Learnings From CJR Analysis of Post-ChCh Media

Tuesday, 2 April 2019, 2:11 pm
Article: Joseph Cederwall

US Media Watchdog Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has recently published a report titled: "What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting"

After the Christchurch massacre, CJR used Media Cloud, an open-source media analysis tool developed at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, to analyse news sources to see how outlets complied with guidelines from groups that seek to limit the amplification of terrorist acts through media.

CJR analysed 6,337 stories from 508 national-level English-language news sources in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

CJR coded for compliance with the following best practices:

1. Don’t publish the shooter’s name.
2. Don’t link to or publish the name of the forum that the shooter posted on to promote the attacks.
3. Don’t link to or publish the name of the shooter’s manifesto.
4. Don’t describe or detail the shooter’s ideology.
5. Don’t publish or name specific memes linked to the shooter’s ideology.
6. Don’t refer to the shooter as a troll or his actions as trolling.
7. Follow the AP guidelines for using the term “alt-right” (contain it within quotation marks or modify it with language such as “so-called” or “self-described”).

In addition, they coded for stories that “focused specifically on the victims or mentioned Islamophobia as a cause in the killings.”

The graph below shows what guidelines publications in different countries violated.

Regarding NZ coverage CJR said:

“The New Zealand Herald, which ran 11 stories shared more than 50,000 times, violated four of the guidelines, more than almost all other New Zealand outlets. Some outlets may look at their social media metrics and conclude that they need to publish sensitive details of the massacre to retain readers.”

And regarding National differences;

“There’s a small difference in adherence to these guidelines between media without a print or broadcast presence, and those that are non-digitally native (see the graph below). However, it’s less significant a difference than the apparent difference in national standards between countries like the US and NZ, which were largely compliant, and those like the UK and Australia, which were less so.”

CJR concluded from these findings, that more journalists are stepping back from the “who, what, where, how, and why” to questions of how to prevent tragedy.

However, they point out that with platforms as a distribution system, this problem is much more complicated. “Digitization has made local news globally accessible, and it’s a very short distance from ‘It can’t happen here’ to ‘It’s happening everywhere.’ ”

Read the full article here

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Joseph Cederwall

Freelance Writer

Joseph is Co-editor of Scoop and Editor of The Dig. Joseph is an editor, writer, and social entrepreneur with an interest in open and participatory media and business models. In 2019, Joseph founded The Dig. Joseph has qualifications in law and anthropology and previously practiced as a lawyer in the Immigration and Human Rights field. He is now applying this background to the practice of ‘reverse anthropology' using a framing of indigenous worldviews to deconstruct the dominant worldviews and cultural myths of Western society. Joseph has a longstanding interest in the commons, participatory democracy, social justice, and human rights. He was a co-founder, and founding Director of ActionStation Aotearoa - now NZ's largest online movement-building organisation. Joseph is also a Director of Freerange Publishing Cooperative, and a long-time contributor to Enspiral - a non-hierarchical collective of freelancers and ventures dedicated to collaborative business practice and purpose-driven enterprise. He lives in beautiful Taranaki and enjoys watersports, permaculture, tai chi, music, and being in nature.

Contact Joseph Cederwall

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