Media Accuracy

I have been wondering and asking myself whether media is accurate and also spot on when it comes to news or the dissemination of information and i never came to a complete conclusion. I as an individual and a student in Public Relations, believe that media's content should be accurate, specific, have an element of fairness and complete straightforward content without any errors as media is the "watchdog" body. On the other hand my opinions differ a bit due to the fact that media-sphere is a very competitive field and each journalist wants to be the first one to cover and report on a story even without having the complete facts and details, i have seen such incidents on the City Press and Sunday Sun newspapers and it is understandable that they (journalists) operate on long and hectic hours and are bound to make mistakes, but doesn't mean that they should feed us half-baked news, does it- what do you think and say? www.ethics.com

The media companies or especially journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information, test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible. Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing, identify sources whenever feasible: the public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources' reliability. As journalists they should always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. www.aim.org/aim-report.  I strongly believe that they have to make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context

is Media biased?

It does make a person to wonder if media is biased or not considering how certain current events are handled by the media. Reason why i doubt the credibilty of the media be it traditional or the new media is because of the recent treatment of other news especially on the broadcast media (television). in my opinion and own capacity. i strongly believe that the media is very biased and treats certain news in a form of favouritism. Looking at the current news, let's take the Vavi case for example all waht the nation heard, read and even seen on all the types of media was about his scandalous case and other prominent news were ignored or given less coverage regardless of their importance.

I firmly feel and i stand to be corrected that media can be biased in the following ways: biased by placement, this is where in the paper or in an article a story or event is printed; a pattern of placing news stories so as to downplay information supportive of either conservative views or liberal views.  I can say that story placement is a measure of how important the editor considers the story and the rest that s/he sees as not of importance is chunked away. The media can also be biased by story selection which is a pattern of highlighting news stories that coincide with the agenda of either the this or that, while ignoring stories that coincide with the opposing view; printing a story or study released by a liberal or conservative group but ignoring studies on the same or similar topics released by the opposing group.

I think the media should just be upright, fair and considerate of other news as for all the news are newsworthy and should be read by all the humans/citizens, in the Public Relations point of view everything is news and should be published and distributed to all the stakeholders.www.studentnewsdaily.com