The free training materials on Media Helping Media are all aimed at encouraging one particular kind of journalism: accurate, fact-based, impartial news reporting.
There are many other kinds of journalism but we believe that the single most important function is to establish and present the facts, free from any form of comment.
As the editor of The Guardian newspaper in England wrote more than 100 years ago: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.
Journalists need to tell people, as plainly as possible, what is happening in the world. Every story should be fact-based.
It is not enough to know your facts are correct – you must also be able to prove it. That is how we establish accuracy.
There must be zero tolerance for inaccuracy. If one element of your story is wrong, how can the audience believe the rest of it?
Sometimes the facts can only be understood with the addition of context. This too needs be fact-based and without any form of added judgement or opinion.
It is not the job of news journalism to tell people what to think. That is a matter for them – and they will be in a better position to decide, once they are in possession of the facts.
We are not interested in helping journalists use their skills to take sides, to take up causes, to become advocates. There is a place for that kind of journalism but it is not our place.
Media Helping Media trainers and contributors have their own opinions. Of course they do. But they have hundreds of years of combined experience in setting those feelings aside when reporting in the public interest. When you come to work, you leave your opinions at home.
You learn to respect facts for their own sake, however inconvenient they might be to your personal views.
You learn that like everyone else, you have conscious and unconscious biases – and these must be carefully guarded against, to stop them interfering with your reporting.
You avoid adjectives and adverbs that carry emotional or judgemental weight.
You do not editorialise. Editorialising is when you allow comment, personal opinions or bias to intrude into your story.
Above all, you allow the facts to speak for themselves.
Your immediate objective is simple but demanding: everything you write must be fact-based, strictly accurate and free from any kind of contamination.
Your long-term objective is to create trust in your work. In an age when truth itself is under attack, your best way to contribute to your society is to be a journalist who can be trusted to deal only with the facts.