What to publish on incendiary issues is a complex matter, but journalists needn’t believe that not publishing, when there is a good reason, violates and inviolable right.
Journalists must do more than cover news events. They must challenge the status quo, and dig deeper into the stories they cover. Journalists are seen in a scrum at the federal Liberal cabinet retreat in September 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
It’s not enough anymore for journalists to be mere watchdogs. Journalism must address subconscious social biases to give readers a fuller picture of what they need to know.
The Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest weekend newspaper, was used to spread disinformation.
Gianluigi Guercia/AFP via Getty Images
Journalists use real people’s stories to ‘humanize’ the news. But these tales – whether harrowing or heartwarming – can be misleading about the pandemic’s greatest threats.
Border Force officials offer help to a dinghy carrying asylum-seekers from Syria, August 10 2020.
Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/PA Images
The freedom of the press is important, and of course it must be protected. But the freedom of everybody else and of ordinary citizens is also important.
More than two dozen newsrooms have shut down and stopped the presses during the pandemic.
Tom Werner/Getty
Does taking government money mean journalists owe the government something? A media ethics scholar examines the ethical questions about news organizations getting government help during the pandemic.
The NSW Court of Appeal’s Dylan Voller decision means the media may be liable for the hurtful things users write on social pages. This will have many media companies in a panic.
Now more than ever, the media should inform, not inflame.
A catastrophic summer has brought climate change into sharp relief – and our media need to have clear policies about how to report on it.
Bianca de Marchi/AAP
Given the summer we have had, media acquiescence in climate change denial, and failure to follow the weight of scientific evidence, looks like culpability.
Everyone has a different reason for sharing a mental health story.
(Shutterstock)
As a crisis unfolded in the Sydney CBD, a journalist tweeted what she saw and heard, and was criticised for doing so. Here’s why she was right to report what she did.
The ACMA and media outlets will now have discussions about how to cover violence attacks like that in Christchurch, in future.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The Australian Communication and Media Authority’s report into the conduct of Australian media in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings is nuanced but very tame.
A Kenyan journalist has an altercation with a police officer.
EPA/Dai Kurokawa
A new study highlights the significant differences in attitudes between UK and German journalists.
The difference in the Christchurch attacks is that propaganda supplied by the perpetrator was available to the professional media, even as the story was breaking.
Wes Mountain/The Conversation
Foreign press took away the dignity from victims killed in the Nairobi terror attacks by publishing their pictures.
Three recent faces of confirmed and alleged terror attacks each treated very differently: the two separate Bourke Street attackers – James Gargasoulas and Hassan Khalif Shire Ali – and Ertunc Eriklioglu, one of the three people arrested on November 20 for allegedly planning a terror attack.
AAP/The Conversation
As recent events show, we might get better media reporting if journalists questioned authorities more closely on the relevance of ethnicity and religion in crime reporting.
Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor, AMREP Department of Medicine, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne & Senior Medical Oncologist and Palliative Care Physician, Melbourne Oncology Group, Cabrini Haematology and Oncology Centre, Wattletree Road, Malvern, Monash University