Bosanac, Siniša and Mandić, Bojana and Sprčić, Andrija.
(2009).
Objective Journalism or Copy-Pasted Press Releases : A Preliminary Media Content Analysis.
In: 2nd International Conference “The Future of Information Sciences: INFuture2009 – Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing”, 4-6 November 2009, Zagreb, Croatia.
Abstract
The volume of information that is transmitted to the public is constantly growing. Unfortunately, the quantity and quality of information in mass media are often in inverse proportion. Objectivity in reporting and investigative journalism are becoming more of an exception than a rule as journalists invest less effort in their work. Reasons for this are various, ranging from economic to ethical, and we tried to present some of them in this article. The aim of the analysis was to find out what is happening in the process of news creation at a stage between the source of information; in this case the public relations manager, and the end product; a news article written using a press release as a source. For this purpose we have analysed a selected volume of press releases and news articles, and compared their content. The results show a considerable overlap, not just regarding the identical information, but also verbatim copies of whole sections of text. Our preliminary findings call for establishing of a quality-control mechanism that would remedy the situation.
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