watchdog Reporting: A Comparative Study of Journalistic Role Performance in 18 Countries (under review).
• Márquez-Ramirez, M. , Mellado, C. , Humanes, M. L. , Mothes, C. , et al. (2019). Detached or Interventionists? Comparing the Performance of Watchdog Journalism in Transitional, Advanced and Non-Democratic Countries . Paper presented at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Prague, May 24–28.
• Mellado, C. , Hanusch, F. , Humanes, M. , Roses, S. , Pereira, F. , Yez, L. , . . . Wyss, V. (2013). The Pre-Socialization of Future Journalists. Journalism Studies , 14 (6), 857–874.
• Mellado, C. , & Van Dalen, A. (2014). Between Rhetoric and Practice. Journalism Studies , 15 (6), 859–878.
• Mellado, C. (2015). Professional Roles in News Content: Six Dimensions of Journalistic Role Performance. Journalism Studies , 16 (4), 596–614.
• Mellado, C. , & Helmueller, L. (2015). Assessing Journalistic Role Performance in 31 Countries: Comparative Design and Methodological Challenges. Paper presented at the 65th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 21–25.
• Mellado, C. , Hellmueller, L. , & Donsbach, W. (Eds.). (2017a). Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Contexts and Methods . New York: Routledge.
• Mellado, C. , Hellmueller, L. , Márquez-Ramírez, M. , Humanes, M. L. , Sparks, C. , Stępińska, A. , . . . Wang, H. (2017b). The Hybridization of Journalistic Cultures: A Comparative Study of Journalistic Role Performance. Journal of Communication , 67 (6), 944–967.
• Mellado, C. , Helmueller, L. , & Weaver, D. (2017c). Revisiting Journalists’ Role Conceptions Research. In C. Mellado , L. Hellmueller , & W. Donsbach (Eds.), Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Contexts and Methods (pp. 21–40). New York: Routledge.
• Mellado, C. , & Van Dalen, A. (2017). Challenging the Citizen–Consumer Journalistic Dichotomy: A News Content Analysis of Audience Approaches in Chile. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 94 (1), 213–237.
• Mellado, C. , Humanes, M. L. , Scherman, A. , & Ovando, A. (2018). Do Digital Platforms Really Make a Difference in Content? Mapping Journalistic Role Performance in Chilean Print and Online News . Journalism .
• Mellado, C. , López-Rabadán, P. , & Elortegui, C. (2017d). ¿(Para) ciudadanos o espectadores? Periodismo político chileno y sus modelos profesionales de aproximación a la audiencia [(For) citizens or spectators? Political journalism and its professional models for approaching the audience]. Palabra Clave , 20 (1), 14–46.
• Mellado, C. , Márquez-Ramírez, M. , Mick, J. , Oller Alonso, M. , & Olivera, D. (2017e). Journalistic Performance in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Professional Roles in News Content. Journalism , 18 (9), 1087–1106.
• Mellado, C. , & Vos, T. (2017f). Conceptualizing Journalistic Role Performance Across Platforms. In C. Mellado , L. Hellmueller , & W. Donsbach (Eds.), Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Models and Measures (pp. 106–126). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Mellado, C. , Mothes, C. , Hallin, D. , & Humanes, M. L. (2019). In Pursuit of Autonomy: Investigating the Gap Between Journalist’s Role Conception and Media Role Performance in Nine European, Asian, and Latin American Countries . Paper presented at the Annual IAMCR Conference, Madrid, July 7–11.
• Montgomery, J. D. (1998). Toward a Role-Theoretic Conception of Embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology , 104 (1), 92–125.
• Muchtar, N. , Hamada, B. , Hanitzsch, T. , Masduki, A. , & Ullah, M. (2017). Journalism and the Islamic Worldview. Journalism Studies , 18 (5), 555–575.
• Oi, S. , Fukuda, M. , & Sako, S. (2012). The Japanese Journalist in Transition: Continuity and Change. In D. Weaver & L. Willnat (Eds.), The Global Journalist in the 21st Century (pp. 52–65). New York: Routledge.
• Pasti, S. (2005). Two Generations of Contemporary Russian Journalists. European Journal of Communication , 20 (1), 89–115.
• Patterson, T. E. , & Donsbach, W. (1996). News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors. Political Communication , 13 (4), 455–468.
• Ramaprasad, J. (2001). A Profile of Journalists in Post-Independence Tanzania. Gazette , 63 (6), 539–556.

• Rosen, J. (1996). Getting the Connections Right. Public journalism and the Troubles in the Press . New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press.
• Roses, S. , & Humanes, M. L. (2019). Conflicts in the professional roles of journalists in Spain: Ideals and practice . Comunicar (preprint).
• Rosten, L. C. (1937). President Roosevelt and the Washington Correspondents. Public Opinion Quarterly , 1 (1), 36–52.
• Scholl, A. , & Weischenberg, S. (1998). Journalismus in der Gesellschaft. Theorie, Methodologie und Empirie [Journalism in society. Theory, methodology and findings]. Opladen/Wiesbaden, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag.
• Schudson, M. (2003). The Sociology of News . New York: W.W. Norton.
• Shoemaker, P. , & Reese, S. (2013). Mediating the Message in the 21st Century. A Media Sociology Perspective . New York: Routledge.
• Shoemaker, P. J. , & Vos, T. P. (2009). Gatekeeping Theory . New York: Routledge.
• Skovsgaard, M. , Albæk, E. , Bro, P. , & de Vreese, C. (2013). A Reality Check: How Journalists’ Role Perceptions Impact Their Implementation of the Objectivity Norm. Journalism , 14 (1), 22–42.
• Starck, K. , & Soloski, J. (1977). Effect of Reporter Predisposition in Covering Controversial Story. Journalism Quarterly , 54 (1), 120–125.
• Stępińska, A. , Jurga-Wosik, E. , Adamczewska, K. , Selcer, B. , & Narożna, D. (2016). Journalistic Role Performance in Poland. Central European Political Studies , 2 , 37–52.
• Tandoc, E. , Hellmueller, L. , & Vos, T. (2013). Mind the Gap: Between Role Conception and Role Enactment. Journalism Practice , 7 (5), 539–554.
• Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity. American Journal of Sociology , 77 (4), 660–679.
• Turner, R. (2006). Role Theory. In J. Turner (Ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory (pp. 233–254). New York: Springer.
• Uribe R. , & Gunter, B. (2007). Are “Sensational” News Stories More Likely to Trigger Viewers’ Emotions Than Non-Sensational News Stories? European Journal of Communication , 22 (2), 207–228.
• Usher, N. (2014). Making News at The New York Times . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Van Dalen, A. , de Vreese, C. , & Albæk, E. (2012). Different Roles, Different Content? A Four-Country Comparison of the Role Conceptions and Reporting Style of Political Journalists. Journalism , 13 (7), 903–922.
• Vos, T. (2002). Role Enactment: The Influence of Journalists’ Role Conceptions on News Content. Paper presented at the 85th AEJMC Conference, Miami, FL.
• Vos, T. P. (2005). Journalistic Role Conception: A Bridge between the Reporter and the Press. Paper presented at International Communication Association conference, New York, NY.
• Vos, T. (2017). Historical Perspectives on Journalistic Roles. In C. Mellado , L. Hellmueller , & W. Donsbach (Eds.), Journalistic Role Performance: Concepts, Contexts and Methods (pp. 41–59). New York: Routledge.
• Waisbord, S. (2000). Watchdog Journalism in South America . New York: Columbia University Press.
• Waisbord, S. (2013). Reinventing Professionalism: Journalism and News in Global Perspective . Cambridge, UK: Polity.
• Wang, H. , Sparks, C. , Lü, N. , & Huang, Y. (2017). Differences within the Mainland Chinese Press: A Quantitative Analysis. Asian Journal of Communication , 27 (2), 154–171.
• Weaver, D. H. (1998). The Global Journalist: News People around the World . Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
• Weaver, D. H. , Beam, R. A. , Brownlee, B. J. , Voakes, P. S. , & Wilhoit, G. C. (2007). The American Journalist in the 21st Century: U.S. News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Weaver, D. H. , & Wilhoit, G. C. (1986). The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Weaver, D. H. , & Wilhoit, G. C. (1996). The American Journalist in the 1990s: U.S. News People at the End of an Era . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Weaver, D. H. , & Willnat, L. (2012). The Global Journalist in the 21st Century . New York: Routledge.
• Weinacht, S. , & Spiller, R. (2014). Datenjournalismus in Deutschland. Eine explorative Untersuchung zu Rollenbildern von Datenjournalisten. Publizistik , 59 (4), 411–433.
• Weischenberg, S. , Malik, M. , & Scholl, A. (2006). Die Souffleure der Mediengesellschaft: Report über die Journalisten in Deutschland . [The prompters of the media society. Report about journalists in Germany]. Konstanz, Germany: UVK.
• Wilke, J. (1998). Journalists in Chile, Ecuador and Mexico. In D. Weaver (Ed.), The Global Journalist (pp. 433–452). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
• Willnat, L. , Weaver, D. , & Choi, J (2013). The Global Journalist in the Twenty-First Century. A Cross-National Study of Journalistic Competencies. Journalism Practice , 7 (2), 163–183.
• Wirth, W. , & Kolb, S. (2012). Securing Equivalence: Problems and Solutions. In F. Esser & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research (pp. 469–485). New York: Routledge.
• Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as Interpretive Communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication , 10 (3), 219–237.
• Zelizer, B. (2011). Journalism in the Service of Communication. Journal of Communication , 61 (1), 1–21.
• Zelizer, B. (2017). What Journalism Could Be . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
• Zhu, J-H. , Weaver, D. , Lo, V-H. , Chen, C. , & Wu, W. (1997). Individual, Organizational, and Societal Influences on Media Role Perceptions: A Comparative Study of Journalists in China, Taiwan, and the United States. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 74 (1), 84–96.

1. As Western journalists developed high levels of professionalism, their understanding of their roles began to take shape within a context in which individual journalists were believed to have a considerable influence over the news stories they produced.

2. The reliance on normative beliefs is not surprising considering that the journalistic field has been predominantly normative in nature (Hallin & Mancini, 2004 ; Mellado et al., 2017a ; Waisbord, 2013 ; Zelizer, 1993 , 2017 ), thus dictating whether journalism can be considered “good” or “bad” journalism.

Related Articles

• Professional Identity and Roles of Journalists
• Public Service Journalism
• Aggregation and Journalism
• Employment Conditions in Journalism
• Journalism as Institution
• Comparative Journalism Research
• Professionalism, Professionalization, and Deprofessionalization in Journalism
• Trends: Women in International Journalism

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 April 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|91.193.111.216]
• 91.193.111.216

Character limit 500 /500

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Literary Journalism

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Literary journalism is another essay form that is best reserved for intermediate and advanced level courses, but it can be incorporated into introductory and composition courses. Literary journalism is the creative nonfiction form that comes closest to newspaper and magazine writing. It is fact-driven and requires research and, often, interviews.

Literary journalism is sometimes called “immersion journalism” because it requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject and to the people the literary journalist is exploring. Like journalistic writing, the literary journalism piece should be well-researched, focus on a brief period of time, and concentrate on what is happening outside of the writer’s small circle of personal experience and feelings.

An Example and Discussion of a Literary Journalism

The following excerpt from George Orwell is a good example of literary journalism. Orwell wrote about the colonial regime in Marrakech. His father was a colonial officer, so Orwell was confronted with the reality of empire from an early age, and that experience is reflected in his literary journalism piece, Marrakech :

Orwell isn’t writing a reflective, personal essay about his travels through Marrakech. Neither is he writing a memoir about what it was like to be the son of a colonial officer, nor how that experience shaped his adult life. He writes in a descriptive way about the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, about the invisibility of the “natives,” and about the way citizenship doesn’t ensure equality under a colonial regime.

Generating Ideas for Literary Journalism

One way to incorporate literary journalism into an introductory or intermediate level course is simply to have students write personal essays first. Then the students can go back and research the facts behind the personal experiences related in their essays. They can incorporate historical data, interviews, or broaden the range of their personal essay by exploring the cultural or political issues hinted at in their personal essays.

If a student writes, in passing, about the first presidential candidate they were eligible to vote for, then they can include facts and figures around that particular election, as well as research other events that were current at that time, for example. As with other essay forms, students should find topics that are important to them.

14 influential essays from Black writers on America's problems with race

• Business leaders are calling for people to reflect on civil rights this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
• Black literary experts shared their top nonfiction essay and article picks on race. 
• The list includes "A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin.

For many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time of reflection on the life of one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. It's also an important time for people who support racial justice to educate themselves on the experiences of Black people in America. 

Business leaders like TIAA CEO Thasunda Duckett Brown and others are encouraging people to reflect on King's life's work, and one way to do that is to read his essays and the work of others dedicated to the same mission he had: racial equity. 

Insider asked Black literary and historical experts to share their favorite works of journalism on race by Black authors. Here are the top pieces they recommended everyone read to better understand the quest for Black liberation in America:

An earlier version of this article was published on June 14, 2020.

"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States" by Ida B. Wells

In 1892, investigative journalist, activist, and NAACP founding member Ida B. Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." Three years later, she followed up with more research and detail in "The Red Record." 

Shirley Moody-Turner, associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University recommended everyone read these two texts, saying they hold "many parallels to our own moment."  

"In these two pamphlets, Wells exposes the pervasive use of lynching and white mob violence against African American men and women. She discredits the myths used by white mobs to justify the killing of African Americans and exposes Northern and international audiences to the growing racial violence and terror perpetrated against Black people in the South in the years following the Civil War," Moody-Turner told Business Insider. 

Read  "Southern Horrors" here and "The Red Record" here >>

"On Juneteenth" by Annette Gordon-Reed

In this collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed combines memoir and history to help readers understand the complexities out of which Juneteenth was born. She also argues how racial and ethnic hierarchies remain in society today, said Moody-Turner. 

"Gordon-Reed invites readers to see Juneteenth as a time to grapple with the complexities of race and enslavement in the US, to re-think our origin stories about race and slavery's central role in the formation of both Texas and the US, and to consider how, as Gordon-Reed so eloquently puts it, 'echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.'"

Purchase "On Juneteenth" here>>

"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author and national correspondent for The Atlantic, made waves when he published his 2014 article "The Case for Reparations," in which he called for "collective introspection" on reparations for Black Americans subjected to centuries of racism and violence. 

"In his now famed essay for The Atlantic, journalist, author, and essayist, Ta-Nehisi Coates traces how slavery, segregation, and discriminatory racial policies underpin ongoing and systemic economic and racial disparities," Moody-Turner said. 

"Coates provides deep historical context punctuated by individual and collective stories that compel us to reconsider the case for reparations," she added.  

Read it here>>

"The Idea of America" by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the "1619 Project" by The New York Times

In "The Idea of America," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traces America's history from 1619 onward, the year slavery began in the US. She explores how the history of slavery is inseparable from the rise of America's democracy in her essay that's part of The New York Times' larger "1619 Project," which is the outlet's ongoing project created in 2019 to re-examine the impact of slavery in the US. 

"In her unflinching look at the legacy of slavery and the underside of American democracy and capitalism, Hannah-Jones asks, 'what if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we [Black Americans] have never been the problem but the solution,'" said Moody-Turner, who recommended readers read the whole "1619 Project" as well. 

Read "The Idea of America" here and the rest of the "1619 Project here>>

"Many Thousands Gone" by James Baldwin

In "Many Thousands Gone," James Arthur Baldwin, American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist lays out how white America is not ready to fully recognize Black people as people. It's a must read, according to Jimmy Worthy II, assistant professor of English at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Baldwin's essay reminds us that in America, the very idea of Black persons conjures an amalgamation of specters, fears, threats, anxieties, guilts, and memories that must be extinguished as part of the labor to forget histories deemed too uncomfortable to remember," Worthy said.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 13 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights activists were arrested after peaceful protest in Birmingham, Alabama. In jail, King penned an open letter about how people have a moral obligation to break unjust laws rather than waiting patiently for legal change. In his essay, he expresses criticism and disappointment in white moderates and white churches, something that's not often focused on in history textbooks, Worthy said.

"King revises the perception of white racists devoted to a vehement status quo to include white moderates whose theories of inevitable racial equality and silence pertaining to racial injustice prolong discriminatory practices," Worthy said. 

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, African American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist asks readers to not be silent on important issues. This short, rousing read is crucial for everyone according to Thomonique Moore, a 2016 graduate of Howard University, founder of Books&Shit book club, and an incoming Masters' candidate at Columbia University's Teacher's College. 

"In this essay, Lorde explains to readers the importance of overcoming our fears and speaking out about the injustices that are plaguing us and the people around us. She challenges us to not live our lives in silence, or we risk never changing the things around us," Moore said.  Read it here>>

"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay from the award-winning journalist's book " We Were Eight Years in Power ," details how Trump, during his presidency, employed the notion of whiteness and white supremacy to pick apart the legacy of the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama.

Moore said it was crucial reading to understand the current political environment we're in. 

"Just Walk on By" by Brent Staples

In this essay, Brent Staples, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for The New York Times, hones in on the experience of racism against Black people in public spaces, especially on the role of white women in contributing to the view that Black men are threatening figures.  

For Crystal M. Fleming, associate professor of sociology and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, his essay is especially relevant right now. 

"We see the relevance of his critique in the recent incident in New York City, wherein a white woman named Amy Cooper infamously called the police and lied, claiming that a Black man — Christian Cooper — threatened her life in Central Park. Although the experience that Staples describes took place decades ago, the social dynamics have largely remained the same," Fleming told Insider. 

"I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman" by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an author, associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In this essay, Cottom shares her gut-wrenching experience of racism within the healthcare system. 

Fleming called this piece an "excellent primer on intersectionality" between racism and sexism, calling Cottom one of the most influential sociologists and writers in the US today.  Read it here>>

"A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin

Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory" was originally published in The Nation in 1966. It takes a hard look at violence against Black people in the US, specifically police brutality. 

"Baldwin's work remains essential to understanding the depth and breadth of anti-black racism in our society. This essay — which touches on issues of racialized violence, policing and the role of the law in reproducing inequality — is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand just how much has not changed with regard to police violence and anti-Black racism in our country," Fleming told Insider.  Read it here>>

"I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing" by Gene Demby

On May 13, 1985, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound in Philadelphia, which housed members of the MOVE, a black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eleven people, including five children, died in the airstrike. In this essay, Gene Demby, co-host and correspondent for NPR's Code Switch team, tries to wrap his head around the shocking instance of police violence against Black people. 

"I would argue that the fact that police were authorized to literally bomb Black citizens in their own homes, in their own country, is directly relevant to current conversations about militarized police and the growing movement to defund and abolish policing," Fleming said.  Read it here>>

When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more .

• Main content

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

Jessica cook.

A journalistic essay is a combination of journalistic reporting and personal essay writing. A newspaper article contains straight journalistic reporting most of the time, while a personal essay tells a story. In a journalistic essay, you must combine these elements in order to tell a story with a factual basis in reporting.

Do your research. The basis of a journalistic essay must be factual; you should use your skills as a journalist to interview the people involved with the story you want to tell and research any available background information. Record interviews, take notes, and spend time at the library or online researching the information you need for the story. Take photos as you conduct your research so you can add them to your essay or at least use them to help you remember important information.

Organize your facts. Begin your essay by outlining your factual information and organizing it in a manner that is easy to understand. You do not always have to tell a story in chronological order; instead, consider how to tell the story in a way that will keep your readers interested from beginning to end.

Write your essay in a clear and concise manner. Avoid overly flowery or confusing sentences; you should strive to make your point clear, not to impress your reader with your vast vocabulary skills.

Let the story be the important part of your essay, not your writing. Your writing should showcase the story in the best light, hooking your reader's interest and keeping it until the end.

• 1 The Guardian: How Journalists Write, by Peter Cole

Related Articles

How to Write a Simple Personal Biography

What Is a Perspective Essay?

How to Make an Outline for an Informative Essay

True or False: Mars Edition

How to Make a Good Introduction Paragraph

How to Start an Informative Paper

How to Write Book Titles in an Essay

The Difference Between Narrative & Non-Narrative Writing

Characteristics of Narrative Essays

How to Write a Historical Narrative

How to Write a Conclusion in My Nursing Paper

How to Write an Essay on Personal Interests & Career...

What Is a Hook Paragraph in an Essay?

How to Make a Story Look Like It Is a Newspaper Article

How to Write an Essay Abstract

How to Write a 10th Grade Book Report

Good Ways to Start an Essay

English Grammar and the Structure of a Narrative Paragraph

What Is a Narrative Response?

How to Write a Book Report in the 6th Grade

Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers.

• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Copyright Policy
• Manage Preferences

© 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, All Rights Reserved. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer .

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Sociology of Media and Communication — Journalism

Essays on Journalism

Matt laur research paper, the importance of a neutral question, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

The Implications of Exculpatory Language

Investigative journalism characteristics and challenges, the aspects of writing a journalism assignment, the ways how media outlets can address the lack of trust in journalism, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

The Concept of Data Journalism

Journalism in the era of internet, why i want to be a journalist, theory of framing in the media, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

The Change in The New Structure of Hong Kong Due to Public Citizens’ Use of The Internet to Spread Information

My views on the role of ethics in journalism, reporting from a court of law, deaths of journalists in india: gauri lankesh murder case, the ethical issues in journalism in absence of malice, a film by sydney pollack, international watchdog organizations on indian journalism, the comparisons and contrasts in journalism, the author’s backgrounding as a critical factor in reader’s positioning, the connection between journalists and politicians, normative concerns regarding media issues in pakistan, biography of aravind adiga, the golden mean theory and journalists’ ethics, security, confidentiality and journalism, bloggers should be treated as journalist and be sanctioned for indiscretions, ms. jelinek pi reporter, sustaining attention to any specific political issue: satire of political cartoons, international federation of journalists, my internship in sahara india news network, an art of journalism in modern digital world, security of journalists in india, relevant topics.

• Media Analysis
• Social Media
• Effects of Social Media
• Collaboration
• Marketing and Advertising
• American Identity

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

What Is Literary Journalism?

Carl T. Gossett Jr / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. This form of writing can also be called  narrative journalism or new journalism . The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction ; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists , Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee , Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past include Stephen Crane, Henry Mayhew , Jack London , George Orwell , and Tom Wolfe.

Characteristics of Literary Journalism

There is not exactly a concrete formula that writers use to craft literary journalism, as there is for other genres, but according to Sims, a few somewhat flexible rules and common features define literary journalism. "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism , voice , a focus on ordinary people ... and accuracy.

"Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds...
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor...
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

... Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. ... Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy—or mostly so—precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." 

Why Literary Journalism Is Not Fiction or Journalism

The term "literary journalism" suggests ties to fiction and journalism, but according to Jan Whitt, literary journalism does not fit neatly into any other category of writing. "Literary journalism is not fiction—the people are real and the events occurred—nor is it journalism in a traditional sense.

"There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions."

The Role of the Reader

Because creative nonfiction is so nuanced, the burden of interpreting literary journalism falls on readers. John McPhee, quoted by Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism," elaborates: "Through dialogue , words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."

Literary Journalism and the Truth

Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Literary Journalism as Nonfiction Prose

Rose Wilder talks about literary journalism as nonfiction prose—informational writing that flows and develops organically like a story—and the strategies that effective writers of this genre employ in The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary journalist. "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical  techniques generally associated with fiction.'

"Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre  itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'

"He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.'"

She concludes, "Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."

Background of Literary Journalism

This distinct version of journalism owes its beginnings to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Joseph Pulitzer, and others. "[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism," begins Carla Mulford. "Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take—that it should be situated in the ordinary world—even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." 

Literary journalism as it is now was decades in the making, and it is very much intertwined with the New Journalism movement of the late 20th century. Arthur Krystal speaks to the critical role that essayist William Hazlitt played in refining the genre: "A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier."

Robert Boynton clarifies the relationship between literary journalism and new journalism, two terms that were once separate but are now often used interchangeably. "The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism—muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor—one found in the New York World and other papers... Although it was historically unrelated to [Joseph] Pulitzer's New Journalism, the genre of writing that Lincoln Steffens called 'literary journalism' shared many of its goals."

Boynton goes on to compare literary journalism with editorial policy. "As the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, Steffens made literary journalism—artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses—into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of the artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same."

• Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
• Krystal, Arthur. "Slang-Whanger." The New Yorker, 11 May 2009.
• Lane, Rose Wilder.  The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist . Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters, University of Missouri Press, 2007.
• Mulford, Carla. “Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”  Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 , edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 75–90.
• Sims, Norman. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism . 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2008.
• Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.”  Literary Journalism , edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, Ballantine Books, 1995.
• Sims, Norman. The Literary Journalists . Ballantine Books, 1984.
• Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History . University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Genres in Literature
• literary present (verbs)
• Third-Person Point of View
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• A Guide to All Types of Narration, With Examples
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• The Essay: History and Definition
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
• What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition

Essay On Journalism

Introduction: ‘Journalism’ means the works of a journalist regarding news, views, reports, etc. It is apparent writing on any issue of an affair. The word journalism was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but with the advent of radio, television, and the Internet in the 20th century the use of the term broadened to include all printed and electronic communication dealing with current affairs.

Concepts of the appropriate role for journalism vary between countries. In some nations, the news media are controlled by government intervention and are not fully independent. In others, the news media are independent of the government but instead operate as private industry motivated by profit. In addition to the varying nature of how media organizations are run and funded, countries may have differing implementations of laws handling the freedom of speech and libel cases.

History and Professionalism of Journalism: While publications reporting the news to the general public in a standardized fashion only began to appear in the 17th century and later, governments as early as the Han dynasty China made use of regularly published news bulletins. Similar publications were established in the Republic of Venice in the 16th century. These bulletins, however, were intended only for government officials, and thus were not journalistic news publications in the modern sense of the term. England took the publication of newspapers towards the end of the 16th century. The daily newspaper sponsored by Defoe appeared at the beginning of the 18th century.

The modern newspapers really developed with the invention of the telegraph which made the possible swift transmission of news across the world. Reuter, the famous News Agency, started the work first. There are several forms of journalism with diverse audiences. Thus, journalism is said to serve the role of a “fourth estate”, acting as a watchdog on the workings of the government. A single publication (such as a newspaper) contains many forms of journalism, each of which may be presented in different formats. Each section of a newspaper, magazine, or website may cater to a different audience.

Journalism in the 20th century was marked by a growing sense of professionalism. There were four important factors in this trend:

(1) the increasing organization of working journalists,

(2) specialized education for journalism,

(3) a growing literature dealing with the history, problems, and techniques of mass communication, and

(4) an increasing sense of social responsibility on the part of journalists.

By the late 20th century, studies showed that journalists as a group were generally idealistic about their role in bringing the facts to the public in an impartial manner. Various societies of journalists issued statements of ethics, of which that of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is perhaps best known.

Functions of Journalism: A modern newspaper is something very much more than a mere purveyor of the news; it is also a store-house of current information, an instrument of public criticism, a creator of public opinion. It is, indeed, a potpourri (admixture) of many things in a variety box. It has, therefore, to be served by a large and varied staff. There are the editor and his assistants who write leading articles and editorial comments and edit news.

Their influence on forming a public opinion is very great. They may be said to do political thoughts on behalf of the man in the street. Then there is the news-editor and his staff. They receive news from different agencies, staff reporters and correspondents. They edit, arrange, and display them. They can flash a headline and create a sensation. The staff-reporters interview people elicit views by “scooping” news in advance.

A modern newspaper must also have on its staff competent artists, cartoonists, photographers, etc. There must be advertisement managers and circulation managers. All these people who are on the staff of a newspaper are known by the general name of journalists, or newspapermen.

Codes of Ethics in Journalism: There are over 242 codes of ethics in journalism that vary across various regions of the world. The codes of ethics are created through an interaction of different groups of people such as the public and journalists themselves. Most of the codes of ethics serve as a representation of the economic and political beliefs of the society where the code was written. Despite the fact that there are a variety of codes of ethics, some of the core elements present in all codes are: remaining objective, providing the truth, and being honest.

Journalism does not have a universal code of conduct; individuals are not legally obliged to follow a certain set of rules like a doctor or a lawyer does. There have been discussions for creating a universal code of conduct in journalism. One suggestion centers on having three claims for credibility, justifiable consequence, and the claim of humanity.

The Role of Journalist: Journalism has improved much of its methods with the passage of years. “It is no longer ponderous instructive, formal. “A good journalist creates his own peculiar style. He knows the art of creating the taste and demand for what he offers. One aspires to literary excellence; another sets greater store by propaganda.

The reader is drawn to the style which is attractive to himself. So it comes about that every journal has its own set of readers. That is why a daily paper and the particular columnists are so much in demand. Too much of the opinion station has, however, to be avoided.

Present-Day Journalism: Although the core of journalism has always been the news, the latter word has acquired so many secondary meanings that the term “hard news” gained currency to distinguish items of definite news value from others of marginal significance. This was largely a consequence of the advent of radio and television reporting, which brought news bulletins to the public with a speed that the press could not hope to match. To hold their audience, newspapers provided increasing quantities of interpretive material articles on the background of the news, personality sketches, and columns of timely comments by writers skilled in presenting an opinion in a readable form.

Modern journalism is organized on a commercial scale. There are international news agencies which collect and broadcast news all over the world. Wealthy and influential newspapers always maintain their own correspondents, home and abroad. The modern world could not exist without such an elaborate organization and agency of information gathered from various sources.

Conclusion: Journalism has many competitors today. Chief of all is the radio and the televisions which not only broadcast and televises but have the added advantages of arranging talks of prominent leaders of the society and establish visual contact with them. But they cannot supersede the newspaper. Remaining glued to Radio or TV at a precise time is not always possible.

Besides, coverage of news by the radio and TV is limited; items must be cut down to the minimum so that the time-limit is not exceeded. But a newspaper can be read at any time, suiting one’s convenience. Its coverage is very wide, and its scope for improvement is unlimited. But the journalist should guard against the present tendency for trivializing and fragmenting news items, imposing the editor’s opinions upon readers.

Information Source:

• ontaheen.com
• britannica.com

What I Would Do If I Won A Lottery

If i were a millionaire, teaching profession, book is our best friend, efficient market hypothesis, a significant advance in the search for life is presented by the new class of habitable exoplanets, create a positive team culture, annual report 2014 of janata insurance company limited, animal communication, dental implants, latest post, key features and characteristics of the continental crust, diaphragm valves, droughts in europe could be averted by reducing emissions faster, global research on coastal oceans as carbon dioxide stores, researchers examine how freshwater diatoms remain in the light, wetting current.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Editorials | Editorial: Liberal bias at NPR, old-school…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Clarence Page

Editorials | Editorial: Liberal bias at NPR, old-school journalism and the reluctance to admit a mistake

Uri Berliner, a journalist of a certain age, has been feeling some heartburn over what has been transpiring at his longtime employer, National Public Radio.

In a nuanced and thoughtful essay on the website The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles, Berliner detailed what he has seen as egregious liberal bias at his employer. Among Berliner’s most notable charges: the network’s refusal to admit that its oft-told story of the Trump presidential campaign colluding with Russia was a canard, even after Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion; NPR’s determination to keep ignoring the clearly relevant Hunter Biden laptop story, even in the face of evidence that it contained politically relevant details of Biden family business dealings; and its stubborn refusal to take the “lab leak” theory of COVID origin seriously, clinging to the idea it was a right-wing conspiracy theory, even as more and more evidence was pointing in that direction.

In essence, looking back at the last presidential campaign, Berliner argued that the station had unethically refused to run anything that it thought might help Trump. And, therefore, NPR had thus changed from a neutral news outfit, following the facts, to a cabal of advocates for one side of the political divide.

We suspect few of our readers would be surprised to hear evidence that NPR has a liberal bias, both nationally and within its local affiliates. And we’ll point out that in all three of the cases cited above, the issue perhaps wasn’t so much political bias so much as a reluctance to admit mistakes had been made in past coverage or follow up sufficiently when there’s new evidence. We journalists hate to fess up as a breed; only the best of us do so in a timely and complete way. In all three cases, those same charges also have been credibly leveled against The New York Times and others. Even many progressive journalists in many newsrooms quietly acknowledge those errors. The pendulum swung too far, and it’s swung back only a little.

But Berliner, whose point of view is shared among veterans of many newsrooms, was actually defending a particular brand of journalistic thinking: “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” he wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed.”

He’s right, of course. So what happened? Part of the answer is the chicken-and-egg segmentation of the audience: the reason all the late-night comedy hosts are progressives is that like-minded viewers are watching TV at that hour. The Times has mostly urban liberals as its subscribers, so it fiscally behooves it to super-serve them.

Part of the answer has to be the rise of critical race theory and the George Floyd-induced reckoning, wherein old-line centrism came to be seen by many on the left as unhelpful at best or a continuance of historical racism at worst. And a big part of the blame goes to Donald J. Trump, who convinced plenty of young journalists he was such a threat to democracy that refusing to write a story which might help him win the presidency was a patriotic act. Of course, that only backfired, as we all now can see. But plenty of smart, leftist journalists still openly decry “bothsidesism,” once a defining ethos of journalists in a free society.

And then, of course, there is the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose outlets became so conservative that the old centrists worried they were falling into the same trap that snared Democrats at the 1991 Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings: Hill faced Republican prosecutors, cautiously neutral Democrats and had no defense counsel. It was crushingly unfair. Lots of newspeople, especially women, don’t want to see that happen again on their watch. Not with Trump around.

So what to do? The idea that we’re going to see a sudden resurgence of open-minded thinking and ideological de-emphasis is probably pie in the sky, as helpful as that would be for those of us who dislike America’s political extremes. Take, for example, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy’s coverage of a piece he clearly hated : “Regardless of the questionable merits of Berliner’s sweeping conclusions,” Darcy wrote, ironically confirming the premise of the article he was critiquing, “his piece has been nothing short of a massive gift to the right, which has made vilifying the news media its top priority in recent years.”

If that’s CNN’s response to a thoughtful critique, that’s a problem. As a journalist, Berliner shouldn’t be worrying about what a political movement could, or even will, do with his piece: his job is to state the evidence and make his point. Of all organizations, CNN should see that. We certainly do.

We commend Berliner’s courage in taking a stand that probably alienated him from many of his colleagues. We think it has good lessons for all news organizations, and it’s equally applicable to those on the right. Journalism has become a lot like nuclear proliferation and deterrence; someone has to have the courage to disarm. For the sake of the country.

There’s a business case to be made here too. The best news outlets, columnists and editorializers have the capacity to surprise readers and viewers, and don’t hesitate to do so. Predictability is a turnoff for readers and listeners. If you know what someone is going to say about something in advance, you’re more inclined not to bother finding out.

Journalists are doing a lot of fretting these days about AI and a possible dystopian future in which that technology eliminates their jobs. One way to ward off that threat is to surprise people. It’s easer to replicate a publication and its writers if they’re beating the same drum all the time.

Still, we’re optimists when it comes to our profession. We see some wise newsroom heads, not all of them old, who realize that foregrounding ideology or political mission doesn’t help report the news or summon the courage to stand up to journalists who are activists in disguise. Plenty of courageous newsroom stands are taken, often with little notice, as facts lead in inconvenient directions, as they so often do.

Readers most often write letters to the editor when they are aggrieved by something. Here’s a suggestion: We think you can help journalism and the country when you write one to praise a courageous journalist who has admitted to a past mistake or wrong take, even if that confession undermines a favored cause.

We doubt AI will do that.

More in Editorials

Editorials | Editorial: The Bears may stir Chicago’s blood with splashy pitch for a lakefront stadium. We’re not convinced.

Editorials | Editorial: Amid the chaos, America’s elite campuses can’t educate. University presidents have to turn that around.

Editorials | Editorial: A victory both for Ukraine and functional American governance

Editorials | Editorial: A historic wrong finally righted for the Prairie Band Potawatomi

Trending nationally.

• Pa. state police say pursuit ended with multiple dead
• US-required bridge inspections don’t test for ship strike. Then, one hit the Key Bridge.
• Boston police arrest 108 at Emerson College pro-Palestinian tent encampment
• In Tampa, Biden blames Trump for abortion ‘health care crisis’
• Reintroduced gray wolf found dead in Colorado

The New Rules of Political Journalism

In this election, the reporting strategies of the past will not be enough.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic :

• The October 7 rape denialists
• Finding justice in Palestine
• Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution . Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “ Banality of Crazy .” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post . “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic .) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic , MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A .

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy . Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal . And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses , for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries .)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even— as David Frum points out in The Atlantic —the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

• Political analysis needs more witchcraft.
• Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

• The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way.
• House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives.
• Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.
• The Trump Trials : The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes.
• The Weekly Planet : The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food. We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi -dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• The Jews aren’t taking away TikTok.
• Women in menopause are getting short shrift.
• The self-help queen of TikTok goes mainstream.

Culture Break

Look. These photos , compiled by our photo editor, show the importance of bicycles in World War II.

Read. “ The Vale of Cashmere ,” a short story by Benjamin Nugent:

“What I liked about your father was that he helped me find my contact lens.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• In-newsroom
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Minneapolis, Minn.
• St. Petersburg, Fla.
• Washington, D.C.
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics & Trust Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

• Newsletters

Opinion | NPR suspends an editor for his essay blasting … NPR

The firestorm caused by uri berliner’s critical essay in the free press continues to rage.

When a senior editor at NPR recently wrote a 3,500-word essay for another outlet, blasting where he works and saying that NPR had “lost America’s trust,” my first thought, quite frankly, was, “ … and he still works there?”

Well, it was learned on Tuesday that the editor in question, Uri Berliner, is currently serving a five-day suspension without pay. NPR media writer David Folkenflik reported the suspension began last week. Folkenflik wrote, “In presenting Berliner’s suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a ‘final warning,’ saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.”

Berliner, who has been at NPR for 25 years, wrote his scathing essay for the online news site The Free Press, a publication on Substack. Folkenflik described The Free Press as a “site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal.”

The suspension does not mean the firestorm created by Berliner’s essay has been suppressed. Folkenflik wrote, “Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner’s essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network’s coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.”

The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin wrote , “After Mr. Berliner’s essay was published, NPR’s new chief executive, Katherine Maher, came under renewed scrutiny as conservative activists resurfaced a series of years-old social media posts criticizing former President Donald J. Trump and embracing progressive causes. One of the activists, Christopher Rufo, has pressured media organizations into covering controversies involving influential figures, such as the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president.”

Maher was not at NPR at the time of her posts and, furthermore, the CEO has no involvement in editorial decisions at the network.

But Berliner told Folkenflik in an interview on Monday, “We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about. And this seems to be the opposite of that.”

In a statement earlier this week, Maher said, “In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen. What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests.”

As far as Berliner’s essay, many, particularly inside NPR, are pushing back against his various assertions, including that NPR has a liberal bias.

Mullin wrote for the Times, “Several NPR employees have urged the network’s leaders to more forcefully renounce Mr. Berliner’s claims in his essay. Edith Chapin, NPR’s top editor, said in a statement last week that managers ‘strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism,’ adding that the network was ‘proud to stand behind’ its work.”

Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor for standards and practices, pushed back against specific claims made by Berliner and told the Times, “To somehow think that we were driven by politics is both wrong and unfair.”

NPR TV critic Eric Deggans tweeted , “Many things wrong w/terrible Berliner column on NPR, including not observing basic fairness. Didn’t seek comment from NPR before publishing. Didn’t mention many things which could detract from his conclusions. Set up staffers of color as scapegoats.”

So what happens now? Will Berliner be in further trouble for criticizing the CEO in an interview with Folkenflik, his NPR colleague?

Berliner told Folkenflik, “Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think.”

I urge you to check out Folkenflik’s piece for all the details. And, by the way, kudos to Folkenflik for his strong reporting on his own newsroom.

CNN’s response

In Tuesday’s newsletter , I wrote how “King Charles” — the limited series featuring Gayle King and Charles Barkley — has ended after 14 shows. I wrote that the network had “pulled the plug” on the show.

CNN said that description was inaccurate and that I was wrong in framing it the way I did.

While I did say that CNN announced from the beginning that the show was a limited series, I also wrote that the show reached its ending “a little ahead of time.” The network, however, said it was clear all along that the show was scheduled to end in the spring, that it is spring right now, and the show was not canceled early.

A CNN spokesperson told me, “‘King Charles’ has come to the end of its limited run, as we announced when it launched last fall that it would run through spring. The show was a great addition to CNN’s lineup, with the youngest, most affluent, and most diverse P2+ audience in its cable news time period and brought new audiences to CNN. It’s inaccurate to report that the show was canceled as it went through its full run and duration of the limited series. We hope to work with both of these incredible talents in the future as they balance their very busy schedules.”

With the NBA playoffs about to begin, Barkley is about to head into extra duty at his main job as studio analyst for TNT’s “Inside the NBA.”

The show’s average viewership was under a half million and lagged behind competitors Fox News and MSNBC, but CNN said it was pleased that the King-Barkley broadcast brought new audiences to CNN. It pointed to this statistic from Nielsen via Npower that said 43% of the “King Charles” audience was nonwhite, compared to 7% for Fox News and 27% for MSNBC during that Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern hour.

Smartmatic and OAN settle suit

Smartmatic, the voting technology company, and One America News, the far-right TV network, have settled their lawsuit. Smartmatic was suing OAN, claiming the network lied that the company rigged the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden and against Donald Trump.

Neither side disclosed the terms of the settlement.

Smartmatic still has pending lawsuits against Fox News and Newsmax. And OAN is still facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. That’s the company that Fox News settled with out of court a year ago by agreeing to pay Dominion a whopping $787.5 million.

Missing at the Masters

According to Sports TV Ratings , Sunday’s final round of The Masters golf tournament on CBS averaged 9.58 million viewers, which was down 20% from last year’s final round, which averaged 12.05 million. This shouldn’t be a surprise. This year’s final round lacked drama, with winner Scottie Scheffler pretty much in control throughout the day.

Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis noted that in the past three decades, only COVID-era Masters in 2020 (5.64 million) and 2021 (9.54 million) had fewer viewers. Those were the least-viewed Masters since 1993.

But Lewis also points out, “As one would expect, the final round of the Masters still ranks as the most-watched golf telecast and one of the most-watched sporting events of the past year — placing ahead of four of five World Series games and every Daytona 500 since 2017. It also goes without saying that the Masters dominated all other weekend sporting events.”

Just for fun, however, I will mention that the 9.58 million was nowhere near the number of viewers (18.7 million) that watched the NCAA women’s college basketball final between South Carolina and Iowa (and star Caitlin Clark) one week earlier on a Sunday afternoon.

Other media notes, tidbits and interesting links …

• Speaking of Clark, Tom Kludt writes for Vanity Fair: “Behind the Scenes With Caitlin Clark on WNBA Draft Day: ‘I Definitely Know There’s Eyeballs on Me.’”
• Axios’ Sara Fischer with “Dozens of Alden newspapers run coordinated editorials slamming Google.”
• For the Los Angeles Times, Greg Braxton and Carolyn Cole with “What ‘Civil War’ gets right and wrong about photojournalism, according to a Pulitzer Prize winner.”
• For The Washington Post, Dave Barry, Angela Garbes, Melissa Fay Greene, John Grogan and Charles Yu with “How does the election feel around the country? 5 writers capture the vibe.” Barry, as always looking at things a bit differently, writes, “Greetings from the Sunshine State! The mood down here, as we anticipate the 2024 presidential election, is one of hopefulness. Specifically, we’re hoping that a large, previously undetected meteor will strike the planet before November.”
• For NPR and “Morning Edition,” Elizabeth Blair with “50 years ago, ‘Come and Get Your Love’ put Native culture on the bandstand.”

More resources for journalists

• Thursday webinar : Covering transgender issues with authority and accuracy.
• Applications for Poynter Producer Project close on Friday!
• Reporter’s Toolkit gives you the tools to succeed early in your career. Apply by April 28.
• Delve more deeply into your editing skills with Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing .

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected] .

The Poynter Report is our daily media newsletter. To have it delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, sign up here .

Opinion | A conversation with White House Correspondents’ Association president Kelly O’Donnell

Advocating for her press corps colleagues has become a second full-time job for NBC News' senior White House correspondent.

Opinion | The case for funding environmental journalism right now

Philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting reporters, but funding must be transparent and clear to maintain credibility

How Poynter transformed a hands-on workshop into an email course

Lessons learned from an experiment in building a new journalism project

Opinion | Journalists at Columbia are leading the coverage of their campus

The Columbia Daily Spectator has expertly documented tense protests over the Israel-Hamas war inside and outside the campus.

Q&A: Mina Kimes on her run from acclaimed sportswriter to Emmy-nominated NFL Analyst

The ESPN star explains how she got over her fears (and the trolls) to get better at discussing the sport she loves

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

Journalist who accused NPR of liberal bias resigns from the network

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Uri Berliner, the veteran NPR journalist who publicly accused his employer of liberal bias, has resigned from the network.

Berliner posted a message Wednesday on the social media platform X with his resignation letter to the public broadcaster’s chief executive Katherine Maher.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote. “I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Berliner, a business editor at the network, was suspended last Friday, four days after the appearance of an April 9 opinion piece for the Substack newsletter the Free Press . His essay said NPR is catering to “a distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” The overall thrust of the piece asserted that NPR has “lost America’s trust.”

Berliner was suspended for five days for violating NPR’s policy requiring management to clear any work produced for another media outlet.

Berliner’s essay said he voted against former President Trump in 2016 and 2020 but that he believes progressive advocacy seeped into the network’s coverage of Trump and other topics such as the Israel-Hamas war, the origins of COVID-19 and the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.

Berliner’s polemic was promoted by conservative critics of NPR, which led to the resurfacing of politically charged social media posts from Maher.

Maher, who took over as NPR’s chief executive in January, expressed her disdain for Trump in a number of tweets, including one 2020 post in which she called him a racist.

NPR issued a statement Tuesday calling the resurfaced tweets a coordinated attempt to damage the network.

NPR president Jarl Mohn is betting on smart, addictive podcasts to hook millennials

Will podcasting kill the radio star?

June 29, 2016

“This is a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations,” the network said. “In this case, they resorted to digging up old tweets and making conjectures based on our new CEO’s resume. Spending time on these accusations is intended to detract from NPR’s mission of informing the American public and providing local information in communities around the country is more important than ever.”

Maher previously headed the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, and has no previous experience in journalism.

She did not respond to Berliner by name, but defended NPR’s performance in a letter to staff made public last week.

“Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” Maher wrote.

NPR had no comment on Berliner’s resignation.

More to Read

NPR suspends journalist who publicly accused network of liberal bias

April 16, 2024

Letters to the Editor: NBC’s firing of Ronna McDaniel was no surprise. But it was a disaster

April 2, 2024

NBC News cuts ties with Ronna McDaniel after internal backlash

March 26, 2024

Inside the business of entertainment

The Wide Shot brings you news, analysis and insights on everything from streaming wars to production — and what it all means for the future.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Stephen Battaglio writes about television and the media business for the Los Angeles Times out of New York. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. He is also the author of three books about television, including a biography of pioneer talk show host and producer David Susskind.

More From the Los Angeles Times

World & Nation

Harvey Weinstein rape conviction overturned by N.Y. Court of Appeals

Entertainment & Arts

Questions swirl over the future of TikTok. Who could own it? How will the platform operate?

April 24, 2024

Company Town

Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are crashing TV’s ad-selling party

Why Disney is doubling down on theme parks with a $60-billion plan

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns

Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage.

By Benjamin Mullin

Uri Berliner, the NPR editor who accused the broadcaster of liberal bias in an online essay last week, prompting criticism from conservatives and recrimination from many of his co-workers, has resigned from the nonprofit.

Mr. Berliner said in a social media post on Wednesday that he was resigning because of criticism from the network’s chief executive, Katherine Maher.

“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O. whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay,” Mr. Berliner wrote.

In his brief resignation letter, addressed to Ms. Maher, Mr. Berliner said he loved NPR, calling it a “great American institution” and adding that he respects “the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism.”

An NPR spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said the nonprofit does not comment on personnel matters.

In an interview, Mr. Berliner said his decision to resign from NPR coalesced early this week after an email exchange with Ms. Maher. He said in the interview that he could infer from one of her emails that a memo she had sent to employees last week about workplace integrity was referring to him even though he had not been mentioned by name. In the email, which was sent to Mr. Berliner on Monday, Ms. Maher said her memo “stands for itself in reflecting my perspective on our organization.”

“Everything completely changed for me on Monday afternoon,” Mr. Berliner said.

Mr. Berliner’s essay stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism of NPR and made Mr. Berliner something of a pariah within the network. Several employees told The New York Times that they no longer wished to work with him, and his essay was denounced by Edith Chapin, the network’s top editor.

Many journalists at NPR pushed back against the essay, including the “Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep, who said on the newsletter platform Substack that Mr. Berliner failed to “engage anyone who had a different point of view.”

“This article needed a better editor,” Mr. Inskeep wrote. “I don’t know who, if anyone, edited Uri’s story, but they let him publish an article that discredited itself.”

Mr. Berliner’s essay found some defenders among the ranks of former NPR employees. Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, a former ombudsman, said on social media that Mr. Berliner was “not wrong.” Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Mr. Berliner’s essay “brave” on Facebook.

Critics of NPR, including conservative activists, used Mr. Berliner’s essay in The Free Press to impugn the network’s journalism and its leadership. One of them, Christopher Rufo, began resurfacing social media posts from Ms. Maher that were critical of President Donald J. Trump and embraced progressive causes. Mr. Rufo has a history of pressuring media organizations to cover critical stories of well-known figures, including the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president.

NPR said in a statement earlier this week that Ms. Maher’s social media posts predated her term as chief executive, adding that she was not working in news at the time.

Before he resigned from NPR, Mr. Berliner was on a five-day suspension from the network for violating company policy against working for outside organizations without securing permission.

Mr. Berliner said he did not have any immediate plans after leaving NPR, adding that he was looking forward to getting more sleep and spending time with his family.

Benjamin Mullin reports on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact Ben securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or email at [email protected] . More about Benjamin Mullin

NPR suspends senior editor Uri Berliner after essay accusing outlet of liberal bias

Npr suspended senior editor uri berliner a week after he authored an online essay accusing the outlet of allowing liberal bias in its coverage..

NPR has suspended a senior editor who authored an essay published last week on an online news site in which he argued that the network had "lost America's trust" because of a liberal bias in its coverage, the outlet reported.

Uri Berliner was suspended Friday for five days without pay, NPR reported Tuesday . The revelation came exactly a week after Berliner publicly claimed in an essay for The Free Press, an online news publication, that NPR had allowed a "liberal bent" to influence its coverage, causing the outlet to steadily lose credibility with audiences.

The essay reignited the criticism that many prominent conservatives have long leveled against NPR and prompted newsroom leadership to implement monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, NPR reported. Berliner's essay also angered many of his colleagues and exposed NPR's new chief executive Katherine Maher to a string of attacks from conservatives over her past social media posts.

In a statement Monday to NPR, Maher refuted Berliner's claims by underscoring NPR's commitment to objective coverage of national issues.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," Maher said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

Heat exposure law: Florida joins Texas in banning local heat protections for outdoor workers

Berliner rails against NPR's coverage of COVID-19, diversity efforts

Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, argued in the Free Press essay that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

While he claimed that NPR has always had a "liberal bent" ever since he was hired at the outlet, he wrote that it has since lost its "open-minded spirit," and, hence, "an audience that reflects America."

The Peabody Award-winning journalist highlighted what he viewed as examples of the network's partisan coverage of several major news events, including the origins of COVID-19 and the war in Gaza . Berliner also lambasted NPR's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – as reflected both within its newsroom and in its coverage – as making race and identity "paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

"All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth," he wrote.

Uri Berliner's essay fuels conservative attacks on NPR

In response to the essay, many prominent conservatives and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, launched renewed attacks at NPR for what they perceive as partisan coverage.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo in particular targeted Maher for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network – her  first at a news organization . Among the posts singled out were  a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist .

Trump reiterated on his social media platform, Truth Social, his longstanding argument that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded.

NPR issues formal rebuke to Berliner

Berliner provided an NPR reporter with a copy of the formal rebuke for review in which the organization told the editor he had not been approved to write for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.

NPR also said he publicly released confidential proprietary information about audience demographics, the outlet reported.

Leadership said the letter was a "final warning" for Berliner, who would be fired for future violations of NPR's policies, according to NPR's reporting. Berliner, who is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union, told the NPR reporter that he is not appealing the punishment.

A spokeswoman for NPR said the outlet declined to comment on Berliner's essay or the news of his suspension when reached Tuesday by USA TODAY.

"NPR does not comment on individual personnel matters, including discipline," according to the statement. "We expect all of our employees to comply with NPR policies and procedures, which for our editorial staff includes the NPR Ethics Handbook ."

NPR staffer express dismay; leadership puts coverage reviews in place

According to the NPR article, Berliner's essay also invoked the ire of many of his colleagues and the reporters whose stories he would be responsible for editing.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said in a post last week on social media site X, though he didn't mention Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and [expletive] on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Amid the fallout, NPR reported that NPR's chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom late Monday afternoon that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay in an interview with NPR, adding that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]