CUNY Academic Commons

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The short answer is, it depends. A reporter who uses anonymous sources has a much heavier lift when it comes to establishing a story’s credibility. All reporters would prefer to use named sources in their s […]

Although transparency has long been a fundamental principle of journalism, the need for a more expansive interpretation of this practice has never been greater.  Record low levels of trust in the news media, […]

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One of the biggest challenges news consumers face today is distinguishing news from other media that does not embody journalism’s three defining attributes: Verification, independence and accountability. […]

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Trust in the news media is in short supply these days. According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer shared with Axios, confidence in news sources around the world has fallen sharply. The poll conducted in […]

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Section 230 doesn’t have many admirers in Washington, D.C., and the need to change it may be one of the few things President Biden and former President Trump agree on—albeit for very different r […]

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Conspiracy theories are nothing new. The oldest ones date back to Roman times and have circulated in varying degrees ever since. From the belief that the Earth is flat or that the CIA assassinated JFK […]

Today marks the beginning of the second annual News Literacy Week, a national initiative organized by the News Literacy Project and E.W. Scripps to raise awareness about the importance of news literacy and the […]

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Humans are storytellers. We like narratives that take the random chaos of life and put it into a coherent structure. The alternative is too difficult to live with: a world where nothing adds up to […]

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Journalistic writing is direct, concise and precise. As “The Elements of Style” says: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawi […]

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Reporters are intrinsically skeptical of all sources–eyewitnesses included—for good reason. At the same time, they are also hugely dependent on sources for their reporting and, dare I say, their very […]

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Remember, not everything is Google-able, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth verifying. Fact-checkers keep an arsenal of resources in their tool belts: a telephone, publication databases and a box of c […]

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Loaded language should come with the warning, “Handle with Care.” This term refers to words and phrases that induce a strong emotional response and carry a positive or negative connotation beyond their […]

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To answer that question, you have to go back to 1996 and what’s known as the “26 words that created the internet.” That was the year Congress passed the Communications Decency Act and its now-infamous Secti […]

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It’s true that “making up names” for anonymous sources might be a good narrative device to help the reader see a source as a three-dimensional human, but a journalist is in the business of telling the truth […]

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The use of anonymous sources in journalism has always been a controversial but widespread practice. News consumers don’t like them because they are deprived of knowing who is making that statement, claim o […]

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There are two distinct situations that could lead to this scenario. In one, a reporter is working on a story but one of the sources is questionable. Perhaps the source’s story doesn’t add up, or facts can’ […]

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I love your skepticism! I also like that you’re thinking critically about what we’re teaching you and asking us to explain things that don’t sound right. As you’ve figured out by now, a big part of […]