According to the Society of Professional Journalists, the duty of the journalist is to further public enlightenment, by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Codes of ethics, such as the one provided by the SPJ, are voluntarily adopted by professional journalists and taught in classrooms.
AAA News Report expects every featured news organization to uphold the 4 principles of the SPJ Code of Ethics:
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.
The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.
Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one's work and explaining one's decisions to the public.
People want the news to be: fair, balanced, accurate and complete.
Over the last two decades, research shows the public has grown increasingly skeptical of the news industry. Research by the American Press Insitute
According to the research, 85% of Americans rate it as extremely or very important that news organizations get the facts right.
However, only 12% of those who get news on Facebook, for instance, say they trust it a lot or a great deal. To cope with the lack of trust in the medium, 66% of Facebook news consumers say they rely on trust in the original news organization that produced the content.
38% of Americans can recall a specific recent incident that caused them to lose trust in a news source. The two most common problems were either instances of perceived bias or inaccuracies.
To summarize: People want the truth, they have to trust news sources, and that trust can be lost with the perception of bias or inaccuracy.
AAA News Report promotes the free flow of trustworthy news, by showcasing sources that excel, following our 3 guiding standards for sources:
Earned recognition from experts as an authoritative source.
We feature news by sources that have earned their reputation by delivering consistent high quality over the long run.
Held up to standards of journalistic integrity and code of ethics.
News sources that fail to meet quality expectations are not featured.
Free and easy access to high quality information.
We strive for the free flow of knowledge. No paywalls, intrusive ads or other roadblock separating people from quality reporting.
AAA News Report seeks to quantify the assessment of news sources. We track expert source analysis and opinion to determine the quality of a source. For instance:
An independent ratings system that relies on human evaluators to determine bias, factual accuracy, and credibility of thousands of media sources.
The world's largest news rating engine. Uses AI to analyze 10k+ news articles each day.
The largest encyclopedia keeps an ongoing discussion on the quality of news sources.
Take, for example, NPR, a source that appears often on this website:
Media Bias Fact Check on NPR: high factual reporting, and highly credible.
The Factual on NPR: consistent practices of sourcing information, fairly unbiased language, generally written in a neutral tone.
Wikipedia Reliability Consensus on NPR: generally reliable for news and statements of fact.
In addition, high-quality sources are expected to publish and follow their own enforceable journalism standards. NPR publishes their own Ethics Handbook that shows their commitment to integrity.
Those are primary points in our source assessment. Further, AAA News Report will review a source's accesibility, funding structure, and the potential for excessive political bias tainting coverage. When accounting for these additional parameters, NPR has a further credibility advantage. In great part because NPR is a non-profit organization with a mission to "create a more informed public", and to accomplish their mission they seek to "produce, acquire, and distribute programming that meets the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression".
This means that, in addition to having a proven track record of quality news reporting that can be verified by independent analysis, at its core NPR is also an organization that seeks to do the news well, for the good of the public.
Why is a news source not featured on AAA.Report?
AAA News Report is not a mass aggregator. It seeks to showcase only the most trustworthy, reliable and accesible sources. Any news source may fail to meet that criteria for a number of reasons, including inconsistent factuality, subpar accessibility, or inconsistent adherence to journalism standards.
A good place to start is to check the reliability of a source on the source analysis websites. The next step is to search if they have and follow a news ethics handbook. Then, consider the ownership and funding structures for potential conflicts with objectivity and neutrality.