Jawbox wrote:
Internet news needs to have the same standards as print news. Or at least TV news for chistsakes!
That really depends on that site. If it's an official "news site", then yeah, it's supposed to be held to the same standard as print journalism. However, anyone can technically write *anything* on a site on the internet. There's no laws requiring that they be truthful. This can be problematic when someone equates a story on <somerandomblog>.org and cnn.com for example. CNN is a news source and is legally required to present truthful and factual information. No one else is held to that standard.
I also think that the link Joph provided misses a key component while critisizing Rueters. The problem isn't necessarily deliberate posing or bias, but an institutional process within journalism that lends itself to incredible subjectivity under the guise of "news".
Most people outside of the news business aren't aware that the headlines, captions, and choice of photographs (if any) are *not* written or chosen by the person who writes the article itself. What happens is that the news organization sends photographers (or buys photographs from someone local), and they send reporters. The reporters write stories about specific events. The photographs are often collected separately and end up in a "pool" of photos from the area taken at about the time of the story. When the story goes to print, an editor will pick out a photograph that looks like it goes with the story, and writes a caption for it (or may even have someone else write the caption). The caption is written to match what the photo appears to show and in a way to tie the photo into the story that the photo has been selected for. Finally, yet another person (can't remember the official term for it) will write a headline for the story itself.
This process allows several levels of subjective choices to be inserted into the story. You don't have to be purposefully biased at all. You just have a view towards the story, pluck a photo that expresses that view from a pile of photos, and write a caption that "fits" that view. You're not trying to lie to anyone, but you can easily pick a photo that has nothing to do with either the story, or the caption that's written underneath the photo. It's not like the photographers take notes as they're taking pictures to ensure that those pictures only go with stories accurately representing the facts. They just snap pictures and then send them back to headquarters. The guys at the other end have no way of knowing what was going on outside the frame. They just pick one that looks good and make up a caption that sounds like it matches what the photo appears to be showing.
This is why we're getting so many inconsistencies. A huge part of that is the incredibly questionable manner in which photos are attached to stories in the first place. A component of that (and where the arguments of bias come in), is that those who pick the photos to go with the stories are always going to pick the one that seems the most dramatic. So photos that are staged or doctored have a higher chance of being selected then those that aren't, exactly because they are intentionally made to appear more dramatic then those that aren't.