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Part I
Ethics, responsibility and self-care
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1
Journalism standards on the job
Chris Frost
Out into the world
All journalists start somewhere and the routes into the industry are many and varied, but the most usual route these days, certainly in most first world regions such as the UK, Western Europe, or the US, is to take a college course and then apply for a job.
It is not the intention of this chapter to examine the types of first job many journalists achieve, as these are as wide and as varied as the media industry itself. The chapter intends to look at the problems and challenges new entrants into the industry face in their first job, wherever that may be, and identify how to build and maintain your credibility and integrity as you progress in your career.
Introduction ā why me
I have worked as a journalist and journalism educator for more than 45 years ā years that have seen enormous change both in the way we work and the type of media we work in and for. All my working life I have tried to ensure the highest ethical standards in publications I have worked for or edited. With the National Union of Journalists, I have helped frame the unionās stance on media freedom and journalistic standards; standards that we have campaigned to have applied throughout the industry, giving evidence to parliamentary select committees, NGOs, and the Leveson Inquiry, and instigating other campaigns to persuade members to aspire to the highest journalistic standards. In my academic career, my work has centred on journalistic ethics, regulation, and standards. Many of my research papers examine standards and the ability (or inability) of regulators to uphold them. Part of my work with the NUJās Ethics Council and the Institute for Communication Ethics has involved discussing difficult ethical problems with various journalists as well as running an ethics hotline for NUJ members ā somewhere they can speak in confidence and discuss their concerns without pressure to make a decision one way or the other. All journalists must come to their own decisions about ethical matters taking guidance from codes of practice such as the NUJās code, or some other code such as UK broadcastingās Ofcom code or the Independent Press Standards Organisationās (IPSOās) for newspaper journalists. It is not the place of this chapter to go into detail about those codes or the regulators who police them but more information can be found in Frost (2016).
A career in journalism
The first job for a new journalist is an exciting adventure, but one that brings difficult decisions as the new entrant learns how to find that winning story, how to stand it up, and how to write it up. These are important skills but a good journalist is also an ethical journalist. For many new journalists, ethics is about the big decisions theyāve seen on the movies: a decision that only needs to be taken once or twice in a career. In reality though, ethics are the everyday decisions that help you make your journalism the best you can. Many codes of practice around the world start with the concept of doing no harm, but soon run into the problem that many of the really important stories are those that harm somebody: the politician caught out in a sex scandal, the businessman using illegal techniques, the teacher abusing his or her position to have sex with students. All will suffer if their wrongdoing is exposed, but these are all stories in the public interest.
As a new or inexperienced journalist you need to be aware of your relationship with and duty to three different groups:
Your colleagues, including your supervisors and editor;
Your sources and contacts;
Your audience ā the public for whom you are writing.
Any good journalism student should have a sound grasp of the media law in their country and will be aware of the codes of practice that might affect them in their working lives. Most codes of practice for journalists around the world cover the following issues:
ā¢ Accuracy, truth and a right to reply;
ā¢ Privacy and intrusion;
ā¢ Harassment and undue pressure;
ā¢ Protecting children;
ā¢ Discrimination and protecting vulnerable groups;
ā¢ Using straightforward means of gathering information;
ā¢ Ensuring justice is done through fair trails and presumption of innocence.
But knowing them and putting them into practice on a daily basis is difficult and requires experience. Nor can the new reporter always rely on more senior staff or managers to offer advice. The pressures on editors to get stories that will sell newspapers is often passed on through senior staff to build a culture in the newsroom that encourages poor practice and unethical journalism as happened at the News of the World in the UK leading to the Leveson Inquiry in 2011. Journalists seeking to behave ethically need to learn how to resist such pressures.
This chapter will look at problem areas for the new journalist and advise how to spot them and what to do about them. It will also offer advice on how to discuss approaches with managers without damaging your career. It will use case studies from around the world to identify the kinds of ethical traps it is easy to fall into and how to handle them.
Media freedom
Journalists always need to remember that they have a duty to uphold and defend media freedom. This freedom, developed from the human right of free speech, conscience, and opinion, and the right to receive information and the opinions of others, is the freedom to publish in the public interest. However, media freedom is not an absolute right ā no publisher or broadcaster has the right to publish anything they want. Individual human rights, constitutional or legal restrictions and audience acceptance all limit what can be published or broadcast. Whilst the media has the right to publish or broadcast views and opinions even if they offend (because the right to publish only inoffensive things is no right at all), in most countries there are limits identified in the laws of defamation, obscenity and fair trial about what can be published and broadcast. In addition, in many jurisdictions, broadcasters are required by law to treat people fairly and are obliged not to broadcast material that might harm or offend people, particularly minors, in the areas of nudity, sex, violence, and death.
An audienceās acceptance of certain material may also limit what a particular publication or broadcast can do. If people find what is being published unacceptable, theyāll stop reading or watching that publication reducing its impact and obliging it to reconsider its publication choices.
Other individual human rights are also often protected either by a countryās constitution, its laws, or by codes of practice. These rights include a right to privacy, a right not to be discriminated against, a right to be presumed innocent until found guilty by a legitimate court, the protection of minors, and the prevention of harassment.
When pursuing a story, journalists need to balance these rights and duties against the right of people to be informed. This involves the public interest: essentially, is the collective public right to be informed more important in this particular story than the individualās right to privacy or protection?
The public interest is not the same as interesting the public (although there can be occasions when interesting the public can be in the public interest ā see Frost 2016). The public interest is about holding those in power or those who benefit from higher social status accountable for that power or social status.
It should also be remembered that many news publications or broadcasters are businesses, there to make profits to enrich shareholders. This often puts pressure on journalists to pursue stories that will draw audiences at the expenses of an individualās right to privacy. Publishers are entitled to use media freedom to make their businesses more profitable but journalists need to be wary about subverting the public interest to publish scandal about the lives of celebrities purely in the pursuit of high readership for their own personal gain and profit or the gain of their publisher.
Ethics
Do you want to be a good journalist, or one that merely gets by? And what does one mean by āa good journalistā? A good journalist is certainly one who is competent at the craft of journalism ā those things learned in college about finding stories, researching them and writing them in a commanding fashion. However, a good journalist is surely also someone who believes in what they are doing and is determined to do it in an ethical way. Things can go wrong, though. The pressure to produce stories that are very attractive to readers often overwhelms the ethical concerns about how those stories are gathered or used. A toxic culture can easily develop in newsrooms where a cynical approach to the central part of the journalistās job can lead a reporter to ignore ethics in order to become the biggest ābadassā on the desk. Itās a macho style of journalism that can often develop in an early career as a young inexperienced journalist attempts to show they are up to the job, but often all it shows is a lack of maturity. It is something all new starters need to guard against.
The new or inexperienced journalist should be fully aware that there is a difference between functionality and ethics. To be a good journalist all need to be functionally good, able to find stories, take fast, accurate notes and write the story up in a stylish way. But they also need to be ethically good, something that is much more personally driven. Editors and others will soon notice if their reporters do not find interesting stories. They will soon complain if they are not supported by accurate details and too many visits from subs re-writing your poorly written copy will soon lead to a poor reputation. However, it might be a long time before you are discovered making up quotes, or inventing stories, or carrying out other forms of unethical behaviour. One should not behave ethically simply for fear of being caught out (although it might be a sensible precaution) but because providing consumers with accurate, interesting, well-written stories is what we do and why people buy newspapers and to provide them with anything else is to cheat them and, worse still, devalue media freedom and the readersā right to be informed. It is the journalistās duty to readers and to their wider rights that insist there should be professional ethics.
Ethics on the job
Many journalists around the world go to college first before becoming practitioners. It is often here that you learn about journalism ethics and media law on such issues as defamation, privacy, court reporting, and privacy. In some jurisdictions a journalist also needs to know the risks of desacato (insulting those in positions of authority). Students often find these topics to be the duller parts of a journalism course but they are essential in teaching how to avoid making a mistake that could land one in jail, or worse still, land oneās editor in jail. Because they are duller they are also the parts of the course that the less diligent student is most likely to avoid. This can cause problems when the student finally gets a staff job with a newspaper or broadcaster. Lack of knowledge of the law, ethics, and codes of conduct can lead to serious errors that can lead to dismissal. An examination of complaints to the UK press regulators The Press Complaints Commission and the Independent Press Standards Organisation by the author in 2016 showed that one of the main problems faced by the regional and local press in terms of complaints was a lack of experience or training often compounded by limited supervision.
Having left university, often with only a shaky grasp of law and ethics, new and inexperienced journalists find that there are very different expectations on the job. Time is a serious resource and one often has very little of it to complete a story. The temptation is often to cut corners on research and failing to contact sources or seek a second voice. Press releases are published with very little checking and very limited change. The time to contact an oppositional voice is rare.
You face very different expectations from supervisors and editors. You are expected to follow orders and you are expected to do it quickly, even if that sometimes means y...
