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Washington Post's New Guideline to Curb Staff's Twitter Escapades

Posted 09/28/09 at 10:18:00 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The social web can be harsh on the socially feckless. It is essential that those with a sizable internet audience - even if an unintended, uninvited one - possess a reasonable amount of savoir-faire. The Washington Post will not be assessing its editorial staff’s innate social skills, though.

It has come up with a new set of guidelines that are aimed at curbing its employees’ cyber capers and harangues. The Post hopes that its new internal guideline for using social networks will prevent the Tweets and Facebook wall posts of its staff from having a bearing on its content. The Milton Coleman, a senior editor at the paper, is said to have prepared the guidelines.

“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism,” Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli wrote in a staff note.

The paper has advised journalists against “tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.”

Image Credit: Politico

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Clown shoes
Submitted by Zazubovich on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 3:13pm

The press has been in the pockets of big business since forever. Anyone see "Conspiracy Rock," the mock psa that was played only once on NBC? Ever wonder why the media is limited to pro-business, super probusiness, and extreme pro-business?

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Are they kidding?
Submitted by VaMage on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 10:11am

I don't believe there is news source anywhere in this country that
is unbiased, and if polls are to be belived neither does hardly anyone else. A better indicator might be that newspapers are going bankrupt and "The Evening News" on the "Big Three Networks" is getting beaten in the Nielsons by RERUNS of the Simpsons on Fox!

We don't have news we have thinly veiled political opinion
masquerading as news

Every time the major media tries to sell the public on the idea that every word they print, speak or show does NOT reflect their editorial bias, be it "political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or
favoritism", they simply lose more credibilty.

The very idea that they honestly think anything could FURTHER
"tarnish our journalistic credibility" is ludicrous, the fact that they
expect the public to actually belive they have anything even vaguely
approaching integrity is just plain insulting.

VaMage

P.S. Please note, I don't care if the source is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist,
Communist, or ALIEN. Nor do I care if it's ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News,
CNN, the Tribune, the Times, People or the National Enquirer, all of
which are about on an equal moral plain. I'm old enough to remember
Edward R. Murrow and these people who claim to be his journalistic
decedents are nothing more then snake oil salesman by comparison.

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

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old story, new package
Submitted by nekollx on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 9:19am

nothing new here. Before the interwebz journalist had the same restriction when theywere quoted in self/3rd party publications.

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