Journalistic Ethics

Sensationalism epitomized by yellow journalism has been an issue of concern since the 20 th century. It was during this period that the call for a socially responsible media became intense because the press was seen to be perpetuating a culture of irresponsibility in the face of the freedom they enjoyed when the libertarian philosophy of the press held sway. Yet, a century later, the media is seen to be reverting back to the same unacceptable, unethical practices. The in-thing is now is " market-driven journalism " – giving priority to trivial news items, certain kinds of layout, headline sizes, photo enhancements, flashy colours, irrelevant and lurid photos that attract mass audiences like entertainment while downplaying information. In the light of these, this paper situates this discourse within the media framing and constructivist theories and attempts to pry apart the connecting issues, the trajectories, the ethical dimensions, and the participants in the blame game of sensationalism. It also situates this in the context of Nigeria using some newspaper headlines and common practices. It however advocates that rather than having a media that 'sells', a media that is socially responsible is exigent in this age that ethics seems to have gone with the wind.

Un bref regard jeté sur les sources du droit positif révèle que la liberté de la presse a fait l’objet d’une consécration particulière au-delà de la liberté d’expression. Ainsi en va-t-il de la Constitution belge, du Bill of Rights américain comme de la jurisprudence de la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme. Quel est le sens de cette distinction à l’heure où les différents médias convergent vers l’internet et où chacun peut communiquer des idées ou des informations à un public potentiellement infini à l’aide du support numérique ?

Au terme d’une analyse systématique du droit belge et du droit conventionnel européen, et à l’appui d’enseignements empruntés au soft law du Conseil de l’Europe et au droit constitutionnel américain, l’auteur défend une véritable approche fonctionnelle de la liberté de la presse, laquelle doit protéger toute personne qui peut faire état d’une intention de s’adresser au public par le biais du support de diffusion de son choix.

A l’aune d’une telle conception, l’étude revisite l’ensemble du régime juridique de la presse, tant au niveau de la communication des idées et des informations qu’au stade de leur collecte préalable. Sont ainsi examinés tour à tour l’interdiction des mesures préventives, la prévention de la censure indirecte de la part des intermédiaires, le droit de réponse, l’autorégulation journalistique, la responsabilité pénale et civile de la presse, le droit général de collecte des informations, les exonérations en faveur des activités de journalisme dans la législation relative à la protection des données à caractère personnel, le droit à la protection des sources journalistiques et la question controversée d’un « privilège » permettant à ceux qui font œuvre de presse de se soustraire à l’application de certaines lois d’application générale.

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is both unattainable and unwarranted. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to, what Luciano Floridi terms, ‘philosophical naturalism’. As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse categorization. The following paper will outline, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. The assumptions behind the current classifications of the field will be questioned. Beginning with the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael Capurro and Floridi, this paper will explicate how any such attempt to develop an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete.

A  critique of the article “Yes, you do have an obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils. Here’s why," from the Washington Post (6/1/16). Attached is a final draft and a link to a version on the "It Is What It Isn't" Blog. See also the illustrated version on Academia.edu.

In this chapter I consider, from two ethical perspectives, the case of how Ken Silverstein obtained his story about DC lobbying firms for Harper's Magazine ("Their Men in Washington: D.C.'s Lobbyists for Hire" (2007)). In order to get this story, Silverstein pretended to be a representative of a made-up group of investors, The Maldon Group, who were looking for a lobbying firm's help in making Turkmenistan, a state that lies under the regime of a megalomaniac ruler who tolerates no opposition, look good in the media, in order to help their investments in the country's natural resources.

On January 7th 2015 eleven people died in the attack against the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The following day most of the Spanish newspapers, including the most widely read (El País and El Mundo), placed on its covers a photograph with the murder of the policeman Ahmed Merabet. Showing on cover a moment as inner as the death of a person reopens the debate about the ethics of journalist images. In this regard it is interesting to know which mechanisms have the journalists to determine the suitability of these images.

The journalistic coverage of the terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils in 2017 generated an intense debate on the desirability of having published certain particularly sensitive photographs and information. The aim of this work is to examine whether the national and international digital press complied with the main ethical norms on the use of images required in these cases. For this purpose, 14 media were analyzed in their online editions: Ara, El Punt Avui, VilaWeb, Nación Digital, El Nacional, La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Cataluña, El País, El Mundo, The Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. The sample includes all the informative pieces published by these media within the first 24 hours of coverage after the terrorist attacks. The results show that several newspapers violated the right to privacy by publishing images that allowed survivors and mortal victims to be identified. In some cases, despite these media taking precautions regarding their contents, they also included links to photographs and videos from other media and users that contained extremely graphic images without warning the readers.

In August 1996, a regional newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News unveiled the results of its year-long investigation into links between the spread of crack cocaine in the U.S. and fundraising for the CIA-backed contra rebels in Central America. “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion” was the first investigative report to achieve national prominence primarily via Internet dissemination. Investigations by three of the country’s largest dailies, rather than advancing the Mercury’s claims, turned into a sustained and damaging critique. Commentators have characterized this sharp scrutiny of a respected regional paper as everything from a defense of journalistic standards to damage control for the CIA. Nearly all, however, have ignored the larger critique of the Internet as a medium of news distribution that emerged in the follow-up coverage. This study examines the controversy as a case of news repair, as defined by Bennett, Gressett, and Haltom (1985), noting what the case reveals about the operation of news repair itself in an era of Internet-based news delivery. The repair of “Dark Alliance” affirmed a paradigmatic understanding of what is and is not news. More broadly, it defended the authority of established broadsheets over the new media and affirmed the traditional hierarchy of national over regional newspapers. This paper argues that the Internet’s role in the publication of this controversial exposé created both need and opportunity for repair of institutional boundaries—those violated by the Mercury’s use of the new medium and a more general erosion in the ongoing migration of news to the Internet.

Neste artigo, pretende-se analisar como a idéia de objetividade em jornalismo gerada na matriz norte-americana foi adotada e reinterpretada no contexto brasileiro. O jornalismo brasileiro foi influenciado pelo americano e adotou parte de seus elementos na segunda metade do século XX. Esta adoção, no entanto, está longe de ser uma cópia e resultou em um jornalismo diferente. Noções de objetividade dos profissionais brasileiros s o também ambivalentes, revelando a sua responsabilidade na sociedade brasileira no sentido de integrar segmentos excluídos no mercado da informação e, ao mesmo tempo, uma visão elitista de que o público não tem condições de participar de um processo de formação de opinião.

In August 1996, a regional newspaper, the San Jose (CA) Mercury News unveiled
the results of its year-long investigation into links between the spread of crack cocaine
in the U.S. and fundraising for the CIA-backed contra rebels in Central
America. “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion” was the first investigative report to achieve national prominence primarily via Internet dissemination.
Investigations by three of the country’s largest dailies, rather than advancing
the Mercury’s claims, turned into a sustained and damaging critique. Commentators
have characterized this sharp scrutiny of a respected regional paper as
everything from a defense of journalistic standards to damage control for the CIA.
Nearly all, however, have ignored the larger critique of the Internet as a medium of
news distribution that emerged in the follow-up coverage. This study examines the
controversy as a case of news repair, as defined by Bennett, Gressett, and Haltom
(1985), noting what the case reveals about the operation of news repair itself in an
era of Internet-based news delivery. The repair of “Dark Alliance” affirmed a paradigmatic understanding of what is and is not news. More broadly, it defended the
authority of established broadsheets over the new media and affirmed the traditional
hierarchy of national over regional newspapers. This paper argues that the
Internet’s role in the publication of this controversial exposé created both need and
opportunity for repair of institutional boundaries—those violated by the Mercury’s
use of the new medium and a more general erosion in the ongoing migration of
news to the Internet.

The  aim  of  this  paper  is  to  shed  some  light  on  the  category  of  truth,  which  the  authors consider fundamental objective in every journalist’s work, and how this category is reflected, as well as implemented in journalistic practice. The right to receive and to spread the truth is  one of the most important rights in a human life. Based on the teaching of Catholic Church the authors derive their argumentation and conclusions from the existence of absolute truth –
the  view  which  is  in  opposition  with  today’s  relativistic  theories.  Seeking  the  truth  is  a persistent  process  and  requires  an  open  attitude  of  those  who  seek.  The  truth  is  a  way  of building  up  relations  and  has  an  inter-subjective  and  dialogical  character.    As  far  as  the reporting  is  concerned,  the  category  of  truth  has  shaped  such  criteria  as  objectivity, impartiality and transparency which, when applied and achieved, lead to good journalism. We deliberately  do  not  say  that  they  result  in  good  journalism,  since  there  are  other  similarly important  aspects  like  proficiency  in  working  with  language,  dedication,  knowledge,  etc.
However, in this paper we will focus mainly on the category of truth, truthfulness and their realisation in reporting.  Truthfulness, from the perspective of authors does not spring from simply stating all the facts relevant to a mediated event or situation (this may be referred to as complexity, which is only one element of truthfulness) but it is a complex category – to some extent  philosophical  or  theological  –  that    goes  beyond  factual  truthfulness.  Thus,  the substance of truthfulness is deeply rooted in the truth about a man.  This anthropological and pesonalistic view of the truth in journalism covers media representation of a man, “the others”
and the world.  The authors argue that sometimes even presenting true information can result in a false image, due to some missing aspects of truthful reporting.  Despite believing in the existence of absolute truth the authors are aware of the fact that reporting can almost never be absolutely truthful because the sources of information are hardly ever impartial, and another source  can  change  a  description  of  a  mediated  event  or  situation.  Thus,  truthfulness  in journalism is about seeking the truth not about owning it.

The growing expansion of Internet access and mass-scale usage of social networking platforms and search engines have forced digital newspapers to deal with challenges, amongst which are the need to constantly update news, the increasing complexity of sources, the difficulty of exercising their function as gatekeepers in a fragmented environment in which the opinions, biases and preconceptions of pundits, their followers, Twitter users, etc. has taken on a new and decisive weight and the mounting pressure to publish certain news items simply because they sell. They must also share audiences with aggregators devoted to the business of disseminating content produced by digital news publishers, blogs and RSS feeds, which is chosen on the basis of search engine algorithms, the votes of users or the preferences of readers. The fact that these computerized systems of news distribution seldom employ the criteria upon which journalism is based suggests that the work of gatekeeping is being r...

The aim of this article is to present a model of journalistic or advertising writing analysis, taking into account four linguistic areas: syntax, semantics, orthography and morphology, within an ethical perspective. The foundation is based on what I call the "ethics of the word", which does not apply exclusively to journalism or linguistics; it is transversal. Journalists ought to pay special attention to language so that in the pretense of information they do not fall into the vice of misinformation. Through critical hermeneutics, the linguistic analysis methodology is taken to clothe it with an ethical orientation, either because of the pursuit of excellence in the work instrument by journalists, because of their responsibility with the language or with the creation of public opinion. Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es presentar un modelo de análisis de redacción periodística o publicitaria, tomando en cuenta cuatro elementos lingüísticos: sintaxis, semántica, ortografía y morfología, con una mirada ética. La fundamentación parte de lo que denomino la "ética de la palabra", que no es de aplicación exclusiva en el periodismo o en la lingüística; es transversal. Los periodistas han de poner especial cuidado en el lenguaje de manera que en la pretensión de información no caigan en el vicio de la desinformación. Por la vía de la hermenéutica crítica, se toma la metodología de análisis de lingüístico para arroparlo con una orientación ética, bien por la búsqueda de la excelencia del instrumento de trabajo por parte de periodistas, por su responsabilidad con el idioma o con la creación de la opinión pública.

The birth of the so-called post-truth era and the new digital environment of social networks have been accompanied by the multiplication of communicators of all kinds who present themselves as “citizen journalists”. This fact brings to the fore two important questions: What constitutes professional journalism? And who deserves to be called a journalist? This paper attempts to answer these two questions from the perspective of the academic training of future journalists, while emphasizing the basic ethical principles of journalism and the need to advance in a policy of accountability to public opinion.