Previous Subchapter → 8.4 Why censorship matters
So it’s clear what we’re talking about here, let’s talk about some definitions, sources and citations:
When it comes to journalism, a source is a piece of evidence: If a reporter makes a claim, the source is what they based their report on.
In journalism, a source is a person, publication, or knowledge other record or document that gives timely information. Outside journalism, sources are sometimes known as “news sources”. Examples of sources include but are not limited to official records, publications or broadcasts, officials in government or business, organizations or corporations, witnesses of crime, accidents or other events, and people involved with or affected by a news event or issue.
A citation is a reference to the source, throughout our documentaries you’ll have seen that when we present sources, we provide links to them that you can type into your browser so you can read them yourself, we also include the links in our credits sections and in other areas, the links are citations, and the pages they lead to are the sources.
A quotation of or explicit reference to a source for substantiation, as in a scholarly paper.
With that in mind, here are 4 simple points you can remember when reading and watching the news.
- Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The more serious a claim is, the more evidence you should demand before accepting it (and the more you should scrutinise this evidence).
Remember that sensationalism and shock value is often used as a tool, used to promote ideological messaging or simply to make a profit, the more controversial a topic is the more likely you are to come across misleading interpretations of it.
- Consider the motive of an outlet and what their bias might be.
Some outlets might be motivated to mislead, either through outright lying or by failing to mention inconvenient details that don’t match the worldview of their writers or owners.
This applies both to mainstream media and alternative media. Mainstream and alternative outlets both try to build reputations of trustworthiness for themselves, the mainstream by pushing an image of trustworthiness and respectability and the alternative by deconstructing that image, presenting themselves as the reliable alternative to the broken mainstream.
In reality, no media organisation is going to be perfect or spotless, whether they’re staffed by career reporters or hobbyists, so don’t focus on whether or not an outlet is from the “mainstream” or the “alternative”, focus on what its people believe in.
Be especially careful when looking at claims from governments and other figures claiming to be trustworthy authorities on information, what they say in public can often be very different to what they say in private, after all authority figures are usually the ones with their jobs on the line if things are going wrong, sometimes they will make genuine efforts to fix the problems, other times they’ll try to find scapegoats, or convince you that there’s no problem at all.
But don’t take this one too far, even if an outlet is biased the substance of what they have to say comes first, if they have the evidence to back up their claims it doesn’t matter if their worldview is ass backwards, proof is proof.
- Follow the chain of sources.
When providing sources for their claims, many outlets link to the publications where they found the source, rather than citing the source itself.
To judge how reliable a source is, check through the publications cited until you can find the original source of a claim, it’s much harder to scrutinise a source you only know of second, third or fourth hand.
- Seek out wider reading.
It’s important to remember that no one outlet can give you all the context possible on an issue, outlets always have to make editorial choices to include less detail on some points and greater detail on others, so context can be lost even when a writer isn’t trying to mislead or lie.
That applies even to a long form documentary series like this one, while we aim to give as much info as possible about the Ukraine conflict and its background, we can’t include every detail of a conflict lasting over a decade, with context going back a century or more, in a few hours, we have to make these editorial choices too:
For example, the policy of sanctions imposed on the Russian population by Western countries, something we oppose and which we discussed in our Ukraine Narratives documentary, wasn’t discussed in this Ukrainian Divide series, because we didn’t feel we had more to add on the topic.
We also haven’t discussed the role of Belarus in the conflict, except for a brief mention of them hosting the Wagner Group, we didn’t talk about the history of Ukraine and Russia from before the 1900s, or the issues surrounding other minorities in Ukraine, who are also impacted by the country’s language laws, such as the Hungarians.
And except for some specific case studies related to our media analysis, we didn’t tackle the issue of war crimes and atrocities that have occurred in the conflict.
To avoid this issue of missing context and get the biggest picture possible, see what multiple outlets might be saying about a topic, rather than getting your info only from the first publication you come across, you might find context that was previously missing.
Services like Ground News can streamline this process, but an easy free way to do it is simply look up a story online and check out others reporting on it.
Following the news is a little bit like detective work, you have to build up the big picture of an issue by following leads, some of these might come up empty, some might be red herrings, and others will get you closer to the truth.