Glossary
Stenography journalism
Reporting that uncritically transmits official claims as fact, without independent verification.
A pejorative term used by media critics. Examples: war coverage that treats official military briefings as news; political reporting that prints "Senator X said Y" without checking whether Y is true; financial coverage that quotes corporate press releases without scrutinizing the numbers. The opposite is *adversarial* journalism — verifying every claim against independent sources before publication. Both extremes have failure modes: pure stenography becomes a PR pipeline; pure adversarialism can become contrarianism for its own sake. Good newsrooms balance them deliberately.