Welcome back. This time we're going to talk about a really central value in journalism. The value of truth telling. And right at the heart of truth telling is the concept of verification. Verification means corroborating, checking, double checking, making sure that the evidence that you've got for your story actually stands up. Verification is all about verifying, seeing whether the information that we've received has any factual basis or whether allegations made have any substance to them. Honesty and truth telling, two of the really key values of journalism. What is truth? Well, it's an old question, isn't it? But in journalism we take a pragmatic approach. Truth in journalism is the best obtainable version of the truth from the material available at the time. And, it's contingent. It can change in the light of new material. Those words of Stephen Ward there on the slide, capture it very nicely. The best we can hope for is a journalism that gradually clarifies issues. So you can take some time. You often don't get the whole truth ever and very often you don't get it all in the very first story. And it takes time to emerge. So, this process of truth telling begins with gathering information and people's views. And then verifying, checking. Is what that person told me true? Can I find a document or can I find somebody else, who will corroborate or back up what that person has said? And once we've verified the information, we can then evaluate it. Is it relevant to the story? How important is it in relation to the other facts that are available to us by reference to those news values that we've spoken about already? What does it mean? Very important part of contemporary journalism is to assist the reader understand what's going on. So, we need to interpret the facts by reference to all of the information that's at our disposal. And then representing it in a way that most accurately and fairly reflects our understanding of the truth. Since the election of Donald Trump, we've entered a new age where the idea of truth is under attack. We hear about truthiness, alternative facts, fake news and this is an outright challenge to journalism. As journalists, we have a duty to respond by being even more careful to see that what we produce is accurate. We must verify before we publish. It's not acceptable to publish and then see if it's correct. Even if we fix an error quickly, some people will only ever see the wrong version. So being right is more important than being first. Otherwise, we undermine public trust in journalism and we play into the hands of people who say we deal in fake news. To do this, professionally, we need an open-minded approach. If we go into this with a closed-minded approach or a biased approach, then we are not behaving professionally as journalists, we're behaving as publicists. We also need to consider competing factors. There are many other factors in life apart from just getting a story. And so, we often need to take into account other interests, particularly the interests of individuals in such things as privacy or other human rights. And then, weigh them against what we call the public interest. It's important that we don't just present a procession of facts. We need to explain the meaning of the facts and their significance. Why they're important to people. And to draw attention to evidence that suggests if there's something going on below the surface. It means that we shouldn't be hinting, about where there is evidence that suggests something else is going on other than what appears to be on the face of the facts, then we need to draw attention to that. And often it involves providing context. The central power of journalism is the power to represent, or portray. Represent not in the sense, not in the political sense of represent but in a sense of providing a representation, providing a picture, of a person or an idea, organization, political party, an event. And every word we choose in writing our copy, colors that representation, that picture, that portrayal. So, it's very important that we choose the words that most accurately and fairly portray the truth as we know it at the time of writing. And accuracy and fairness are the two touchstones for the quality that we call impartiality. We'll come back to impartiality at another time in the course. And it means not exaggerating, beating up is the jargon phrase, the material that we have but to represent it with proportional language. Language which again, accurately and fairly represents the true position. So in summary, verify before publishing. And, so our procedures are to gather, verify, evaluate interpret, explain and then portray accurately and fairly.
