Media Critique: Verification and Context

New York’s Air Is Cleanest in 50 Years, Survey Finds. (New York Times)

Obamacare delay for small business exchanges. (CNN.com)

New York Times and CNN, supposedly the most trusted national publications, violated both a principle and a yardstick today, Thursday, September 26, 2013. These newspapers made a very simple to correct, yet lazy mistake: verify.

Verification - seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment.

Context - measures the number of sources, and independent expert sources. 4 regular sources and 2 experts merit a good article.

The New York Times' story about the cleanest Air in 50 years did a lot of things right. It was newsworthy, it affects 8.245 million people's health and well being for a long period of time. It's truthful, the article's goal was to get across the message honestly, and it succeeded. But The author made one mistake: verification and context. In the article it provides us with the following sources: Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYC Community Air Survey. First off are these expert or regular sources? Well, I'd say that in many situations Mayor Bloomberg would qualify as an expert source, but in this instance, no. I think that what could qualify as an expert would be a scientist, sanitation expert, etc. Not someone who just looks at a survey. Next, does a survey even count as a source? Here, yes. Since this is a scientific survey, I'll let it slide, but typically it wouldn't.

The CNN article is on Obamacare, which we all know some one who has something to say on the topic. But this is also CNN Money, a business geared new source, so  I'd expect the sources to be some business aficionados. In the first paragraph it cites the source as "according to a U.S. Health and Human Services Department official." This is too broad and ambiguous. I mean how do we know this is even true? We can't back it up without some of that information. Later in the article it keeps sighting a press release by that organization, so you'd just have to check with that Press Release, which isn't clarified. In general it uses the following terms as sources:

•  Senior Obama administration officials
•  Critics of Obamacare 
• Timothy Finnell, a health care broker who services small businesses in Tennessee.

There's only only source in there that can be background checked to be verified. The rest would cause you to have to dig up the source yourself to double check. There should be enough active reporting to get more than one name in an article. And I wouldn't call Finnell an expert, so he's only a regular source.

So you have a New York Times article with two regular sources, and a CNN article with one name in the entire story. So both fail to meet the journalistic standards of verification and context.