21 pages, Journalists who cover rural areas in the United States say they are afraid to report on hate groups, and this fear is exacerbated by close community ties and limited resources among rural journalists. We examine the concept of “hate speech” as a boundary object, analyzing in-depth interviews with U.S. journalists reporting in rural communities (n = 33) to better understand how rural journalists report on hate. We find that rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate. Journalists often dismissed acts of hate using the residual category of “not hate, but … ” to signal something that they felt was out of place or unsuitable but did not rise to the legal definition of hate speech and thus was not worth reporting on. This approach ends up challenging journalists’ normative commitments to their communities and exemplifies their desire to avoid an objectivity trap.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D08345
Notes:
Pages 265-285 in Steve May, Case studies in organizational communication: ethical perspectives and practices. Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, California. 402 pages.
Research among experienced environmental journalists reveals a shift since 2000 in their view of "balance," as an element of objectivity. They now advocate a "weight of evidence" approach where stories reflect scientific consensus.
This article explores the role of traditional objectivity in newspaper coverage of the nomination in Alaska of a socialist commissioner of environmental conservation and the subsequent "framing" of public discussion.
Identified online via keyword search of UI eCatalog, Examines the inter-relationship between journalism and poetry in the 19th century, when poems on topical issues regularly appeared in newspapers alongside prose reports of the same events.
8 pages., Online via UIUC Library electronic subscription., The author of this commentary argued that environmental journalism offers a conceptual model and guide to action for all journalists in the "post-truth" and "post-fact" era. "Since the specialism was formed in the 1960s, environmental journalists have reported on politically partisan issues where facts are contested, expertise is challenged, and uncertainty is heightened. To deal with these and other challenges, environmental journalism ... has reassessed and reconfigured the foundational journalistic concept of objectivity. The specialism has come to view objectivity as the implementation of a transparent method, as the pluralistic search for consensus, and, most importantly, as trained judgment."
Gifford, Claude W. (author / Director, Office of Communication, U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Format:
policy statement
Publication Date:
1974-01-01
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 67 Document Number: D10745
Notes:
Claude W. Gifford Collection. Beyond his materials in the ACDC collection, the Claude W. Gifford Papers, 1919-2004, are deposited in the University of Illinois Archives. Serial Number 8/3/81. Locate finding aid at https://archives.library.illinois.edu/archon/, Claude W. Gifford Collection. 4 pages., Considerations involved in separating the program information function of USDA from the policy information function. They focused, for example, on efforts proposed by the American Agricultural Editors' Association to "be objective in playing an educational role rather than a promotional role in explaining farm programs, referendums and related policy matters."
