ABSTRACT
If you put ‘media ethics’ into an Internet search engine such as ‘Google’, you are likely to be confronted by well over 3 million websites. Such is the concern, interest and serious intent of the overwhelming number of the world’s journalists and broadcasters – that there is a right and a wrong way of going about these things, that the practicality of ‘truth’ is paramount, and that a properly informed public is a highly desirable objective. This leads to a widespread continuing debate to codify best practice in achieving these ends. These sets of rules, standards and Codes of Practice regulate how journalists do their work and are far from theoretical ideas. They are the practical application of a series of ethical principles – an ethic being defined as ‘a moral belief about what is right and wrong, influencing our actual behaviour’. ‘Media ethics’ therefore concerns everyday decisions and choices – the morality of what is done in practice – and the values which inform those decisions. Ethics affects the whole spectrum of journalistic and media production. It is often the lack of proper reflection by media practitioners into what they do which leads to much unethical behaviour – journalists making too many decisions, too quickly and without the appropriate time to think things through. However, journalism is essentially connected to the real – and far from ideal – world. Governments, institutions, commercial interests and individuals have things to hide, things they would rather not make public because reputations, share prices, votes, personal wealth or power would suffer. The desire for total truth is not all that universal, hence the need for news people in particular to have a set of rules to govern what they do, and for everyone else to know what these are.
