Journalism: Back to Basics

How cool is it that in the 21^st century it isn’t just news anchors, professional investigative journalists or beat reporters that bring us news and current events? Today, average JoAnne Public contributes to a globally collective knowledge. What is less cool, however, is the vast amount of not-really journalistic style writing that permeates media with biased opinions or fake news. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher good journalistic pieces from stories rife with personal beliefs or judgements. Whether you are a reader or writer of today’s news, keeping an eye out for just a few ‘tells’ means you’ll perhaps consume or create more real news and fewer opinion pieces.

Accuracy

It’s pretty exciting to be the first to report a story, or to read the earliest account of a story. You know what is less exciting? Finding out you read misinformation after you shared it with friends, or learning you released a story before all your facts were confirmed. It is far better to be right than to be first; both as a reader and a writer. I think we can all agree that anything premature is, well…not great.

Sources

Remember back in school when you had to write a bibliography to prove where you found your information? The same basic rules apply to good news reporting too. Although citations don’t always have to be formal, there should be some mention of the source of the information. This doesn’t mean confidential contributors should be named, though. Sometimes protection of privacy is important to a story!

Naming sources not only lends credibility to a story, but doing so supports the validity of any quoted numbers or stats too. For example, I could tell you eleventy nine percent of drivers pick their noses at a stop light. If I don’t also tell you which studies prove this, shouldn’t you question the legitimacy of that statistic?

Free from Bias

Good reporting demands sharing all sides of a story. We’ve all read stories about kids constantly on their devices today and never looking up to experience the people right in front of them. Presumably, they’re on social media, playing games, and generally wasting their lives. But what about the kid texting a parent living away from the family home, or communicating with a teacher about an assignment, or talking a friend through a trying time? Do we also get to read about how those kids are experiencing real relationships, trauma, joy, or easing the loneliness of a loved one through their device? Do we get to learn about how that kid is making a difference in the life of another not sitting in that group?

It’s important for good journalism to tell all sides of the story without injecting personal views, emotional attachment to one side or the other, and to keep stereotypes out of the story. According to the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, although it’s acceptable to include other people’s opinions in a story, the writer should steer clear of expressing their own opinions. So as long as both the kid with her face in her device AND, for example, the disapproving onlooker both have a voice in a story, it all balances out!

We all know if it’s on the Internet it must be true, but keeping an eye out for legitimate journalism fosters the smartitude in all of us.

Related Topics:Deanna Deveau Journalism Opinion

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Journalism: Back to Basics

National

Andrew Scheer exposes the Mark Carney Canadians should know

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the X account of Andrew Scheer

Mark Carney spent his entire life promoting the carbon tax.

Now he’s trying to scam Canadians out of billions and to do it he’s put a whole crew together.

It could be the biggest con job in Canadian history. Only YOU can stop it! pic.twitter.com/1DyywsynBN

— Andrew Scheer (@AndrewScheer) February 22, 2025

Daily Caller

NEWT GINGRICH: Europe’s Elites Were Finally Told To Take A Look In The Mirror

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Newt Gingrich

In an amazing show of courage, Vice President J.D. Vance offered an intervention for some of our European allies.

That is the best way to think of the two historic speeches he made in France and Germany last week.

In Paris, Vice President Vance pledged the United States would do whatever it takes to lead the world in the development of Artificial Intelligence. He went on to assert that Europe’s automatic response to regulate technological change rather than adapt to it was doomed to fail.

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Vance warned the Europeans that the Trump administration would retaliate to protect American high-tech companies from being fined and regulated by the European community.

Then, Vance went to the Munich Security Conference. It is the annual meeting of European leaders concerned about defense and threats to peace. The Vice President shocked the Europeans by launching a frontal assault on the decay of their political system.

As Vance put it:

“But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.”

He then went through a litany of specific complaints about the behavior of different European countries. They ranged from failing to control immigration, suppressing free speech, and Brussels seeking to control and define futures of independent countries such as Hungary and Romania.

The leading French newspaper, Le Monde (their equivalent of the New York Times) asserted that the American Vice President was declaring “ideological war on Europe.”

Le Monde was right. The European elites have been decaying for at least two generations. They hide behind their privileged status and take ideological positions that feel good but are destructive. Europe’s failures are devastating for most everyday Europeans.

I have personal knowledge about this. I have a Ph.D. in Modern European History – and I have lived in France, Germany, Belgium and Italy. As a young Army dependent, we were living in France when the French Army came back from Algeria, killed the French Fourth Republic and brought back General Charles de Gaulle to establish the Fifth Republic.

It is now the longest serving non-royal government in French history.

The European elites value each other’s opinions more than they value serving the people of Europe. The European elites live in a fantasy world of green policies that destroy industries and jobs, welfare policies which destroy the work ethic, and immigration policies which undermine the popular culture. They simply hope for a peaceful world without a strong military.

Meanwhile, state enforced speech codes protect Islamic extremists at the expense of local citizens.

The result has been a steady decline of European culture, economic development, and defensive capacity.

The Afghan Islamist who wounded more than two dozen people and killed a mother and her two-year-old daughter with a car two days before the supposed security conference signals the willful avoidance of reality at the heart of the elite European worldview.

To be clear, I admire European civilization. I believe America is far stronger and safer if Europe is healthy and capable of growing and defending itself.

I hope vice president Vance’s intervention at least starts European elites thinking about what must be done to revive their continent.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.