Journalism Ethics at the Crossroads

Democracy, Fake News, and the News Crisis

Roger Patching, Martin Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367197278
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429516047
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides journalism students with an easy-to-read yet theoretically rich guide to the dialectics, contradictions, problems, and promises encapsulated in the term 'journalism ethics'.

Offering an overview of a series of crises that have shaken global journalism to its foundations in the last decade, including the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 US presidential election, the book explores the structural and ethical problems that shape the journalism industry today. The authors discuss the three principle existential crises that continue to plague the news industry: a failing business model, technological disruption, and growing public mistrust of journalism. Other topics covered include social media ethics, privacy concerns, chequebook journalism, as well as a new analysis of journalism theory that critiques the well-worn tropes of objectivity, the Fourth Estate, freedom of the press, and the marketplace of ideas to develop a sophisticated materialist reimagining of journalism ethics.

This is a key text for students of journalism, mass communication, and media ethics, as well as for academics, researchers, and communications professionals interested in contemporary journalism ethics.

1 News in crisis

Responding to the pandemic

DOI: 10.4324/9780429242892-2

Change comes at you quickly

Most of us were forced to change our way of life significantly in 2020 as the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) swept across the globe. The pandemic upended our daily routines, and it is likely to be some time before any kind of ‘new normal’ is achieved. We are certain it will be nothing like the ‘old normal’; it will involve living with future pandemics (WHO 2020). The SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely to be the biggest story in the world so far this century, and it will dominate the news for some time. Few stories, aside from an international financial crisis or a world war, can affect as many people as a virulent global pandemic. Such was the impact of COVID-19 that by the end of September 2020, infections had passed 33 million and deaths totalled more than a million (Tonkin, Briggs, and Hepburn 2020). With a surge in the numbers of cases and deaths in Europe, India and United States, that by July 2021 cases globally had topped 40 million and deaths 4 million, according to the World Health Organization. Responses to the pandemic varied from country to country as researchers toiled to find a vaccine and governments grappled with the massive health and economic impacts. Countries experienced huge pressure on their health sector and introduced economic shutdowns to varying degrees and for varying periods. Millions of people were temporarily or permanently out of work.

For the mass media, covering COVID-19 presented its own set of ethical challenges—many of which we discuss in general in later chapters—but which were there during the darkest days of the pandemic. On the day in mid-December 2020 that the US Electoral College confirmed that Democrat candidate Joe Biden had won the presidential election 306 votes to President Trump’s 232, America passed a grim milestone—more than 300,000 deaths from the coronavirus (Marsh 2020). The daily death rate was regularly exceeding 3,000—more than the US lost on D-Day in the Second World War or the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Hollingsworth and Renault 2020). As Christmas approached, The Washington Post reported someone in the US was dying from COVID-19 every 33 seconds—five in the time it took to listen to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ (Bump 2020b). A report in late December 2020 noted that more than 500 journalists and media workers in more than 57 countries had died from COVID-19, about ten times the numbers killed worldwide while doing their job or in retribution for that work (Hare 2020).

One of those issues involved editors and reporters deciding when and how to hold governments to account for their tardy or botched responses to the developing crisis. Just as the media is there to hold the powerful—in this case mostly governments and their leaders—to account for their decisions, the media also needs to be accountable for its coverage. While they were quick to call those in power to account, journalists were not so quick to accept responsibility for some of their dubious and dangerous coverage. The former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, summed up the seriousness of the media’s role in the early months of the pandemic:

The penny seems to be dropping in some quarters that journalism can be a matter of life and death. How many of our friends and loved ones die in this pandemic is to a great extent reliant on what people believe to be the truth about its seriousness.

(Rusbridger 2020b)

The ‘truth about its seriousness’ should have come from governments through the media, but in too many cases both governments and media chose to politicise the virus rather than work together to overcome it. We will discuss the ‘myth of objectivity’ later but put bluntly it is obvious in times like these that journalists are not simple observers of what’s happening. They are active ‘players’ in the unfolding tragedy—they decide what is news, how it will be covered and what issues will be given prominence (Jericho 2019). Journalists bear a huge responsibility to get it right. While the exceptional, the novel or the horrific have been criteria for deciding what constitutes news for decades (Masterton and Patching 1986, 12), some of the stories widely reported during the pandemic were dangerously wrong. There were myriad conspiracy theories swirling around social media, but some of the most dangerous were those given credibility by being amplified and repeated by the mainstream media.

At times of international crisis, like a world war or global financial crisis, the media is supposed to play a vital role in getting the latest, accurate information to their audiences. For the best part of 2020, coronavirus-related news dominated our newspapers, TV screens, radio and online sites and all too often that ‘accurate information’ was, sadly, pessimistic, rather than optimistic. But what value was accurate news to an audience that in large part was moving away from trusting the mainstream media to report accurately (Park et al. 2020) and that was receiving mixed messages from their political leaders? How can there be a shared trust when leaders, like former US President Donald J. Trump, are playing down the impact of the pandemic, or when commentary from those chasing a ‘clickbait’ headline gives oxygen to conspiracy theories, or suggests the virus is not that serious or claims there was no scientific evidence to support medical advice like social distancing or wearing a mask in public. 2020 was a year of rapid change and uncertainty: every facet of life has been affected, and the media has not been excepted from the chaos.

The impact of Donald Trump

The leader of the free world at the time had plenty to say during the height of the pandemic, and much of it did little to alleviate the anxiety of most of the American public. In the early days, leaders the world over realised that to inform their citizens about the severity of the pandemic, they needed the support of the media. That posed a dilemma for President Trump. How does he manage a huge health and economic crisis when he has been consistently telling people for years not to trust the media? The President and the media were the main sources of the latest information about the pandemic and state of the economy. President Trump was widely criticised for his handling of the pandemic. Initially the criticism centred on his early downplaying of the risks of the virus and suggesting at one stage that it would simply disappear like a ‘miracle’ come the (Northern) spring (The New York Times 2020). Then came other mistakes like the lack of testing at ports of entry, the bungled quarantine operation for infected cruise ship passengers, and a shortage of testing kits (Bell 2020). Research has since shown that President Trump was the ‘single largest driver’ of misinformation about the pandemic in the US (Stolberg and Weiland 2020). As the number of cases and the death toll mounted to where the United States had more fatalities than any other country, the President started having daily press briefings at the White House, which began as an opportunity for the Coronavirus Task Force to report to the American public, but soon took on the usual adversarial role of the President taking exception to anyone from the assembled media suggesting he might be at least partly responsible for the spread of the pandemic because of his early inaction, or questioning some of his more outlandish suggestions of cures, like injecting bleach. In June, Trump blamed the media for reporting the large number of cases being disclosed by widespread testing and even suggested he might stop the testing (Sheth 2020). Critics said the daily news briefings became little more than election-year campaign rallies with the President dominating the podium and self-praising his own handling of the pandemic. The criticism came to a head in mid-June when the major networks dropped their live coverage of one briefing when the President played a ‘propaganda’ video criticising the media’s coverage and showing prominent figures praising his handling of the crisis (Knott 2020). At the time debate was raging in US media circles about how much of the ‘briefings’ the TV networks should broadcast live. Did the media carry some blame for the President’s spreading of suspect Coronavirus information by giving him a regular platform (Jones 2020b)? A member of The New York Times’ editorial board, Michelle Cottle, was in no doubt: ‘[I]t falls to the media to serve the public interest by no longer airing his briefings live,’ she wrote (Cottle 2020). When members of the White House press corps did question the President’s actions (or lack of them) he reverted to his ‘fake news’ media-bashing mantra and attacked the journalists’ integrity. What the President failed to see—or purposely chose to ignore—was that it was the media’s job to ask pertinent questions at such critical times. They were not there to undermine the President, but to inform the public. In other words, to do their job (Jones 2020c).

The story so far: How coverage of the pandemic played out across the globe

We will detail in later chapters how mainstream media across the globe has been on life support for most of the 21st century. But at a time when the public the world over was clamouring for reliable information on the impact of the coronavirus on their everyday lives, the worldwide decline of mainstream media was further exacerbated by pandemic-fuelled recessions. In many countries, media advertising revenues dried up, and many newspapers, magazines and broadcast news outlets were forced to either cut their output, drastically reduce staff or close down temporarily or permanently. Ironically, at a time when the world needed journalists the most, the biggest story in the world this century was costing thousands of those journalists—the recorders of the first draft to history—their jobs (G. Smith 2020; Flynn 2020).

From the early days of the pandemic the predictions for mainstream media were dire. In the United States newspapers were said to be facing an ‘extinction-level’ crisis (Gabbatt 2020) while there was a similar prediction for mass media in developing countries (Ahmed 2020); for example, an extensive report by the Reuters Institute on journalism in what it termed ‘emerging economies and the Global South’ was released in early 2021 (Radcliffe 2021). In the United Kingdom, media commentator Roy Greenslade suggested the pandemic would ‘finish off’ many titles (Greenslade 2020). By July 2020, more than 36,000 journalists in the United States had either been sacked, furloughed (temporarily laid-off), or had their pay cut (Radcliffe 2020). A month later came the news that more than 2,000 had lost their jobs in the UK (Mayhew and Tobitt 2020) and a further 1,000 in Australia (Meade 2020b). Organisation after organisation announced plans to cut production costs by various combinations of publication suspensions, pay cuts, staff lay-offs or furloughs. In Australia, the pandemic accelerated the already developing trend of print closures. In mid-May 2020, The Public Interest Journalism Initiative reported that more than 200 Australian newsrooms had closed temporarily or permanently since early 2019 (PIJI 2020). While the lay-offs were biggest in the newspaper sector, there were also major cuts in magazines with many printing their last editions, and big staff cuts—including some high-profile presenters—in the broadcast sector. Many of those who survived the massive cuts worldwide found themselves under added pressures, working from their loungerooms, studies or kitchen tables. The public wanted the latest information, and although the overall trend in the past decade had been for online to overtake television as the most frequently used source of news, the coronavirus temporarily reversed that trend (Newman 2020). Major news organisations in the UK, US and Australia also reported a temporary surge in digital subscriptions (Mayhew 2020a; Turvill 2020; Warren 2020b).

Challenges to press freedom

The gravity of the situation for the mainstream media wasn’t helped by governments around the globe using the crisis to clamp down on press freedom under the guise of combating misinformation and ‘fake news’ (Simon 2020; IFJ/IFEX 2020a). According to a survey of more than 1,300 journalists in 77 countries released by the International Federation of Journalists to coincide with World Press Freedom Day in April 2020, 75 per cent said they had faced official restrictions, obstruction or intimidation while trying to report on the pandemic. Dozens reported being arrested, facing lawsuits or being assaulted while trying to cover the pandemic: ‘From Greece to Indonesia and from Chad to Peru journalists used words such as precarious, problematic, terrible, worse, declining and restricted to assess the media freedom environment’ (IFJ/IFEX 2020b).

The countries that usually end up at the bottom of the Reporters Without Borders annual Media Freedom Index that we refer to in the chapter ‘Journalism under threat’ as ‘the usual suspects’ were using the pandemic to further stifle press freedom. Stories about media oppression highlighted Egypt (Press Gazette 2020), the Philippines (ABC 2020d), Ecuador (Constante 2020), Hungary (Walker 2020), China (Birtles 2020), and parts of the Pacific, notably Fiji and Papua New Guinea (Anthony 2020; Robie 2020). One of Time magazine’s 2018 Persons of the Year, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa (2020), in an article titled ‘We can’t let the virus infect democracy’ added a few more—India, Brazil, Jordan, and Thailand—in her wrap-up of those countries that were using the pandemic to further cut press freedom and freedom of expression in general.

Aside from the challenges thrown up by governments trying to control the release of information about the pandemic, there were other more personal issues for journalists—like the danger of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Not the book we thought we were writing
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Ethics, trust, and the crisis of journalism
• 1. News in crisis: Responding to the pandemic
• 2. News in crisis: Responding to Black Lives Matter
• 3. News in crisis: The fake news crisis
• 4. News in crisis: Digital disruption
• 5. News in crisis: The economic collapse of the news industry
• 6. The crisis of legitimacy
• 7. Journalism and social media: An ethical minefield?
• 8. Is it time to abandon privacy?
• 9. Dubious methods
• 10. The importance of whistleblowers and source protection
• 11. Journalism under threat
• 12. Journalism, ethics, and philosophy
• 13. A crisis in epistemology and ideology
• 14. (Re)introducing the dialectic: Hegel and Merrill
• 15. ‘Standing Merrill on his feet’: Journalism and materialism
• 16. Dialectic in action: Revisiting key issues in ethics
• 17. Rebuilding trust in journalism: An ethical imperative
• Bibliography
• Index