Today
we discussed churnalism with you. Jackson and Moloney (2015) describe this as
the use of unchecked PR materials in news. This is otherwise known as
copy-paste journalism. PR agencies send their press releases more and more in a
way that journalists can publish it without any editing or researching.
Causes
A number of shifts are
causing this phenomenon called churnalism. On the journalistic side you can see
a decrease in editorial staffs. Due to budget costs and redundancies
journalists have less and less time to check their sources and be able to reach
their deadlines. On the other side PR agencies are growing. The sizes of the
staff at PR agencies are increasing so more agents are getting hired and
budgets are growing as well. This even causes a shift from journalists who join
PR agencies.
Origin
In 2008 Nick Davis wrote
his book Flat Earth News in which he
introduces us to churnalism. He uses the metaphor of a flat earth to describe
churnalism. In the Middle ages people assumed the earth was flat. Nobody did
any research about it but everybody believed it due to popular opinions. A
couple centuries later research turned out this was not true at all and people
were led to belief these untrue information due to churnalism, unchecked facts.
As we explained churnalism can lead to falsehood in news stories due to copy
and pasting press releases which are written from a biased perspective. Overall
there is a decrease in independent news gathering. This comes to show in
research among English and Dutch domestic news in newspaper. 38% in Britain
depended fully on PR and in the Netherlands 26% was fully or partly based on ‘prepackaged’
news. By showing this video we tried to make it more clear what the
consequences of churnalism can be in case of falsehood.
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