17 Jun 2016 | Magazine
Chris Bond, Yvette Huddleston, Rachael Jolley and Anthony Clavane
Photos: Fiona Gell/The Leeds Big Bookend Festival
The Index on Censorship Big Debate took place at the 5th annual Leeds Big Bookend Festival this week, where journalists and authors were invited to discuss which has the biggest impact: journalism or fiction. Index’s magazine editor Rachael Jolley was joined by assistant features editor of The Yorkshire Post Chris Bond, Yorkshire-based journalist and author Yvette Huddleston and author of the award- winning Promised Land Anthony Clavane to explore which medium is more influential and why, as part of a series of Time To Talk debates held by Eurozine. Audio from the debate will be available at Time to Talk or listen below.
27 Apr 2016 | Magazine, mobile, Volume 45.01 Spring 2016
Reporters shouldn’t forget old techniques for checking information. Image: Alex Steffler/ Flickr /Creative Commons
Can you stand it up? Those five words were the ones I probably uttered more than any other when editing a daily newspaper. Excited reporters would be fed a diet of rumours: a member of parliament has left his wife, the chief constable has been suspended. These snippets would then be thrown into the daily news conference. And, with some exaggerated world-weariness, I would ask the key question. Can you stand it up? I never heard about half of the stories again.
Our advantage was that when a lead emerged at midday, we had nine hours to stand it up. If we couldn’t make it watertight we could give ourselves another 24 hours. In today’s digital world the pressure is on to push the button as soon any unsubstantiated tale flashes across our Twitter feeds. And the rush to publish means half-baked stories, outdated pictures and factual errors appear on websites that should know better. The irony is that verification has never been easier. My staff used to tread a regular path to our library to consult Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, Bartholomew’s Gazetteer and our own cuttings. Now you can check almost everything online. So why don’t we? As Spotlight, the Oscar-winning Hollywood film on investigative journalism shows, sourcing, checking and re-checking is how you nail whether a story stands up. In the world of 24-hour news and digital everything, those traditional techniques should not be forgotten. They include:
- Be suspicious of everything. Take nothing at face-value. Check for vested interests. Trust no-one – even good contacts.
- Your job is to confirm things. If you can’t, try harder. If you really can’t, don’t publish.
- Always go to primary sources. Ask the chief constable if he is being suspended. Ask the authority chairman. If they won’t talk, find the committee members – all of them. When my neighbour was killed the local paper splashed it and got three facts wrong. Nobody from the paper had called the family (or me for that matter). Nobody bothered to make the effort. Shocking.
- Follow the two-sources rule. Get everything verified by at least two trustworthy sources. Ideally on the record.
- Use experts. There are universities, academics, specialists who will flag up credibility issues. Experts also know other experts.
- Every story has a paper trail. There are still archives (try LexisNexis), court papers, Company House, Tracesmart. Has the same mistake been made before?
- Ask yourself the key questions. What else can I look at? Who else can I talk to? Is it balanced? Did I write the headline first and make the story fit?
- Make sure the readers understand what is opinion and what is fact. And that includes the headline.
- Sweat the small stuff. Dates, spelling, names, figures, statistics. Don’t forget the who, what, why, where, when and how.
- Evaluate the risk. There are times when with all the rigorous checking, a story might still only be 99%. If instinct and public interest tell you to publish – pass it to the editor. That is what he or she is paid for. And, with the other nine rules followed thoroughly, hopefully the editor won’t need to ask the key question.
Peter Sands is the former editor of UK daily newspaper the Northern Echo and runs media consultancy Sands Media Services. This story is an extract from a longer report by First Draft’s Alastair Reed about the importance of verification to stop the spread of hoaxes and propaganda online.
You can read the full feature in the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine (see subscription details here)
19 Jan 2016 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Ukraine
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. Credit: Drop of Light / Shutterstock.com
Since October 2015, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project has recorded a total of 40 verified violations against press freedom in Ukraine, six of which took place in Crimea. Of these reports, 17 included a physical assault or an attack to property, showing just how unsafe the country is for many media workers. To break this number down further, seven violations were physical attacks on journalists only, six were solely damage to journalists’ property and four included a mix of both.
“State and non-state actors alike are undermining the freedom of the press in Ukraine, including Crimea,” Hannah Machlin, Index’s Mapping Media Freedom project officer, said. “Clashes in the eastern region of the country, along with blocked access to local government meetings, frequently incite threats against media workers, including arrest, harassment, violence and even death, all of which set a disturbing precedent for the country as a whole.”
The media in Ukraine may be protected in theory by laws that allow access to information and the increased independence of the broadcasting regulator, but as Mapping Media Freedom shows, this isn’t so much the case in practice.
Below, Index on Censorship details just 10 of the verified incidents since October 2015, highlighting the problem of violence — from the police and politicians to far-right extremists and unidentified assailants — and damage to property against media workers in Ukraine.
Source: Mapping Media Freedom, Index on Censorship’s joint project with European Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders to monitor censorship and violence against journalists in Europe.
22 Sep 2015 | Austria, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
Panelists at the OSCE meet on online attacks against journalists: writer Arzu Geybulla; Gavin Rees, Europe director of the Dart Center for journalism and trauma; Becky Gardiner, from Goldsmiths, University of London; journalist Caroline Criado Perez
“This is not something that only ‘ladies’ can fix,” emphasised Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE’s Representative on Freedom of the Media at an expert meeting on the safety of female journalists in Vienna on 17 September 2015, which Index on Censorship attended.
The importance of collectively tackling the growing problem became an overarching theme of the conference. “There is a new and alarming trend for women journalists and bloggers to be singled out for online harassment,” said Mijatovic, while highlighting the importance of media, state and NGO voices coming together to address the abuse.
Arzu Geybulla and Caroline Criado Perez, journalists from Azerbaijan and the UK respectively, started the meeting with moving testaments of their own experiences. Despite covering very different topics, they have received shockingly similar threats – sexual, violent and personal. “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you and choke you with my dick” was one of the messages received by Perez after she campaigned for a woman to feature on British banknotes.
Although male journalists also receive abuse, women experience a two-fold attack, including the gendered threats. Think tank Demos has estimated that female journalists experience roughly three times as many abusive comments as their male counterparts on Twitter.
The problem, said Perez, was not just the threats but how the women who receive them are then treated. “Women are accused of being mad or attention seeking, which are all ways of delegitimising women’s speech,” she said. “People told me to stop, close my Twitter account, go offline. But why is the solution to shut up?” She added: “This is a societal problem, not an internet problem.”
“Labelling a person, and making that person an object, is particularly common in Azerbaijan,” said Geybulla, an Azeri journalist and Index on Censorship magazine contributor who was labelled a traitor and viciously targeted online after writing for a Turkish-Armenian newspaper. “Our society is not ready to speak out. You can’t go to the police. The police think it must be your fault.”
The intention of the meeting was to highlight the problem, while also proposing courses of actions. Suggestions included calls for more education in digital literacy; more training for police; more support from editors and media organisations, and from male colleagues. There was some disagreement on whether the laws were robust enough as they stand, or needed an update for the internet age.
Becky Gardiner, formerly editor of Guardian’s Comment is Free section, spoke about how her own views on dealing with online abuse had changed, having initially told writers they should develop a thicker skin. “It is not enough to tell people to get tough. Disarming the comments is not a solution either. That genie is out of the bottle.” Gardiner, who is now a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, is working on research into the issue, as commissioned by the Guardian’s new editor, Kath Viner.
It was suggested that small but crucial steps could be taken by media organisations to avoid inflammatory and misleading headlines (which are not written by the journalist, but put them in the firing line) and to be careful of exposing inexperienced writers without preparation or support. Sarah Jeong from Vice’s Motherboard plaform said, in her experience, freelancers often came the most under attack because they don’t have institutional backing.
The OSCE said this will be the first in a series of meetings, with the aim of getting more organisations to take it serious and to produce more concrete courses of action.
Read more about the online abuse of women in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, with a personal account by Gamergate target Brianna Wu and a legal overview by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire).
Tweets from OSCE’s #FemJournoSafe conference:
https://twitter.com/julieposetti/status/644456066432937984
