ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand how to evaluate news accounts for incomplete explanations for causes of people’s behavior. To make a news account captivating, journalists seek out the dramatic elements of events sometimes to the exclusion of the larger perspective. The preference for anecdotal instead of base-rate information can lead people to mischaracterize events. Such information might answer how many local grade-school children take free or reduced-price lunches, or the number of practicing Buddhists in a region, or the level of education attained by second-generation Guatemalans in a community. Editing is a process that occurs throughout the development of a story. In larger news organizations, photojournalists, reporters and the graphics team work together with editors to develop a story. In journalism, attribution is the identification of the source of information in a news story. People tend to attribute the cause of another person’s behavior either to elements within that person or to environmental elements.
