Accuracy
When professional market researchers ask their clients how accurate any data should be, the answer is often such as very accurate or as accurate as possible. However accuracy, at least where fieldwork is involved, has a price and as a general rule, increases in accuracy not only cost more but cost disproportionately more.
A high level of accuracy is not always needed to meet the overall research objective. If a company is entering a new market, where common sense and observation tells us the market is huge, there may be little point in spending lots of money closely measuring its size. An approximation will do and the money saved may be better spent on some other information need.
Balance
Companies must regularly review all principal fixed assets – tangible and intangible – to ensure that the balance sheet offers a reasonable valuation. The value of an asset may fall because of many adverse events or conditions, such as obsolescence or damage, initiatives by competitors, or significant and permanent changes in the marketplace. These are referred to as “impairment factors”. In the UK, when goodwill or any other fixed asset is being written off over more than 20 years, it must be reviewed for impairment each year. At the end of the first year following an acquisition, companies must review the associated goodwill for impairment.
Objectivity
objectivity and balance, disparages private ownership of media, and is fundamentally in the business of changing the political system. Because the underlying Marxist theory is based on a radical change of the entire political and information system, it is difficult to discuss empirically real – as opposed to imagined or theoretical – media effects on the individual.
Subjectivity
Evaluation is also connected to the notion of subjectivity (derived from Benveniste’s 1966/1971 observations on subjective features of language and introduced by Lyons 1977 into Anglo-American linguistics). Although there are now many competing views of subjectivity, broadly speaking, it is defined as being concerned with self-expression, i.e. the expression of the speaker’s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, emotions, judgement, will, personality, etc. (Lyons 1982: 103, 110). Studies of subjectivity are usually concerned with three aspects of language: (1) the speaker’s perspective as shaping linguistic expression; (2) the speaker’s expression of affect towards the propositions contained in utterances; (3) the speaker’s expression of the modality or epistemic status of the propositions contained in utterances (Finegan 1995: 4). In particular, studies of subjectivity are often concerned with ‘the notion of the “subject” from the point of view of its incarnation as self, as speaker, and as grammatical subject.
Opinion
News journalists are not the only members of the media who influence public opinion. For example, it has been suggested that US talk-show host Oprah Winfrey is more influential in Canada than all Canadian newscasters combined. The fact that the US Cattle Producers Association chose to sue her for comments made about beef illustrates the degree to which it respects her ability to sway the public. In Canada, media personalities such as hockey commentator Don Cherry also evoke strong opinions. Cherry
Any number of public opinion polls have indicated that the public rely on and, more important, trust the news media to provide information on public policy issues.
Bias
Data is at once a ‘discovery’ and an ‘invention’. When a dichotomy is established between these facets, discovery and invention, a bias can be introduced into the construction of theory. Researchers who, in an effort to maintain absolute objectivity, decide to limit data to ‘discoveries’ can, by deliberately avoiding a part of the data they consider to be too subjective, limit the creative part of their research.
Representation
The significance of representation, specifically mass media representation, lies in its relationship to power, a relationship that bell hooks explores in her books Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, and Black Looks: Race and Representation. hooks discusses the critical role media representations play in shaping people’s perceptions of themselves and others, 5 and she ties specific representations of race to the perpetuation of unequal power relation.
Privacy
Privacy and human rights are now fundamental to journalistic practice. Though an individual’s right to privacy has long been enshrined in various other legal systems, it is important to note that, in English law, there is, as yet, no such right. In France – famed for its strict privacy laws – the tort of privacy was first recognised as far back as 1858 (‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’) 1 and was added to the Civil Code in 1970. 2 The United States has the ‘Bill of Rights’ and the ‘liberty’ clause of the 14th amendment, granting individuals anonymity rights in terms of ‘intimacy’ and ‘solitude’. 3 Art. 10 of the German constitution enshrines privacy in the words, ‘letters, post, and telecommunications shall be inviolable’ and, in 1983, the Federal Constitutional Court, in a case against a government census law, formally acknowledged an individual’s ‘right of informational self-determination’, which is limited by the ‘predominant public interest.
