Hacked and leaked content has become a major source of information for the mainstream news, particularly in the years since Donald Trump snatched the official Republican presidential nomination in 2016. This chapter seeks to identify some salient policies and practices the news media have adopted in their coverage of the rise of Trump to power. Indeed, there is a plethora of literature on the role hackers and leakers as well as news fakers play in today’s journalism (Eggen, 2006; Gunkel, 2005; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, & Morris, 2004; Lievrouw, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Son, 2002; Vegh, 2003). We even have a new theory with a set of principles designed to test, interpret, and predict the phenomenon. Called “haktology,” the theory examines the processes of gaining illegal and unauthorized access to information, its subsequent disclosure to reporters and activists, its transmutation into news reports, and the impact such reports leave on public opinion.

This article analyses a special case to illustrate paradigmatic rectification in news production that took place at the turn of the century. The special case concerns Tony Burman, a former head of Canada’s CBC and former managing director of the global news channel Al Jazeera English. Burman drew the journalistic community’s attention through ‘editorial remedies’ that saw the emergence of a special way of news coverage rarely practised by mainstream western media. Burman’s news model holds that all people or actors involved in an event determined newsworthy are equal and matter to the story in the same way regardless of their power. This article examines Burman’s news model as a shared mindset among members of a 24/7 news organization, focusing on the principles of objectivity, event and news values.

This volume brings together current scholarly debates about how to bridge the gap between theory and practice in media and journalism research. Drawing on work from media scholars and media practitioners that focuses on how both sides can work together for the good of society, Towards a Praxis-based Media and Journalism Research is the first collection to examine how theory and practice can be combined for positive effect. The result will lay important groundwork for scholarship on this new and increasingly important idea in media and communication studies.