Media Mythbusters Blog

Media Malpractice: Improper professional action or treatment, as from reprehensible ignorance or neglect or with ill intent This is the dictionary definition, excluding references to physicians, medical practice being the source of the term. It’s difficult enough to prove medical malpractice, given the infinite variety of humans and their reactions to varying treatments, the range of acceptable medical practices, and the difficulties of gathering evidence. It’s even more difficult with respect to the media. The added difficulty is because journalism is much less a well-defined and regulated profession than medicine. So, the standards and their application is less precise and the enforcement of standards lacks an authoritative body. Nonetheless, journalism and its major practitioners have developed and propounded standards that, for the most part, are fairly comprehensive and tried. It is against those standards, journalism’s own, that we measure. It is also usually more important that we pay more attention than we have to media malpractice. While medical malpractice may affect just one, or thousands, media malpractice affects many millions of media users, and many millions – if not billions – more of earth’s inhabitants whose governance, security, economic advancement, and freedoms (or opportunities for those) is affected.

Although we do not seek a new body to rule on when journalism fails its own standards and have enforcement power, we do seek to empower the most important bodies: the media’s end-users, their customers, with the reliable information to press for closer adherence to journalism’s standards, and writers of contemporary and future histories with the reliable information from which to note and research what actually happened.

We have adopted a wiki format, to allow for updating as more and better information becomes available. We have adopted a narrative format that distinguishes each separate event and fact along with their evidence, and presents what is less certain or unknown both for completeness and as a guide to further probing and research. In this way, the reader can disentangle the web of allegations on an issue, and better judge for him or herself the incident(s), the relative positions, and whether media malpractice occurred. The cases presented are selected for their recent or current importance, or telling illustration of wider and/or longer-lasting problems.