CUNY Academic Commons

Protect your sources. It’s the cardinal rule of journalism, and reporters hold this promise of confidentiality in the highest regard. Journalists will protect a source’s identity or withhold details of their con […]

At the very least, journalists must strive to publish reports that are independently verified, accurate, and fair at the time of publication. As news breaks, it’s up to the reporter and editorial team to d […]

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Ethical journalists act with integrity, seek the truth, and report on it. Telling a story of public interest requires transparency on who provided the information and how the reporter acquired it. Sometimes […]

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Journalists have a long history of putting citizens first and holding power to account–and that shouldn’t change just because there’s a new owner on the masthead. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel go even […]

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To answer this question, you might go straight to the source. Since launching his HBO series Last Week Tonight in 2014, John Oliver has repeatedly shot down suggestions that his work is a form of […]

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Press freedom is under attack, and not just recently. It has been on a steady decline for the last decade, according to the World Press Freedom Index, which ranks 180 countries every year. In 2022, only […]

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It feels like a new conspiracy theory is popping up every day.  Just look at the social media posts after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during the game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Doctors […]

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We’ve all heard the saying, “There are two sides to every story.” And sometimes, that’s true in journalism—and life. But balance is not an element of journalism and certainly not its goal. While reporte […]

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Representation is a huge challenge for newsrooms, and you’re right– they need to do better. We talked about why the racial makeup of a newsroom matters in a post earlier this year, but you bring up another […]

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That depends on whom you ask, but a lot of U.S. adults think so, according to a new poll by Pew Research. More than 90 percent of conservative Republicans believe social media companies are censoring […]

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There is some evidence that it can, and two political scientists recently performed an interesting experiment to find out. David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of […]

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Fact-checkers are on the frontline in the war against misinformation, and their ranks are growing as falsehoods flood the internet. The number of fact-checkers has doubled since 2016, with nearly 400 now […]

America’s partisan divide is becoming more pronounced, and cable news is stoking these divisions even more than social media, according to a new study that tracked the news consumption of tens of thousands of p […]

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Chances are we all know someone – a family member, a friend, a classmate, or a co-worker – who believes in conspiracy theories. In fact, more than half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy the […]

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With any human endeavor, there’s potential for error. While it is the responsibility of journalists and news organizations to deliver accurate and fair reporting, consumers should never assume that e […]

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Men were dying. Homeless, indigent, alone, often asleep on city streets or in subway cars. No one knew when the next death might occur. The locations were adding up, too: Washington, then New York. Was […]