William Morris reflects on the current state of media ethics
on becoming Chairman of the International Communications Forum (ICF)
Few are old enough to remember the heady days before the
newspaper revolution when computers replaced hot metal. But having been brought
up in and around newspapers as a copy boy, I can remember the smell of the ink
and the dirt and the clatter of the little presses and the deafening hum of the
big monsters that rolled rivers of newsprint three stories into the air and
back down again. For many of us those days are gone. Gone too are the great
teams of investigative journalists. The Sunday Times’s ‘Insight’ team was,
perhaps, the last of these but even they have long disappeared into the mists.
In those days who were the guardians of ethical journalism?
The broadsheet proprietors cared about their reputations. And even the tabloid
newspaper owners cared in some measure. Editors in chief took pride in the
standards they adhered to. Even subeditors had a conscience, though then as now
they could be staggeringly ruthless.
Have things changed? Well yes and no. Men and women of
conscience still run some of our newspapers. Men and women of vision and
mission still comprise many of our radio and television broadcasters and
newspapermen. But the pressures are perhaps greater. For most journalists,
spending a week working on a story is a luxury they can only dream of. Was it
ever thus? Perhaps they always had to churn out copy but there was, I believe,
more space for investigative journalism, if only because proprietors once had
deeper pockets and more journalists to share the load.
Many Western papers have less than little time to sub copy
anymore because of ever tighter budgets. There are the exceptions such as the Washington
Post with its awesomely professional and well-staffed Foreign Desk (I must
confess a bias because my daughter works for the Post) but such exceptions are
rare.
What then does this mean for ethical journalism? It means
that the journalist becomes the guardian of media ethics. It is a world in
which we each take our own responsibility for what we do. We no longer have the
moral conscience of the sub or the editor to fall back on. The editors themselves
– for the most part – are still great women and men of conscience and
principle. They still do heroic work shaping the overall vision of their
publications. The great names are there. Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief of
the London Guardian is a classic current example. But can Rusbridger even begin
to read more than a small proportion of the vast quantity of copy the Guardian
churns out in its online and print editions? Most modern editors are simply too
busy to concern themselves on a day-to-day level with being the conscience of
their junior reporters.
So, is xenophobia an issue? Sure it is. Media stories about
classic pariah groups, the gypsies, the Romanians, the Arabs, the ‘Islamists’
and so forth, can descend into obscenity so easily and we don’t even notice.
One Jewish writer I know wrote a whole opinion piece titled ‘LONDINISTAN’ and
does not understand, to this day, that the mere headline (and it was of her
choosing) was pejorative. She would be horrified to be called racist and, of
course, she is not, just more than a little thoughtless perhaps.
In a similar vein, is desensitisation to violence an issue?
Of course. Here in the West we think nothing of broadcasting images of
brutality and torture if they are screened past the ‘9 o’clock watershed’, with
little consideration given to the fact that many pubescent, vulnerable children
are unlikely to head for their beds before midnight. And in the rest of the
world things can be worse. The images of blood and violence on television sets
in countries such as Israel and Iraq are breeding a generation desensitised to
gore to such a degree that it is truly flabbergasting.
Is disinformation an issue? Absolutely. The current Syrian
civil war has bred such a flood of intelligence agency feeds, as did the Iraq
war little more than a decade ago, that it is near unbelievable. And most, I
repeat, most, of these stories are published without serious qualm or question.
My late father, a newspaper editor himself, had a maxim: ‘A story without a
source is a source of trouble.’ This maxim we still use in our Media Ethics
Code. He had a far better one too. It ran: ‘When in doubt, cut it out.’
So where do we go from here? Perhaps the key is that a
number of prominent journalists make a public commitment to truth in Gandhiesque
fashion. An affirmation that Absolute Truth is their standard. Or is that too
extreme? Too fanatical? Undoubtedly we need to do something. If the editors can
no longer always be our bellwethers we must find new heroes, new women and men
we can point to and say: ‘They believe in fair play.’
Ethical journalism requires standards of vigilance that are
unprecedented precisely because we are our own moral guardians and cannot lean
on our bosses any longer. We should embrace that challenge with excitement. It
heralds a better age. We are no longer children. We must stand up for
ourselves. Gandhi once wrote (and I paraphrase slightly): ‘By experience I have
found that people rarely become virtuous for virtues’ sake. They become
virtuous by necessity. Nor is there anything wrong in becoming good under the
pressure of circumstances.’ Raghvan Iyer, Gandhi’s main disciple, added: ‘Human
life is an aspiration, a continual striving after perfection, and the ideal
must not be lowered because of our weaknesses.’
Exactly! Herein lies a role for organisations like the
International Communications Forum. We should extol virtue and excellence where
we find it, through every means possible from the razzmatazz of the
International Award to the private and personal accolade. And where necessary
we should gently and respectfully cajole and criticise, through conferences and
seminars if nowhere else. And we should support, nurture and foster media
ethics, by doing everything from extolling the merits of media ethics codes to encouraging
training in best practice.
Just as physicians and other health care professionals swear
a Hippocratic Oath to practise medicine honestly, perhaps the ICF should
promote our own oath of journalistic integrity which members of the trade could
swear to in an effort to bolster internationally recognised standards of media
ethics. After all, the world has changed. In a brave new world exploding with
social media, demonstrations are called on Facebook, corruption is exposed in
blogs, and reputations are destroyed by Twitter. In an era in which the
internet provides an arena in which citizen journalists abound, it is the
professional press that must adopt the highest standards of media credibility
if they are to have a distinct place of their own, a territory that is truly
theirs, in a world peopled with rumour and the viral tweet.
And it is exciting, truly exciting, that that should be the
case.
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