Issues continue to plague journalists in the modern-day. Luckily, journalists are not as worried about regulations such as the 1918 sedition act. According to The Free Speech Center, it punished journalists critical of the government with a twenty-year prison sentence or a $10,000 fine (equivalent to $181,662.25 in 2021). Even with limits on free speech being uplifted, journalists, if uncareful, are at risk of being ripped by defamation laws or cannibalized by personal bias.
Defamation "is a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone's reputation," according to Electronic Frontier Foundation. The post from Electronic Frontier Foundation says "merely labeling a statement as your 'opinion' does not make it so." As a journalist, you should not post a theory about someone that could potentially hurt an individual's reputation.
To avoid a defamation case, a journalist should always double-check sources. Make sure that a source is reliable and that it provided valid, verifiable information. Next, a journalist should always remove herself from the story, if writing a hard news story. It is a journalist's responsibility to convey the facts in a hard news piece rather than the opinion of the writer. Lastly, peers should review the journalist's drafts. Have someone qualified look over a drafted piece to make sure that it fairly conveys information with no unfounded claims leveraged against someone.
If writing an opinion piece, a journalist should examine the given facts to justify an opinion. There should be no unfounded theories. Those can ruin someone's reputation along with cheapening the journalist's integrity of being fair. Unfounded theories are a product of gut instinct and bias which should be avoided.
Bias is another issue in journalism. According to Student News Daily, a journalist or an outlet can be checked for bias by analyzing how they label people or groups, how often they give both sides of the story, what kind of sources they use, and where they place stories in their newspaper.
To be the best journalist one can be, bias cannot be in the journalist's reporting. To be an unbiased journalist at an unbiased network, one must remove oneself from the story, examine both sides of a conflict, use reliable sources, label individuals and groups fairly, have a peer check that the story is unbiased, and cover all important stories even if they are uncomfortable.
As a journalist, one can anticipate a scenario where an eyewitness gives faulty information. For example, he's biased against the victim, so he downplays the attack. Instead of using this information as fact, look for other eyewitnesses, sift through police reports, and use other resources to ensure the details of the story.
Being a journalist means following certain responsibilities for the sake of the story and credibility. Even though a journalist may be tempted to use her platform to voice political opinions, journalists should follow ethics. The masses need to know the truth.
To avoid defamation and bias, the facts must come first, and facts always need to be double-checked and reviewed.
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