Journalism ethics and the elephant in the room.

The point of “the Rosenthal Rule” is not to penalize any one political viewpoint; rather, the cub reporter who wanted to march in a protest has such a strong personal connection to that issue that it made him unsuited to write neutral, fact-based stories on that issue. A conflict of interest is still an ethical problem even if nobody misbehaves and nobody means any harm.

Details matter in journalism.

Get the brand of the beer, the make, model and year of the car and the name and breed of the dog. Here’s a great story that suggests journalists also “get the brand of the bra.” Similar:Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselvesThe Washington Post, which was one of ab…Current_EventsNASA: No,…

Avoid biased reporting. Avoid bias in your reporting. A person might be biased. A person cannot be bias.

Bias is a noun.

  Similar:Scrooge Is My BrotherMy daughter delivered the opening “Marle…CultureHenry Bemis waited his whole life to finally read a book. Listen to Lynn Venable’s story,…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3DHCiz…BooksAddressing Our Biases: Medieval BathingDid medieval people bathe? If you alr…CulturePost-publication review as an efficient alternative to pre-publication peer reviewAndrew Gelman of “Statistical Modeling, …AcademiaPerspective | After Hannity’s travesty, Fox News…

When Is Asking the Question Part of the News? (Rarely.) 

We mostly only encounter the phrase “when asked about” in reporting, so when students start writing news reports, they tend to gravitate towards that phrase in order to signal to the world, “I am doing journalism now.” In truth, journalists use that phrase only in very specific circumstances, when omitting it would give a distorted impression of the truth.…