A Global Media Company
The corrupt, legacy media has lost all credibility. Follow CD Media for an American company with reporters located all over the world. While not a participant, CD Media will adhere to the guidelines outlined by the Trust Project, an initiative to standardize signals of trustworthiness across the web.
PRINCIPALS
Telling the Truth
- Be honest, accurate, truthful and fair. Do not distort or fabricate facts, imagery, sound or data.
- Provide accurate context for all reporting.
- Seek out diverse voices that can contribute important perspectives on the subject you’re writing.
- Ensure that sources are reliable. To the maximum extent possible, make clear to your audience who and what your sources are, what motivations your sources may have and any conditions people have set for giving you information. When unsure of information, leave it out or make clear it has not been corroborated.
- Correct errors quickly, completely and visibly. Make it easy for your audience to bring errors to your attention.
- If a report includes criticism of people or organizations, give them the opportunity to respond.
- Clearly distinguish fact from opinion in all content.
Conflicts of Interest
- Avoid any conflict of interest that undermines your ability to report fairly. Disclose to your audience any unavoidable conflicts or other situational factors that may validly affect their judgment of your credibility.
- Do not allow people to make you dishonestly skew your reporting. Do not offer to skew your reporting under any circumstances.
- Do not allow the interests of advertisers or others funding your work to affect the integrity of your journalism.
Community
- Respect your audience and those you write about. Consider how your work and its permanence may affect the subjects of your reporting, your community and since the Internet knows no boundaries in the larger world.
Professional Conduct
- Don’t plagiarize or violate copyrights.
- Keep promises to sources, readers and the community.
- If you belong to a news organization, give all staff expectations, support and tools to maintain ethical standards.
Censorship
- We will refuse any attempt to censor our material, accepting delay as the price for putting out exactly what we want.
- In military situations, we will be respectful of requests related to security and respect for troops, but reserve the right to make our own decisions.
Accuracy
- Our staff members must take responsibility for the accuracy of all information that we publish, using an accuracy checklist before publication.
- Our staff members should take reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy of information that we publish and note our sources.
- We should not publish rumors or other information we have not verified.
- If we are unsure of the accuracy of information, we should cite our sources, word stories carefully to avoid spreading false rumors, acknowledge what we don’t know and ask the community’s help in confirming or correcting our information.
- Reporters should fact-check before publication but should not preview any of the actual text of a story with sources.