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User:Northamerica1000/Churnalism

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For the reliable sources guideline on churnalism, see WP:NEWSORG.

Churnalism

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The term "churnalism" may sometimes be used as a reason at AfD discussions to dismiss sources that cover business and entrepreneurship, even if it's The New York Times (more Pulitzer Prizes won than any other news organization) or The Wall Street Journal (#1 newspaper in the US by circulation).

Almost every company covered on Wikipedia is big enough to have a public relations (PR) department, and when anything newsworthy happens regarding the company, the PR department is likely to put out a press release, because it is their job to do so. The press release will typically talk about whatever facts are most likely to interest journalists, because that is the point of a press release, so the contents of the press release can sometimes overlap with article content.

Virtually every story covering a company will use the company and/or its employees as sources – except in rare cases, where e.g. the company is being sued and has to produce documents for discovery, where else would the press get its information from? Most stories covering a company, even very negative coverage, will quote the company's employees or spokespeople, because that's considered good journalistic practice. And of course, the spokespeople will try to make the company sound good, for obvious reasons.

All this applies even when the reporter is very hostile to the company – look at, e.g., The Wall Street Journal's expose of Theranos, and count how many times it quotes Theranos or its employees, or uses them as sources. The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that journalists should "Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing." The mere fact that a journalist has spoken to a company representative thus says nothing about whether or not a particular piece of journalism is "PR" or "churnalism."

Newspapers don't wake up in the morning and start knocking on doors of companies looking to write about them. Some news articles about companies are derived from PR. However, it is still up to the media to decide to cover them.

If a reliable source decides to fact check a press release and write a story about it, it then meets the definition of coming from a reliable source.

It is often standard practice for reporters for reliable news sources to actually speak with people involved in the companies and organizations they report upon and provide quotes in news articles. It would be biased for them not to.

In scientific terms, the "churnalism hypothesis" may be unfalsifiable — it can be defined in a way that could cover virtually all business news, making it impossible to disprove. I'd suggest advocates of the term "churnalism" write an essay, maybe at WP:CHURNALISM, that clearly defines the term, and gives several examples of business news coverage that both is and is not "churnalism".

Legitimate news vs. churnalism

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Determination

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Shortcut

In general, an indication of legitimate business news coverage is an article published with a byline from a staff writer of a publication with editorial oversight. One means of determining whether or not a source is a press release is to perform a search in a search engine using the title of the article. Oftentimes, legitimate news articles published by reliable sources are hosted on the publisher's website and a limited number of affiliate websites, as well as some unauthorized "copycat" websites.

Conversely, press releases may have the same article hosted on many various public relations websites such as PR Newswire, Marketwired, Business Wire and the like, their affiliate websites, and other "copycat" websites. In general, an indication of churnalism is a non-bylined article with content cut and pasted directly from a press release.

Editors need to show critical judgment when reviewing sources in the business press. It's worth the few extra minutes to compare a contentious or implausible article in one business news source with articles on the same subject from other sources, in and out of the business news. If several articles in business news sources on a given subject which appear to be questionable or implausible have identical or nearly identical text, this is a good indication that none of the sources meet WP:RS on that topic. Information on that subject should be sought elsewhere. If no source meeting WP:RS shows that the subject has been noted, it fails WP:NOTABLE and should not have an article in Wikipedia.

"Laundering" press releases

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In Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ruggero Santilli (2nd nomination) an editor found and mentioned several articles in Biotech Week, News of Science, and Energy Weekly News, all trade publications of the NewsRx group of publications in support of retention of the article (on the grounds that the article's subject was a businessman who was also notable as an advocate of fringe scientific views).

Let's look at a quote from one of these journals:

  • Thunder Energies Discovers Invisible Terrestrial Entities Using Santilli Telescope
  • News of Science
  • February 7, 2016 | Copyright
  • 2016 FEB 7 (VerticalNews) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at News of Science -- Thunder Energies Corp (TNRG:OTC) has recently detected invisible entities in our terrestrial environment with the revolutionary Santilli telescope with concave lenses (Trade Mark and patent pending by Thunder Energies). Thunder Energies Corporation has previously presented confirmations of the apparent existence of antimatter galaxies, antimatter asteroids and antimatter cosmic rays detected in preceding tests. In this breaking news, Thunder Energies presents evidence for the existence of Invisible Terrestrial Entities (ITE) of the dark and bright type.
  • "This is an exciting discovery. We do not know what these entities are; they're completely invisible to our eyes, our binoculars, or traditional Galileo telescopes, but these objects are fully visible in cameras attached to our Santilli telescope," stated Dr..."

This article's text is almost identical to coverage of the same story in the rest of the business press. It's implausible that, if editorial oversight was exercised in presentation of this story, that it was exercised almost identically by Business Television, CNN Money's "PR Newswire", Yahoo! Finance, and YourNewsWire.com, among others. Even CNN and Yahoo! News, in their business coverage, did little more than cut-and-paste from company press releases, even when the company in question is making extraordinary and scientifically implausible claims.

While this article carried a byline, in this instance the only byline was "By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at News of Science" - and this anonymous "news reporter-staff news editor" went on to confirm assertions by the article's subject which were based on fringe theory of the sort described by this part of the WP:FRINGELEVEL guideline: "Fringe theories may be excluded from articles about scientific topics when the scientific community has ignored the ideas," for the basis of the improbable claims made for the "Santilli telescope" is the inventor's own mathematical and physical theories, which have essentially been ignored by the mainstream physics community.

The mention of Thunder Energies Corp's ticker symbol in the OTC stock market makes this WP:PROMOTION as well. Scientific publications don't ordinarily cite that sort of information; this seems to be promotion of a corporate stock offering disguised as news coverage of a scientific development. These articles don't meet the criterion in WP:RSCONTEXT - "...the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication." In this case, what appears to be WP:SECONDARY source information could inappropriately enable WP:PROMOTION or WP:FRINGELEVEL statements in a Wikipedia article, owing to the author's uncritical use of content from the subject's press release.

It's important to avoid giving Wikipedia's voice to any statement which cannot be verified by a reliable secondary source defined in WP:RS. WP:DUE ought to be applied to statements supported by an article like this, even when supported by reliable secondary sources. If we talk about telescopes which are said by their inventors to enable their users to see "Invisible Terrestrial Entities", this claim has to be presented along with the scientific consensus which contradicts it, and the reader told that the vast majority of people who use telescopes don't accept WP:FRINGE statements which describe how this telescope is said to work.

The article above can be cited if the theory behind the telescope it describes can clearly shown to be a notable fringe theory. Owing to the wide distribution of Thunder Energies' press releases on the Santilli telescope,notability of this belief as a fringe theory is now widespread. WP:SENSATION counsels us "Even in respected media, a 24-hour news cycle and other pressures inherent in the journalism industry can lead to infotainment and churnalism without proper fact checking, and they may engage in frivolous "silly season" reporting." One of the news agencies who reprinted Thunder Energies' press release verbatim was CNN Money. Another was Yahoo! Finance, also trusted by millions of readers.

Churnalism is a valid concern. The case study above is nearly a "worst-case" scenario in which a press release making a very implausible assertion was cut-and-pasted by a number of electronic business news providers into their own reporting. In the case cited, the press release caused not only some appalling WP:RS failures in at least two respected news organizations' reporting, but a wave of reporting which fails the WP:SENSATION guideline in the tabloid press and in fringe theory Web sites. Remarkably scarce in a Google search on "Santilli telescope" is any critical coverage in a reliable source, perhaps because of the reputation the telescope's inventor has for suing anyone who disagrees with him publicly.

See also

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Wikipedia essays

Wikipedia guidelines

Notes

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External media

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  • Rosen, Rebecca J. (April 22, 2013). "Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help You Find Out". The Atlantic. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
  • Lewis, Paul (2011-02-23). "Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media". The Guardian. Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  • Marsh, Kevin (January 27, 2009). "The Editors: Journalism, not 'churnalism'". BBC. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
  • Agnew, Jenny (February 7, 2014). "Journalism and Ethics, Part One: Attribution and "Churnalism"". St. Louis Magazine. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
  • Lee, Chris (October 7, 2011). "Meeting the PR challenge of "fake news"". City A.M. Retrieved August 14, 2017.
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