2.3: Accuracy strategies

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A man working on a computer and talking on a mobile phone. (Unsplash free-to-use license, Vitaly Gariev)

Media writers in every branch of the industry not only have to publish accurate information, they must be prepared to demonstrate to skeptical audiences where their information comes from and why it is as accurate as can be. Transparency is essential for news practice but may be expected of all types of media professionals particularly when engaging with audiences on social media.

Definition: Transparency

Transparency in the mass media industry refers to professional openness regarding the creation and dissemination of content. Though not prized in aspects of the mass media industry that must protect trade secrets, in news and in many social media influencer roles, transparency is a key way for media writers to demonstrate that they and the information they publish are trustworthy.

Media consumers are being taught rightly to question what they read and see in the mass media and on social media. Most members of the public have been burned by mis/disinformation in the past. Media consumers look for authenticity, openness, and up-front acknowledgement of biases where relevant, and they are on the lookout for AI-generated content as well.

Accuracy in professional practice is about consistency and about being as transparent as you can be, depending on your industry role. A reputation for accuracy is built over time as professionals consistently publish well-supported, factual information. Being transparent in media writing means documenting and demonstrating your process for gathering information, crafting messages, and making dissemination choices. It means demonstrating to audiences how the writer knows whatever it is they claim to know.

Media writers should refrain from publishing conjecture. They should publish only what they reasonably believe to be true and only what they can support with multiple factual sources. Media writers should be honest, open and communicate clearly how certain they are about specific claims. Let the philosophers argue if there is such a thing as absolute truth. For the sake of publishing useful information for mass audiences, the standard should be to publish only information that is reasonably well supported by multiple sources that is complete, accurate and precise as it can be at the time of publishing.

Different media outlets will set their own expectations for publication standards and for how they deal with corrections if and when they are needed. In news, many professional organizations change story webpages when corrections are needed but include notes at the bottom of the article indicating that edits were made and what those edits were. This is essential for keeping newswriters and editors accountable.

Advocacy versus accuracy

It is acknowledged that in many cases media audiences prefer advocacy for their point of view over strict standards of accuracy. Audience trust and engagement are not always directly linked to the level of content accuracy. Sometimes, advocates for a certain point of view would prefer to ignore or change facts to better fit their version of events. In the United States, getting different versions of events from opposing partisan media outlets predates the nation's independence. Advocacy and accuracy are often at odds in contemporary mass media and social media.

This text argues that advocates must be held to basic standards of accuracy just like anyone else. The long-term health of societies demands that opinions be based on facts, not the other way around.

This text aims to teach ethical professional practices for sustainable media writing careers that contribute to media systems citizens can rely on. As demonstrated earlier, the ethical consensus across the media industry is that professionals should tell the truth. The best practices and guidelines outlined in the rest of this section serve that aim. This section begins with a look at accuracy in news before addressing how best to ensure accuracy in advertising and public relations contexts. 

It's a skill issue

Those who study and promote best practices for producing trustworthy news have the following guidelines: 

• Publishers must take reasonable steps to ensure accuracy.
• Publishers must distinguish clearly between statements of fact and opinion.
• Whilst free to be partisan, publishers must not misrepresent or distort the facts.
• Publishers must correct any significant inaccuracy with prominence equal to the original article at the earliest opportunity.

Source: IMPRESS, independent press monitoring

Unpacking best practices

1. Steps to ensure accuracy include finding knowledgeable sources with first-hand information, double-sourcing factual claims with sources who are independent of each other — including institutional and non-institutional sources when possible. Further steps include taking notes of important details for every claim of fact; where criminal or ethical allegations are made, naming the source of the allegation(s) when possible; and providing information that corroborates the claim in the published report. These pointers are based on guidance from the Media Helping Media website (CCBY, NC, SA), a free training resource for journalists and news managers.
2. Distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion seems straightforward enough, but some media organizations attempt to blur the lines. If you find you are being instructed to present opinions as though they were facts, you should seriously consider finding another employer.
3. With transparently labeled opinion content, it is professionally acceptable to represent points of view that support a political party or group. After all, all published content related to advertising, public relations, military and government public affairs, etc. presents information from a certain point of view, but this is not a license to generate your own misinformation. The difference between prioritizing facts and misrepresenting or covering up information is key.
4. When corrections are necessary, and they even happen to seasoned professionals, they should play as prominently as the original content. This means they should be published on the same platform with the same level of prominence as the original content that included any erroneous information.

These are behaviors you should not only practice in your professional career, but, as a consumer, you should hold the publishers of content you consume to the same standards. The steps outlined above are probably clear enough if you have experience gathering information and producing content for mass audiences, but for beginning reporters, influencers, and other media writers, it might help to go into a bit more detail about why these steps are so important.

Digging Deeper

Finding sources with first-hand information is considered most valuable because they should have direct empirical evidence of what took place. That is, they can describe the sights and sounds of events. They can often explain not just what happened but why, and for more in-depth stories they might have paper or electronic documentation that supports their claims. No eyewitness account will be perfect. This is why journalists demand that factual claims be backed up by multiple sources, even for information that seems legitimate. Still, a human with detailed, direct knowledge is usually considered the best source.

Official sources, sometimes called institutional sources, can be both quite knowledgeable and quite likely to share only a limited version of the facts. Knowledgeable officials are not immune to mistakes or misstatements.

Definition: Institutional source

News sources are people who provide information for a story. Accurate stories can only be built on trustworthy sources. Institutional sources are people who represent an organization with a structure that is recognized both formally and informally in society. These sources are often knowledgeable, but they are not infallible. Even information from reliable institutional sources must be double sourced.

Often, government and other institutional sources are tasked with maintaining the status quo. Attempting to find information that challenges the status quo might lead to sources being uncooperative or might lead to them providing incomplete or poorly supported facts. It is up to professional journalists to hold institutional sources up to at least the same level of scrutiny that they apply to others. Officials such as those who represent police, fire departments, courts, educational institutions, and governmental bodies as well as corporate and other organized business interests should not mind being fact checked because they, too, are responsible for providing accurate information to the public.

Allegedly...

In news, when a story involves an allegation of illegal or seriously unethical activity, alarm bells should go off for the media writer. These types of stories can trigger lawsuits if done poorly. The basic standard for accuracy is that any detail relating to an allegation should be corroborated by at least two sources who are independent of one another, and the published report should include as much evidence as is reasonable to present publicly.  It is not unusual for sources to request anonymity if they are alleging someone committed a crime against them. These requests can only be handled on a case-by-case basis. At times anonymity in published reports is granted to protect the identity of an accuser, but the news organization may want to obtain corroborating evidence including sourcing beyond standard double sourcing practices. 

It is not unheard of for a journalist to be careful when taking notes about allegations against an individual accused of a horrendous crime only to get their name wrong in a published report. Attention to accuracy in reports of criminal or ethical allegations must extend to every detail, large and small.

AI tools and other online resources

Though they should be skeptical of information provided by artificial intelligence tools, media writers may wish to augment their research efforts with AI. It is essential to note, though, that just because AI chat tools access massive amounts of data and present information in a clear, straightforward manner, this does not mean they are accurate. AI tools can be disturbingly inaccurate with regard to basic facts. Media writers should feel empowered to make use of the same tools available to every other professional working in the creative industries, but in the interest of accuracy, media writers should take extra care in verifying information provided through AI search tools.

As for blogs, podcasts, influencers, advice and ratings websites, and other general information web sources, it is important to use them if they help improve the breadth and depth of your news searches. When considering their level of accuracy, refer to the following suggestions based on the University of Texas at El Paso's guidelines for telling good online sources apart from bad ones.

1. Scrutinize the source's identity: Check the domain name. Check the username and profile for online comments and influencer content. The first step in analyzing information from an online source is to know whether the source is legitimate. With practice, you will recognize fake URLs, bots and other fake social media accounts, and you will be able to disregard their information out of hand.
2. Dig deeper into source credibility: Once you are sure you are dealing with a source that is who or what they say they are, a media writer still needs to ask if this is someone worth listening to. Does the website or article list an author? Check their biographical information. Check to make sure websites are not parody sites. Check the date of publication, and check to see if other reputable publishers have ever referenced this website or individual. Note that mere quantity of content does not guarantee trustworthiness. There are many YouTube accounts that publish hours of misinformation almost daily to garner attention and clicks, but an ocean of misinformation is useless to a media writer thirsting for trustworthy information.
3. Look for corroboration from those with different points of view: While partisan news sources and influencers with political biases rarely agree about who deserves the praise when things go well or the blame when things to wrong, they will often agree on the fact that something happened and when and where it took place. It is important that you do not repeat lies from politically biased sources, but when sources with different viewpoints do agree this can be a sign that the information at a base level is real.
4. Consider some sites "background only" sources: Websites like Wikipedia, blogs, most podcasts, and social media chatter can be good resources when starting to learn about a topic, but they are not definitive sources of information and should not be cited in news stories. Consider the metaphor of a mountain stream in gold country which carries all types of mud, fool's gold, and flecks of the real thing. These can tell you where to begin to look for valuable information, but when looking for substance, for the mother lode, so to speak, these are only starting points.

Automation transparency

Media organizations find themselves with access to more tools than ever that are capable of automating data gathering, data analysis, formulaic writing, and dissemination tasks. The algorithms they use to collect, analyze, interpret, and present data as narrative for human consumption are often hidden from public view. There are growing calls for media organizations to be more transparent about how they use algorithms to generate and disseminate content, but research suggests there are limits on how much media companies are willing to expose.

For example, Nicholas Diakopoulos & Michael Koliska analyzed focus group discussions with 50 news media professionals and scholars to learn about the possibilities and challenges of being more transparent about the algorithms being developed to produce news content. They found, in their study published in 2016, that media companies understood the push for transparency but saw releasing too much information about proprietary algorithms as a threat to their business.

Essentially, it would cost news media companies to prepare algorithmic data to be shared publicly, and there was no financial incentive for doing the work. "Costs identified in producing transparency information included: data preparation, documentation writing, source code polishing, and benchmark testing," according to Diakopulos and Koliska (needs footnote). For these reasons, the general public may not be aware of how media organizations use algorithms to collect and analyze so-called "big data." More transparency in the industry is needed if media organizations expect the general public to trust them. Individual professionals can do their part by being transparent when using software to gather and analyze data that refer to members of the public. A media organization might not allow or wish to fund full disclosure about how proprietary algorithms work, but journalists and other media professionals should demand the right to divulge when algorithms have been used and for what purpose.

Accuracy in advertising and public relations contexts

The first rule of accuracy in the advertising and public relations fields is that professionals must not lie to consumers or stakeholders. Consumers have varying levels of skepticism for advertising and public relations content, but they also look to both for information about the world around them. Advertising and PR writers are usually up front about the fact that they are advocating for a point of view. Painting a product or a brand or a business or institution in the best possible light, given the facts at hand is legitimate professionally. Lying to mass audiences, covering up for crimes and other misdeeds, and omitting information that could cause great harm are not acceptable.

Over the past two decades or so, it has become increasingly clear that news organizations are not considered objective even when they strive to be. Audiences tend to evaluate news in relative terms according to the audience's political point of view. A staunchly centrist news organization that goes out of its way year after year to demonstrate that its content exhibits less political bias than almost every other mass media outlet available to the public might still be considered too far to the left or to the right based on an audience member's perspective. What matters most is not how far a news site deviates from partisan audience perspectives. What matters is if they are reporting false information carelessly or purposefully.

Professional advertising creatives and PR writers may be more cautious than many journalists when it comes to discussing current events, sharing social media content, or speculating about future events because there may be dire legal and financial implications for misinforming the public. Regardless of your mass communication subfield, following professional codes of ethics and developing a personal sense of applied ethics and a vigilance against mis-/disinformation is essential in this industry moving forward.

Strive for accuracy, not infallibility

Philosophers, particularly philosophers of science, generally acknowledge that there is no absolute truth because there are limits to our perception and because no one has access to all of the facts all of the time, but even given this fact, anyone who writes for mass audiences has a responsibility to be as factual as they can be. It is easier than ever to verify basic information through the careful application of critical thinking skills combined with the wealth of information and knowledge available online.

Information Accuracy Exercise

To get a sense of how valuable accuracy in professional media is, open your favorite social media app and scroll or swipe until you come across something you know to be false that is, however, presented as though it were a fact.

Answer the following questions:  Which social media platform did you use?
What was the piece of information or story that was presented inaccurately?
Does it appear that this bit of false information was created by accident, by negligence, or spread to purposefully confuse audiences?
What was the likely motivation for creating or spreading this inaccurate information?
Was AI involved in the creation or spreading of this false information?
How many posts or videos did you scroll through before you found an inaccuracy?

How common do you think it is that people are misinformed or purposefully fed disinformation on social media platforms?
What strategies do you have for checking information to see if it is true?

Finally, should societies consider studying media literacy as nearly important as studying how to read and write?

Many avid social media consumers, when they first learn about media literacy and start to face how much false information they see in a day, find the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation staggering.

Misinformation and disinformation are troubling for societies the world over, but their prevalence suggests there is a market for professional, honest, clear and interesting fact-checking services.

Accuracy permeates almost every aspect of media writing. More specific situational advice for being accurate appears throughout the rest of this text.

Media consumers also have a responsibility to think critically about all of the information they consume. For a more complete text on media literacy, consider reading Media Communication, Convergence and Literacy, another OER text that deals specifically with media literacy. 

The next section briefly deals with the big picture social implications of mis/disinformation and makes the case that media professionals should not only avoid mis/disinformation when they see it but should actively attack it because it undermines all branches of professional practice.