Accountability: Responsible or answerable for your work.

Advertising: Attracting attention by paying to have announcements placed on billboards, in newspapers and broadcasts or on websites.

Balance: Equality between the totals of the two (or more) sides of the account. Balance is more technical; a quantitative measurement.

Bias: A predisposition that distorts your ability to fairly weigh the evidence and prevents you from reaching a fair or accurate judgment.

• How to Spot Bias
  • Look for evidence of a pattern of unfairness over time
  • Compare a variety of news outlets, especially to search for bias by omission
  • Take note of the self-interest of those alleging bias

Cognitive Dissonance: Psychological theory that proposes that people are powerfully motivated to reduce their discomfort. In order to get rid of that feeling, people will change their beliefs or behaviors. OR, they will justify and rationalize or even block and warp new information.

Confirmation Bias:  Pursuing information that reassures or reflects a person’s particular point of view.

Direct Evidence: Anything that was captured firsthand or on the scene (i.e. video, recordings, photographs, documents, records, eyewitness accounts)

Entertainment: Something affording pleasure, diversion or amusement.

Fair Comment: Protects your rights to criticize and comment on matters of public interest without being liable for defamation, provided that the comment is an honest expression of opinion and free of malice: the intent to cause harm without legal justification or excuse.

Fairness: Marked by impartiality and honesty. Free from self-interest, prejudice or favoritism. Being fair to the evidence.

Hostile Media Effect: A belief among partisans that news reports are painting them in the worst possibly light. People who are deeply involved in one side of an issue are quicker to spot and remember aspects of a news story that are negative. The best informed partisans are the most likely to see bias.

Independence: Freedom from the control, influence or support of interested parties, coupled with a conscious effort to set aside any preexisting beliefs and a system of checks and balances.

Indirect Evidence: Second-hand or recreated information (i.e. accounts from official spokespersons, expert reconstructions, hearsay testimony, computer models)

Journalist: A journalist’s primary mission is to inform the public while employing journalistic methods such as verification to uphold journalistic values in order to maintain independence and accountability.

Journalistic Truth: The best obtainable version of the truth on any given day.

News: Timely information of some public interest that is shared and subject to a journalistic process of verification and for which an independent individual or organization is directly accountable.

News Driver: What make information into news.

The 10 Universal News Drivers:

• Importance: When the information has serious implications
• Prominence: When the story involves a famous person or person of interest
• Human Interest: A unique or universal experience exploring the human condition
• Conflict: Clashes of people, institutions or ideas
• Proximity: Where the event took place in context to the audience
• Timeliness: Anniversaries, holidays or deadlines – the calendar is the crucial context of the story
• Magnitude: Numbers are the essence of the story
• Relevance: How wide is the story’s impact and audience?
• Unusualness: Alerts and divers – something strange that doesn’t usually happen every day.

News Literacy: The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

No Prior Restraint: Government cannot stop something from being published, broadcasted or posted on the Internet, except in rare instances. But, the publisher can face consequences later.

Peer Influence: When personal perceptions of things like size or distance are impaired by group pressure.

Privilege: Protects your right to publish court testimony, police reports or other public documents, even if they contain falsehoods. This is because the public has the privilege to review the contents of government files as a means of ensuring police, courts and other agencies are conducting themselves correctly. Since most people work, the press is a mechanism for reading those government files.

Propaganda: Information, ideas or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution or nation. It is often bias and misleading, in order to promote an ideology or point of view.

Publicity: The process of securing public notice with information designed to enhance the image of a person or product.

Raw Information: Information that has yet to be examined or verified. It is unfiltered information that bypasses traditional gatekeepers and mediators.

Reliable Information: Allows the news consumer to make a decision, take action or share responsibly with others

Selective Dissonance: The process of distorting or “forgetting” incoming information if it does not match a person’s particular point of view.

Source Misattribution: The process of attributing comforting information to a more respectable source.

The ‘Fourth Estate’: An old European phrase used to describe the press and its role as a watch dog. Originally, it referred to unofficial powers like Queen consorts or powerful lawyers, as distinct from the Church, Parliament and People. The Fourth Estate moniker was sarcastically applied to reporters by the 18^th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle:

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” From: On Heroes and Hero Worship.

In America, the four estates of power are the three branches of government and the citizens to counterbalance them.

Verification: Process that establishes or confirms the accuracy or truth of something.

• Disciplines of Verification
  • Gather, assess and weigh evidence
  • Place facts in the big picture (context)
  • Be fair when appropriate, adjust balance
  • Maintain transparency