ABSTRACT
Press regulation first became an issue abroad. Sweden has had a press council from the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘ The Publicists Club [of Sweden], which was formed in 1874 with journalists, newspaper editors and other publishers as its members, had, on a number of occasions in the beginning of the 1900s, served as a self-appointed tribunal to hear complaints against newspapers’ (Nordlund 1991: 1). Even before this, the Swedes had been adjudicating on complaints in an informal way. It also developed the first journalistic code in 1900, although this was not widely adopted. The French were next, with the Syndicat National des Journalistes (the French trade union) publishing a charter of conduct in 1918 (PC 1990: 285). Other European countries had also considered the subject and some had rudimentary laws by the middle of the 1800s. In the USA, journalism college teachers were discussing ethics and the need for journalists to set their own standards at least as early as 1913 (Bleyer 1913: 357). In the UK, an indication of journalistic thinking on ethics around this time could be found in a small handbook for journalists, published in 1873 (possibly the first UK book designed to teach journalism), which included a chapter about ‘Reporting Etiquette’. This identified an early need to improve the behaviour of journalists (Reed 1876). It is interesting to note that this chapter was only inserted in the second edition and nothing like it was in the first edition published ten years previously. This etiquette was more about what the NUJ today describes in its rule book as ‘Membership responsibilities’ (NUJ, 2009) than about professional ethics. The book’s main concerns were about the job (salaries, qualifications and working practices), libel, the duties of the reporter and note-taking (shorthand, by which it set great store, and transcribing the notes). The author was concerned about taking an accurate note and transcribing that accurately for publication, but he did not mention other ethical issues. Discussing reporting meetings, for instance, he says: ‘In taking notes of a meeting, care should be taken to distinguish the speakers with accuracy’ (Reed, 1876: 57). This also applies to speakers’ names which, Reed advised, require special care (ibid.: 58). He also advised that a reporter should not misrepresent a view antithetical to those of his paper:
Few papers report both sides at equal length and with absolute impartiality; and the reporter must be in a measure guided by the known sympathies of his journal, in selecting the speakers to be most fully reported.
