Study: Political journalists opt for stenography over fact checking during presidential debates
Study: Political journalists opt for stenography over fact checking during presidential debates
by Craig Silverman
Published July 16, 2014 9:47 am
Updated July 16, 2014 3:44 pm
During the 2012 U.S. presidential debates, political journalists on Twitter primarily repeated candidate claims without providing fact checks or other context, according to new research published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.
Authors Mark Coddington, Logan Molyneux and Regina G. Lawrence analyzed tweets from 430 political journalists during the debates to see how much they engaged in the checking of candidate claims. The resulting paper is “Fact Checking the Campaign: How Political Reporters Use Twitter to Set the Record Straight (or Not).”
They also examined whether the political journalist’s tweets fell more into the construct of traditional objectivity or what they call “scientific objectivity,” which eschews he said/she said in favor of empirical statements and analysis, i.e fact checking.
They found that 60 percent of the journalist tweets “reflected traditional practices of ‘professional’ objectivity: stenography—simply passing along a claim made by a politician—and ‘he said, she said’ repetition of a politician’s claims and his opponent’s counterclaim.”
The rest:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/259021/study-political-journalists-opt-for-stenography-over-fact-checking-during-presidential-debates/