Journalism ethics and standards
Journalism ethics and
standards comprise principles of ethics and of good practice as
applicable to the specific challenges faced by journalists. Historically and currently,
this subset of media ethics is widely known to
journalists as their professional "code of
ethics" or the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and
canons commonly appear in statements drafted by both professional journalism
associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news
organizations.
While various existing codes have some differences,
most share common elements including the principles of—truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity,
impartiality, fairness and public accountability—as these apply to the
acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the
public.
Like many broader ethical systems, journalism
ethics include the principle of "limitation of harm." This often
involves the withholding of certain details from reports such as the names
of minor children, crime victims' names or
information not materially related to particular news reports release of which
might, for example, harm someone's reputation.
Some journalistic Codes of Ethics, notably the
European ones, also include a concern with discriminatory references in news based
on race, religion,sexual orientation, and
physical or mental disabilities. The Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe approved
in 1993 Resolution 1003 on the Ethics of Journalism which recommends
journalists to respect the presumption of innocence, in
particular in cases that are still sub judice.
Evolution and purpose of codes
of journalism
The
principles of Journalistic codes of ethics are designed as guides through numerous
difficulties, such as conflicts of interest, to assist
journalists in dealing with ethical dilemmas. The codes and canons provide
journalists a framework for self-monitoring and self-correction.
Codes of practice
While journalists in the United States and European countries have led in formulation
and adoption of these standards, such codes can be found in news reporting
organizations in most countries with freedom of the press. The
written codes and practical standards vary somewhat from country to country and
organization to organization, but there is a substantial overlap among
mainstream publications and societies. The International
Federation of Journalists launched a global Ethical Journalism Initiative in
2008 aimed at strengthening awareness of these issues within professional
bodies.
One of the leading voices in the U.S. on the
subject of Journalistic Standards and Ethics is
the Society of
Professional Journalists. The Preamble to its Code of
Ethics states:
...public
enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The
duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing
a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious
journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with
thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a
journalist's credibility.
The
Radio-Television News Directors Association, an organization exclusively
centered on electronic journalism, maintains a code of ethics centering
on—public trust, truthfulness, fairness, integrity, independence and
accountability. RTNDA publishes a pocket guide to these standards.
The primary
themes common to most codes of journalistic standards and ethics are the
following.
Accuracy and standards for factual reporting
·
Reporters are expected to be
as accurate as possible given the time allotted to story preparation and the
space available, and to seek reliable sources.
·
Events with a single
eyewitness are reported with attribution. Events with two or more independent
eyewitnesses may be reported as fact. Controversial facts are reported with
attribution.
·
Independent fact-checking by
another employee of the publisher is desirable
·
Corrections are published when
errors are discovered
·
Defendants at trial are
treated only as having "allegedly" committed crimes, until
conviction, when their crimes are generally reported as fact (unless, that is,
there is serious controversy about wrongful conviction).
·
Opinion surveys and
statistical information deserve special treatment to communicate in precise
terms any conclusions, to contextualize the results, and to specify accuracy,
including estimated error and methodological criticism or flaws.
Slander and libel considerations
·
Reporting the truth is almost
never libel, which makes accuracy very important.
·
Private persons have privacy
rights that must be balanced against the public interest in reporting
information about them. Public figures have fewer privacy rights in U.S. law,
where reporters are immune from a civil case if they have reported without
malice. In Canada, there is no such immunity; reports on public figures must be
backed by facts.
·
Publishers vigorously defend
libel lawsuits filed against their reporters, usually covered by libel
insurance.
Harm limitation principle
During the normal course of an assignment a reporter
might go about—gathering facts and details, conducting interviews, doing research, background checks,
taking photos, video taping,
recording sound—harm
limitation deals with the questions of whether everything learned should be
reported and, if so, how. This principle of limitation means that some weight
needs to be given to the negative consequences of full disclosure, creating a
practical and ethical dilemma. The Society of Professional
Journalists' code of ethics offers the following advice, which is
representative of the practical ideals of most professional journalists.
Quoting directly:
·
Show compassion for those who
may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when
dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
·
Be sensitive when seeking or
using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
·
Recognize that gathering and
reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not
a license for arrogance.
·
Recognize that private people
have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public
officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding
public need can justify intrusion into anyone's privacy.
·
Show good taste. Avoid pandering
to lurid curiosity.
·
Be cautious about identifying
juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
·
Be judicious about naming
criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
·
Balance a criminal suspect's
fair trial rights with the public's right to be informed.
Ethical
standards should not be confused with common standards of quality of
presentation, including:
·
Correctly spoken or written
language (often in a widely spoken and formal dialect, such as Standard English)
·
Clarity
·
Brevity (or depth, depending
on the niche of the publisher)
Self-regulation
In addition
to codes of ethics, many news organizations maintain an in-house Ombudsman whose
role is, in part, to keep news organizations honest and accountable to the public.
The ombudsman is intended to mediate in conflicts stemming from internal and or
external pressures, to maintain accountability to the public for news reported,
and to foster self-criticism and to encourage adherence to both codified and
uncodified ethics and standards. This position may be the same or similar to
the public editor, though public editors also
act as a liaison with readers and do not generally become members of the Organisation
of News Ombudsmen.
An
alternative is a news council, an industry-wide
self-regulation body, such as the Press Complaints Commission, set up by
UK newspapers and magazines. Such a body is capable perhaps of applying fairly
consistent standards, and of dealing with a higher volume of complaints, but
may not escape criticisms of being toothless.
As with
other ethical codes, there is a perennial concern that the standards of
journalism are being ignored. One of the most controversial issues in modern
reporting is media bias, particularly on political
issues, but also with regard to cultural and other issues. Sensationalism is
also a common complaint. Minor factual errors are also extremely common, as
almost anyone who is familiar with the subject of a particular report will
quickly realize.
There are
also some wider concerns, as the media continue to change, for example that the
brevity of news reports and use of soundbites has reduced fidelity to the
truth, and may contribute to a lack of needed context for public understanding.
From outside the profession, the rise of news management contributes to the real
possibility that news media may be deliberately
manipulated. Selective reporting (spiking, double standards) are very
commonly alleged against newspapers, and by their nature are forms of bias not
easy to establish, or guard against.
This section
does not address specifics of such matters, but issues of practical compliance,
as well as differences between professional journalists on principles.
Standards and reputation
Among the
leading news organizations that voluntarily adopt and attempt to uphold the
common standards of journalism ethics described herein, adherence and general
quality varies considerably. The professionalism, reliability and public
accountability of a news organization are three of its most valuable assets. An
organization earns and maintains a strong reputation, in part, through a
consistent implementation of ethical standards, which influence its position
with the public and within the industry.
Genres and ethics
Advocacy journalists — a
term of some debate even within the field of journalism — by definition tend to
reject "objectivity",
while at the same time maintaining many other common standards and ethics.
Creative nonfiction and Literary journalism use
the power of language and literary devices
more akin to fiction to bring insight and
depth into often book-length treatment of the subjects about which they write.
Such devices as dialogue, metaphor, digression and other such
techniques offer the reader insights not usually found in standard news
reportage. However, authors in this branch of journalism still maintain ethical
criteria such as factual and historical accuracy as found in standard news
reporting. They venture outside the boundaries of standard news reporting in
offering richly detailed accounts. One widely regarded author in the genre is Joyce Carol Oates, as with her book on
boxer Mike Tyson.
New Journalism and Gonzo journalism also
reject some of the fundamental ethical traditions and will set aside the
technical standards of journalistic prose in
order to express themselves and reach a particular audience or market segment.
Tabloid journalists are
often accused of sacrificing accuracy and the personal privacy of their
subjects in order to boost sales. The 2011 News International phone hacking
scandal is an example of this. Supermarket tabloids are
often focused on entertainment rather than news. A few have "news"
stories that are so outrageous that they are widely read for entertainment
purposes, not for information. Some tabloids do purport to maintain common
journalistic standards, but may fall far short in practice. Others make no such
claims.
Some
publications deliberately engage in satire, but give
the publication the design elements of a newspaper, for example, The Onion, and it is not unheard of for
other publications to offer the occasional, humorous articles appearing
on April Fool's Day.
Relationship with freedom of the press
In countries without freedom of the press, the
majority of people who report the news may not follow the above-described
standards of journalism. Non-free media are often prohibited from criticizing
the national government, and in many cases are required to distribute propaganda as if it were news.
Various other forms of censorship may restrict reporting
on issues the government deems sensitive.
Variations, violations, and controversies
There are a
number of finer points of journalistic procedure that foster disagreements in
principle and variation in practice among "mainstream" journalists in
the free press. Laws concerning libel and slander vary from country to country,
and local journalistic standards may be tailored to fit. For example, the United Kingdom has a
broader definition of libel than does the United States.
Accuracy is
important as a core value and to maintain credibility, but especially in
broadcast media, audience share often gravitates toward outlets that are
reporting new information first. Different organizations may balance speed and
accuracy in different ways. The New York Times, for instance, tends to print
longer, more detailed, less speculative, and more thoroughly verified pieces a
day or two later than many other newspapers. 24-hour television news
networks tend to place much more emphasis on getting the "scoop."
Here, viewers may switch channels at a moment's notice; with fierce competition
for ratings and a large amount of airtime to fill, fresh material is very
valuable. Because of the fast turn-around, reporters for these networks may be
under considerable time pressure, which reduces their ability to verify
information.
Laws with
regard to personal privacy, official secrets, and media
disclosure of names and facts from criminal cases and civil lawsuits differ widely, and
journalistic standards may vary accordingly. Different organizations may have
different answers to questions about when it is journalistically acceptable to
skirt, circumvent, or even break these regulations. Another example of
differences surrounding harm reduction is the reporting of preliminary election
results. In the United States, some news organizations feel that it is harmful
to the democratic process to report exit poll results or preliminary returns
while voting is still open. Such reports may influence people who vote later in
the day, or who are in western time zones, in their decisions about how and
whether or not to vote. There is also some concern that such preliminary
results are often inaccurate and may be misleading to the public. Other outlets
feel that this information is a vital part of the transparency of the election
process, and see no harm (if not considerable benefit) in reporting it.
Taste, decency and acceptability
Audiences
have different reactions to depictions of violence, nudity, coarse language, or
to people in any other situation that is unacceptable to or stigmatized by the
local culture or laws (such as the consumption of alcohol, homosexuality, illegal drug use, scatological images,
etc.). Even with similar audiences, different organizations and even individual
reporters have different standards and practices. These decisions often revolve
around what facts are necessary for the audience to know.
When certain
distasteful or shocking material is considered important to the story, there
are a variety of common methods for mitigating negative audience reaction.
Advance warning of explicit or disturbing material may allow listeners or
readers to avoid content they would rather not be exposed to. Offensive words
may be partially obscured or bleeped. Potentially offensive images may be
blurred or narrowly cropped. Descriptions may be substituted for pictures;
graphic detail might be omitted. Disturbing content might be moved from a cover
to an inside page, or from daytime to late evening, when children are less
likely to be watching.
There is
often considerable controversy over these techniques, especially concern that
obscuring or not reporting certain facts or details is self-censorship that
compromises objectivity and fidelity to the truth, and which does not serve
the public interest.
For example,
images and graphic descriptions of war are often violent, bloody, shocking and
profoundly tragic. This makes certain content disturbing to some audience
members, but it is precisely these aspects of war that some consider to be the
most important to convey. Some argue that "sanitizing" the depiction of
war influences public opinion about the merits of continuing to fight, and
about the policies or circumstances that precipitated the conflict. The amount
of explicit violence and mutilation depicted in war coverage varies
considerable from time to time, from organization to organization, and from
country to country.
Reporters
have also been accused of indecency in the process of collecting news, namely
that they are overly intrusive in the name of journalistic insensitivity. War correspondent Edward Behrre counts
the story of a reporter during the Congo Crisis who walked into a crowd
of Belgian evacuees
and shouted, "Anyone here been raped and speaks English?"
Campaigning in the media
Many print
publications take advantage of their wide readership and print persuasive
pieces in the form of unsigned editorials that represent the
official position of the organization. Despite the ostensible separation
between editorial writing and news gathering, this practice may cause some
people to doubt the political objectivity of the publication's news reporting.
(Though usually unsigned editorials are accompanied by a diversity of signed
opinions from other perspectives.)
Other
publications and many broadcast media only publish opinion pieces that are
attributed to a particular individual (who may be an in-house analyst) or to an
outside entity. One particularly controversial question is whether media
organizations should endorse political candidates for office. Political
endorsements create more opportunities to construe favoritism in reporting, and
can create a perceived conflict of interest.
Investigative methods
Investigative journalism is
largely an information-gathering exercise, looking for facts that are not easy
to obtain by simple requests and searches, or are actively being concealed,
suppressed or distorted. Where investigative work involves undercover journalism or use
of whistleblowers, and even more if it resorts
to covert methods more typical of private detectives or even spying, it
brings a large extra burden on ethical standards.
Anonymous
sources are double-edged - they often provide especially newsworthy
information, such as classified or confidential information about current
events, information about a previously unreported scandal, or the perspective
of a particular group that may fear retribution for expressing certain opinions
in the press. The downside is that the condition of anonymity may make it difficult or
impossible for the reporter to verify the source's statements. Sometimes
sources hide their identities from the public because their statements would
otherwise quickly be discredited. Thus, statements attributed to anonymous
sources may carry more weight with the public than they might if they were
attributed. (See also: news source.)
The Washington press
has been criticized in recent years for excessive use of anonymous sources, in
particular to report information that is later revealed to be unreliable. The
use of anonymous sources increased markedly in the period before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The
mainstream press is often criticized for poor accuracy in reporting science news. Many
reporters are not scientists, and are thus not familiar with the material they
are summarizing. Technical information is also difficult to contextualize for
lay audiences, and short-form reporting makes providing background, context,
and clarification even harder. Food scares are an
example of the need for responsible science journalism, as are stories
connected with the safety of medical procedures.
Because
science deals largely with accepted facts or scientific consensus, it can
illuminate some of the common complaints leveled at journalistic standards and
practices. For example, in the common tendency in the name of fairness, to seek
out and equally report "both sides of the story," it would be
ludicrous spending equal time reporting the "flat Earth" argument
whenever a "spherical Earth" was assumed. Not so much, in say;
society, culture, or politics, where it's easy for the apathetic or uninformed
to pretend everything is "soft," mere, or unreal opinion. Likewise,
the common practice to without discrimination, publish "Average Joe's"
highly opinionated opinion on the cause of something, (such as a flood) simply
because he's standing by the side of the flood observing it. But in fact the
cause is probably technical, and may have great economic and political import,
—as will the published article within the realm of public opinion. It is
sometimes claimed that some publishers do not want expert reporters because
they cannot-be/are-not objective in their reporting. Critics argue this
definition of objective actually means "ignorant." In science, as
noted above, where one opinion is NOT as good as any other as we pretend in
politics and various other social arenas, this seems particularly silly.
Science itself has rules (such as scientific consensus and peer review) so it is
not uselessly chasing every low-merit hypothesis coming from countless
megaphones. Some of these values are explained in Kuhn's The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions and by Karl Popper, etc. and
are likely to be adopted by some science writers. For all these and related
reasons, science reporting may be on some leading edges of journalism.
Examples of ethical dilemmas
One of the
primary functions of journalism ethics is to aid journalists in dealing with
many ethical dilemmas they may encounter. From
highly sensitive issues of national security to everyday questions
such as accepting a dinner from a source, putting a bumper sticker on one's
car, publishing a personal opinion blog, a
journalist must make decisions taking into account things such as the public's
right to know, potential threats, reprisals and intimidations of all kinds,
personal integrity, conflicts between editors, reporters and publishers or
management, and many other such conundra. The following are illustrations of
some of those.
·
The Pentagon Papers dealt
with extremely difficult ethical dilemmas faced by journalists. Despite
government intervention, The Washington Post, joined
by The New York Times, felt the
public interest was more compelling and both published reports. (The cases went
to the Supreme Court where they were merged and are known as New York Times
Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713.
·
The Washington Post also
once published a story about a listening device that the United States had
installed over an undersea Soviet cable during the height
of the cold war. The device allowed the
United States to learn where Soviet submarines were positioned. In that case,
Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee chose not to run the
story on national security grounds. However, the
Soviets subsequently discovered the device and, according to Bradlee, "It
was no longer a matter of national security. It was a matter of national
embarrassment." However, the U.S. government still wanted The Washington
Post not to run the story on the basis of national security, yet, according to
Bradlee, "We ran the story. And you know what, the sun rose the next
day."
·
The Center for International Media Ethics, an
international non-profit organisation "offers platform for media
professionals to follow current ethical dilemmas of the press" through its
blog. Besides highlighting the ethical concerns of recent stories, journalists
are encouraged to express their own opinion. The organisation "urges
journalists to make their own judgments and identify their own
strategies."
·
The Ethics
AdviceLine for Journalists, a joint venture, public
service project of Chicago Headline Club Chapter of the Society of Professional
Journalists and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice, provides
some examples of typical ethical dilemmas reported to their ethical dilemma
hotline and are typical of the kinds of questions faced by many professional
journalists.
A partial
listing of questions received by The Ethics AdviceLine:
·
Is it ethical to make an
appointment to interview an arsonist sought by police, without informing police
in advance of the interview?
·
Is lack of proper attribution
plagiarism?
·
Should a reporter write a
story about a local priest who confessed to a sex crime if it will cost the
newspaper readers and advertisers who are sympathetic to the priest?
·
Is it ethical for a reporter
to write a news piece on the same topic on which he or she has written an
opinion piece in the same paper?
·
Under what circumstances do
you identify a person who was arrested as a relative of a public figure, such
as a local sports star?
·
Freelance journalists and
photographers accept cash to write about, or take photos of, events with the
promise of attempting to get their work on the AP or other news outlets, from
which they also will be paid. Is that ethical?
Can a journalist reveal a source of information
after guaranteeing confidentiality if the source proves to be unreliable?
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