03-01-2011, 04:45 PM
It seems that more and more the line between "good" journalism and opinion/entertainment is getting blurred. I think that is bad for a great many reasons, perhaps most of all because it makes it very difficult to discern the valid information from what is essentially opinion. So this pipe dream of an idea occurred to me:
If there are people with the right motivation and knowledge about what it takes to be as objective in creating reports as is practicable given human nature (a really big "if", I know), I would love to see them get together and form a private non-profit association that would establish criteria that someone would have to meet to be able to publicize that they are communicating as an "Accredited Clinical Journalist"; ACJ.
I realize that this falls into dreamer territory, but just playing with the idea, I can see where there are a lot of questions that would need to be answered:
- Who would make up this private non-profit association that would give out the accreditations? I think journalism academics with a record of advocating journalistic objectivity would be a primary source. But I think it would be good for the association to also have practicing journalists with solid reputations for objectivity.
- How would people know that a report was written by an accredited journalist? I think this is very important. People would need to have a simple way to identify a report by an accredited journalist so that they could be more confident in the information contained in the report. I think the simple way to do that would be for the author of the report to put the acronym "ACJ" after their names at the beginning of the report. I think it would be fine for the journalist to write opinion pieces, but the opinion pieces should not have the ACJ on them.
- Would someone have to get the accreditation to be called a journalist? No, I don't see why that should be the case. Anyone could call themselves a journalist, but they would have to get the accreditation to legitimately put the ACJ after their names on reports.
- What if someone with the accreditation made reports that lacked the objectivity in the standards for accreditation? I think there would need to be a review committee from the accrediting association that people could file complaints with that would investigate those complaints and could suspend or cancel the journalist's accreditation. It would probably be helpful if there was a law in place to make illegal to misrepresent oneself as having accreditation when they don't.
- Probably the hardest question is... what criteria would be used to determine if a report is objective enough? What does it mean to say a report is objective? I suppose you could say that such a report must stay very tightly to only the who, what, why and when that are clearly known. But a great deal of the time an important part of the story is the opinions of disagreeing parties - reporting that objectively can be really tricky.
I'm sure there are lots more questions. What do you think? (I'm especially curious about Gutenburg's opinion.)
When I am looking for objective information I would really like to be able to look for some kind of accreditation thing next to the name of the person doing the report so that I could have a reasonable amount of confidence that the person at least made a good effort at being objective. Other than the idea I put forth here (which may very well be pie-in-the-sky), does anyone have any other ideas on how such a thing could be done? Or do you think that there really isn't much of a problem with reporting the way it is done now?
I'm not too crazy about the term "Accredited Clinical Journalist" but I couldn't come up with anything better. Anybody got any other ideas?
If there are people with the right motivation and knowledge about what it takes to be as objective in creating reports as is practicable given human nature (a really big "if", I know), I would love to see them get together and form a private non-profit association that would establish criteria that someone would have to meet to be able to publicize that they are communicating as an "Accredited Clinical Journalist"; ACJ.
I realize that this falls into dreamer territory, but just playing with the idea, I can see where there are a lot of questions that would need to be answered:
- Who would make up this private non-profit association that would give out the accreditations? I think journalism academics with a record of advocating journalistic objectivity would be a primary source. But I think it would be good for the association to also have practicing journalists with solid reputations for objectivity.
- How would people know that a report was written by an accredited journalist? I think this is very important. People would need to have a simple way to identify a report by an accredited journalist so that they could be more confident in the information contained in the report. I think the simple way to do that would be for the author of the report to put the acronym "ACJ" after their names at the beginning of the report. I think it would be fine for the journalist to write opinion pieces, but the opinion pieces should not have the ACJ on them.
- Would someone have to get the accreditation to be called a journalist? No, I don't see why that should be the case. Anyone could call themselves a journalist, but they would have to get the accreditation to legitimately put the ACJ after their names on reports.
- What if someone with the accreditation made reports that lacked the objectivity in the standards for accreditation? I think there would need to be a review committee from the accrediting association that people could file complaints with that would investigate those complaints and could suspend or cancel the journalist's accreditation. It would probably be helpful if there was a law in place to make illegal to misrepresent oneself as having accreditation when they don't.
- Probably the hardest question is... what criteria would be used to determine if a report is objective enough? What does it mean to say a report is objective? I suppose you could say that such a report must stay very tightly to only the who, what, why and when that are clearly known. But a great deal of the time an important part of the story is the opinions of disagreeing parties - reporting that objectively can be really tricky.
I'm sure there are lots more questions. What do you think? (I'm especially curious about Gutenburg's opinion.)
When I am looking for objective information I would really like to be able to look for some kind of accreditation thing next to the name of the person doing the report so that I could have a reasonable amount of confidence that the person at least made a good effort at being objective. Other than the idea I put forth here (which may very well be pie-in-the-sky), does anyone have any other ideas on how such a thing could be done? Or do you think that there really isn't much of a problem with reporting the way it is done now?
I'm not too crazy about the term "Accredited Clinical Journalist" but I couldn't come up with anything better. Anybody got any other ideas?