The Media and Entertainment Alliance (the journalists’ union) has argued that greater concentration of media ownership is a key reason for tightening up the enforcement of the journalists’ ethics.
It has suggested that ethics standards for journalists be tempered by why what it sees as an uneven balance of power in newsrooms between journalists wanting to behave ethically and wanting to correct errors and proprietors who put commercial and other interests first.
The union and others have been conducting seminars around the country this month to get feedback from the draft code of ethics brought down in March. The draft was the result of the work of a committee headed by ethicist Father Frank Brennan SJ and included a judge, novelist, journalists and a philosopher.
I don’t think the concentration-of-ownership or the balance-of-power arguments stand up and it is unfortunate that they have been used as arguments for the new code. I say this because the new code is a huge improvement on the old and it should not need spurious reasons for its adoption.
The committee has significantly improved the old 1984 code which seemed to condone cavalier attitudes by journalists because it put the public’s right to know as an “”over-riding” principle for journalists — privacy, good taste, national security and personal safety presumably taking a back seat. The old code also demanded journalists respect all confidences in all cirsumstances. Once again, other people’s safety and rights presumably taking a back seat.
However, the new code has come in for some criticism for being too long (twice the length of the old code) and for being less prescriptive about corrections, commercial influence and the use of underhand means to obtain news.
At a seminar at the ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences this week Brennan made the pertinent point that the best code in the world means nothing unless journalists follow it and that a code can at best be only a guide to conduct rather than a prescriptive law because it is a union’s code and not all journalists are members of the union. Moreover the code is not statute-based.
At the same seminar I suggested that the context of the code was crucial and got some raised eyebrows when I suggested that competition and diversity in media ownership was the enemy, not the friend, of decent ethical practices.
Where there is a virtual monopoly, as is the case with morning newspapers in most Australian cities, some of the competitive urgency to publish is reduced. With a competitor breathing down your throat for circulation in the same market, considerations of privacy and fairness there is a morning monopoly newspaper. It has to cater for all political, social and economic strata. s extremely important. Commercial. Union. Societal.
Tediously long.
..if underhand disclose…. if urge correction shd be in writing…
TV UK papers.