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Agents of social change is a phrase once widely used by Canadian student newspapers to describe a doctrine of activist civic journalism.
In 1861 an article by Thomas Adolphus Trollope referred to "a far more powerful agent of social change—the Mail". [1]
The phrase was used in 1965 at the annual conference of Canadian University Press in Calgary, when a delegation led by the McGill Daily proposed and passed an amendment to CUP's statement of principles that said "one of the major roles of the student press is to act as an agent of social change." The motion's authors argued that university students, including student journalists, had a special role to play in the social and civil-rights revolutions of the time, and objective reporting could not achieve this. Instead, student journalists had to take sides on social issues, and guide campus opinion accordingly.
CUP's leadership soon realized that being "agents of social change" meant that distanced, objective reporting was impossible. In 1967 CUP removed all prohibitions against "unbiased" reporting from its charter, replacing the word "unbiased" with "fair."
In 1968, CUP fleshed out the 1965 "agents of social change" clause into a longer list of resolutions, reading as follows:
"Agents of social change" and the struggle to interpret it led to frequent clashes between the radical and moderate CUP member papers. To the moderates, the phrase not only excused but encouraged biased reporting, as long as the bias was in favour of so-called progressive causes — causes that sometimes supported violence or illegal activity.
For instance, during the 1975 October Crisis, the CUP national bureau encouraged member papers to publish the FLQ manifesto and write pro-French, anti-War Measures Act articles, because they felt these perspectives were being lost in the mainstream press. In 1985, CUP wrote a list of "liberation organizations" that its national bureau was authorized to support, including the IRA and the PLO. Although member papers were not obligated to print these stories, the move alarmed and disillusioned the moderate papers, some of whom would leave CUP in the years that followed.
After several inconclusive debates on the subject, CUP voted to delete the "agents of social change" clause in 1991, prompting the temporary resignation of the McGill Daily and the Simon Fraser University Peak .
Even though it is no longer official CUP policy, "agents of social change" survives in the constitutions of some CUP member papers, including the Martlet at the University of Victoria, and continues to be debated at CUP conferences.
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation, the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles.
Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies.
The Fulcrum is the English language student newspaper at the University of Ottawa. The paper dates back to 1942 and co-exists on the bilingual campus with La Rotonde, the University of Ottawa's French newspaper. The two newspapers are not simply translated copies of the same material, rather, the two are completely separate—and sometimes rivalling—entities.
Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning World War II veterans. Carleton was chartered as a university by the provincial government in 1952 through The Carleton University Act, which was then amended in 1957, giving the institution its current name. The university is named after the now-dissolved Carleton County, which included the city of Ottawa at the time the university was founded.
The news media or news industry are forms of mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public. These include news agencies, newspapers, news magazines, news channels etc.
Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon members of the community playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information. Courtney C. Radsch defines citizen journalism "as an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism". Jay Rosen offers a simpler definition: "When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another." The underlying principle of citizen journalism is that ordinary people, not professional journalists, can be the main creators and distributors of news. Citizen journalism should not be confused with community journalism or civic journalism, both of which are practiced by professional journalists; collaborative journalism, which is the practice of professional and non-professional journalists working together; and social journalism, which denotes a digital publication with a hybrid of professional and non-professional journalism.
The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view. Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them. The phenomenon was first proposed and studied experimentally by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.
Theta roles are the names of the participant roles associated with a predicate: the predicate may be a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or a noun. If an object is in motion or in a steady state as the speakers perceives the state, or it is the topic of discussion, it is called a theme. The participant is usually said to be an argument of the predicate. In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments.
Canadian University Press is a non-profit co-operative and newswire service owned by more than 50 student newspapers at post-secondary schools in Canada. Founded in 1938, CUP is the oldest student newswire service in the world and the oldest national student organization in North America. Many successful Canadian journalists got their starts in CUP and its member papers. CUP began as a syndication services that facilitated transnational story-sharing. This newswire continued as a private function until 2010 when it was turned into a competitive source for campus news in the form of an online public wire at cupwire.ca.
The Carleton University Students' Association is a non-profit corporation that represents the undergraduate students at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Journalistic objectivity is a considerable notion within the discussion of journalistic professionalism. Journalistic objectivity may refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities. First evolving as a practice in the 18th century, a number of critiques and alternatives to the notion have emerged since, fuelling ongoing and dynamic discourse surrounding the ideal of objectivity in journalism.
The Charlatan is the independent weekly student newspaper at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.
Journalistic ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and good practice applicable to journalists. This subset of media ethics is known as journalism's professional "code of ethics" and the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements by professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.
Media transparency, also referred to as transparent media or media opacity, is a concept that explores how and why information subsidies are being produced, distributed and handled by media professionals, including journalists, editors, public relations practitioners, government officials, public affairs specialists, and spokespeople. In short, media transparency reflects the relationship between civilization and journalists, news sources and government. According to a textual analysis of “Information Subsidies and Agenda Building: A Study of Local Radio News”, an information subsidy is defined as “any item provided to the media in order to gain time or space”. In order to understand media transparency, one must gain an understanding of the different aspects in which media transparency is researched, understood, and explored. The following page will attempt to examine media transparency as it has grown and how it affects the modern world.
Civic journalism is the idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process. The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate. The civic journalism movement is an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants.
Peace journalism is a style and theory of reporting that aims to treat stories about war and conflict with balance, in contrast to war journalism, which peace journalism advocates say display a bias toward violence. The theory proposes practical methods for correcting biases in stories appearing in the mainstream and alternative media, and suggests ways for journalists to work with other media professionals, audiences, and organizations in conflict.
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to journalism:
Interpretive journalism or interpretive reporting requires a journalist to go beyond the basic facts related to an event and provide more in-depth news coverage. The lack of precise borders accompanied with diverse theoretical approaches related to what interpretative journalism is in the modern world results in the practice of interpretative journalism overlapping with various other genres of journalism, and furthermore operationalization of interpretative journalism becomes largely blurred. Interpretive journalists must have atypical awareness with and comprehension of a subject with their work involving looking for systems, rationale and influences that explain what they are reporting.