Introduction

This third edition was written in an attempt to continue to improve and update what I hope has been a useful source of knowledge and understanding for both students of journalism and practitioners. Its production from its early roots almost 20 years ago to this latest edition has covered some significant developments in journalism ethics and changes in the way journalism is regulated. The idea of this book first came to me those 20 years ago because I was having great difficulty finding suitable texts about journalism ethics to recommend to my students. A number of ‘How to . . .’ journalism books contained a little advice about standards and good practice but most were of the breezing-through style which mirrored ethics teaching on most journalism courses until very recently and so it seemed a good idea to produce something that could help students develop their ethical thinking. So I started the first edition, conscious that I was treading on largely virgin territory, for while there were several good books on ethics from US authors, hardly anyone in the UK had previously produced a book on ethics. This was mainly because most journalism until then had been taught on relatively short training courses and it was only with the introduction of undergraduate programmes in journalism in the early nineties that journalism teachers were able expand their teaching to include ethics. There were a large number of books written by Americans for Americans. In the USA, journalism has been an area for serious study and informed and educated practice for some considerable time. But the differences of approach there, particularly the implications of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the power this gives to the media, meant that interesting and important though many of these books were, they were of limited value to British journalists and journalism students. Lambeth’s Committed Journalism (1992), Klaidman and Beauchamp’s The Virtuous Journalist (1987), Meyer’s Ethical Journalism (1987) and Media Ethics by Christians et al. (1998) are all books that I found instructive to read and am happy to recommend. However, the differences in culture and background between the USA and the UK mean that their perspective tends to waver in and out of focus, leaving the reader faintly confused. Too much is taken for granted. The American journalist’s ethical roots are firmly bedded in the First Amendment and no further manuring is required. Of course many a cynic will say the British journalist already has his or her ethical roots firmly bedded in manure and that it will require the ethical equivalent of dynamite to move many of them away from the ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story’ style of journalistic morality but I hope things are improving and there is some evidence that most journalists attempt to aim for high standards. Journalism books in the UK until very recently were very practical in nature. Mansfield’s The Complete Journalist (1935) was one of the few early UK books on journalism and this was joined in 1950 by The Kemsley Manual of Journalism (Hadley et al.), produced to support the Kemsley Editorial Plan, a revolutionary training scheme for journalists in Viscount Kemsley’s newspaper group. The British Press, by Robert Sinclair, was published in 1949 and this looked at ethics and the personal conduct of journalists. But its approach was very general and it is now more interesting for the light it casts on the journalistic ethics of the time than for the usefulness of its advice. The National Council for the Training of Journalists was started in 1952 by employers’ groups, trade unions and editors and on the back of this steady formalisation of journalism training, the early 1960s saw a sudden flourishing of books about journalism. While they were all solid primers on journalistic work, there was little about ethics. It is the growth in three-or four-year undergraduate courses that has done the most to expand thinking about journalism ethics in the educational establishments. A three-or four-year course allows the time to develop a critical discussion of standards in journalism in a way that was impossible before. The tradition on the one-year courses was to discuss ethical issues as they arose in the students’ practical work. However,

students often came to believe that ethical problems were rare and involved lengthy debate instead of being pervasive, often requiring instant decision against deadline. An excellent example of a journalism textbook produced before undergraduate programmes became popular is Practical Newspaper Reporting by Geoffrey Harris and David Spark which was the standard primer during the 1980s and 1990s. This was first written in 1966 for the NCTJ and a second edition was published in 1993 (and reprinted in 1994). By then the Press Complaints Commission had been launched and with it, an industry Code of Practice. This was included as an appendix in the book and a new Chapter 19 had been included on ethics. It was entitled ‘A Note on Ethics’ and that is all it was: two and a half pages about issues. The first page is largely about the new PCC and the subsequent pages bring up matters raised by PCC complaints covering issues such as addresses, freebies, illustrations, plagiarism and promises. This is not to criticise the book, which was typical of its type and time, but to draw some conclusions about the general view of ethics at the time (less than 20 years ago). The first UK books on ethics were published in the early 1990s (Andrew Belsey and Ruth Chadwick (eds) (1992) Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media, London: Routledge; and Elliott Cohen (ed.) (1992) Philosophical Issues in Journalism, Oxford: OUP). These contained essays on elements of journalistic ethics that were very useful. However, as a series of essays, they lacked cohesion, nor were they specifically aimed at journalism students. Journalistic ethics have only very recently become a seriously regarded subject for study by practitioners and journalism academics in the UK (see Stephenson and Bromley 1998: Chapter 10). A two-hour session on a wet weekday afternoon half-way through a one-year course was very much the standard teaching for would-be journalists until towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Even now there are few one-year courses that do more than a couple of sessions. A letter from the NUJ’s Ethics Council to scores of colleges teaching journalism, offering guest speakers on the subject, saw only a handful of responses. In a letter to journalism colleges in 1996, the late Sir David English, then Chairman of the PCC’s Code of Practice Committee, drew attention to a report from the National Council for the Training of Journalists about their National Certificate Examination which claimed that many trainees seemed unaware of the provisions of the PCC’s Code of Practice. ‘There was even a suggestion by trainees that the code could be disregarded if a better story was the result,’ reprimanded Sir David in his letter. He pointed out that this was a matter of grave concern, and asked trainers to make clear to students what the Code of Practice had to say. But the people taking this exam were working journalists with about two years’ experience on a newspaper in addition to their training course. It is to be hoped that things have improved a lot since then and that Sir David’s successor both in the editor’s chair at the Daily Mail and as Chair of the PCC Code Committee, Paul Dacre, does not need to send out a similar letter and there is some evidence that there is that sort of improvement in standards. Things in the industry and journalism education have change enormously since 1990. We now have the internet and all that brings to journalism and information dissemination. The average journalist is now a graduate; many have been on courses that now discuss ethics, using this or one or more of the other excellent books available, such as Keeble, Harcup or Sanders, and the regulation system has changed considerably, particularly for broadcasting. Because of all this change, I felt it was time to revisit the book, to note the developments and changes made within the industry and to try to draw in some of the research that has taken place in those 20 years. It should be remembered that any book of this sort is only a snapshot of the collective thinking of journalists and that this is constantly changing. There are some areas where the issues are clear, but others where thinking is in a state of change. It is this debate within the industry and the wider public that is important and which I attempt to identify. There is a difficult balance to be struck when writing a book of this sort. I hope it will be read by practitioners, both students and professionals, who want to gain a clearer insight into their

work, as well as academics seeking to discover why a body of intelligent people who often claim to be driven by pure and noble motives seem to fail both so often and so publicly. To achieve this aim, I have tried to offer discussion, debate and advice on ethical journalistic practice derived from the experience of many journalists, the case studies of the key regulatory bodies with the underpinning of moral philosophers through the ages and I hope you will be able to use it to develop your own set of ethical tools to guide you in your professional behaviour. My campaign for higher journalistic standards needs the support of all the journalists it can get because any move towards a more ethically-based journalism must be driven by journalists if it is to be sustained. For too long, too many journalists in the UK have tended to shrug their shoulders and assume morals are for someone else and then wonder why there are calls for legislation on such issues as payments to witnesses, and privacy. Regular rows about media intrusions into the lives of celebrities such as David Beckham, Ashley Cole, Max Mosley or John Terry have raised public concern about the way the press so often intrudes into the private lives of public figures. Calls for legislation are made at regular intervals and are widely supported by the public even if the government fears the press too much to consider their introduction. Clearly, in the light of such widespread public interest and concern, journalists cannot ignore or remain indifferent to the ethical aspects of their profession. The industry has been lucky. While there have been some outrageous invasions of privacy, they have not been so sustained as to force a government to act, particularly a government so concerned with its media image as Tony Blair’s. But the willingness of such figures as the Prince of Wales and Tony Blair to complain to the PCC about invasions of their children’s privacy as well as the jailing of Clive Goodman shows that the pressure on the media has stepped up a gear or two. There must also be concern about the creeping of legislation into the area of protection of privacy. Law and changing opinion have made it easier to prohibit the publication of names under the guise of protecting privacy. We have a choice in the UK. Either we will have to have legislation to deal with the excesses of the media, particularly the tabloid press, or journalists will have to get their act together and start to behave responsibly. Journalists can only do this if they are educated to consider the issues raised by their work. All too often the general consensus seems to be that ethical issues are a once-in-ablue-moon problem – crises that pop up from time to time requiring considerable thought before a decision is made. This, of course, is not the case. Ethical problems are dealt with almost on a minute-by-minute basis in journalism. They happen so regularly that many of the decisions are part of the natural working pattern and receive no particular conscious thought process. If we make an ethical decision not to steal, we do not need to revisit that decision every time we encounter something that is not nailed down. But the habitual thief does not have such an easy time as his or her decisions (which must be taken on every occasion) are not ethical but entirely pragmatic: Is the item worth stealing? Is the physical effort required worth it? Am I likely to be caught? Many journalists seem to go through the same logistics-only processes in their work. Shall I invent this part of the story? Is the mental and physical effort required worth it? Am I likely to be found out? Only the punishments for those caught out seem markedly different. Time in prison for the thief, a slap on the wrist from the PCC or Ofcom and possibly disciplinary action by the editor for the journalist. Only by making the moral decision not to invent stories in the first place can the journalist avoid mental turmoil of this sort during the writing of every story. Of course journalists are often under pressure, or at the very least perceived pressure, from others, such as editors, to stretch ethical elasticity to its limits and sometimes beyond. There have been suggestions that print journalists should have the PCC’s Code of Practice written into their contracts of employment and the PCC has already asked proprietors to do this for editors. This idea does spark some questions. For instance, if a contract of employment contains the Code and an editor instructs a journalist to pursue a story in a way that requires breaching the Code, can

the editor then sack the journalist for breaching it? What if the journalist refuses to follow the instruction? Can he or she be sacked for insubordination? How can journalists be expected to adhere to a code which they have not been involved in drawing up? The PCC Code of Practice is agreed by editors only and neither journalists nor their representatives are consulted about the process. The National Union of Journalists believes that journalists should have the right to refuse assignments if they believe the assignment will breach the code of practice. This is a view that was supported by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in its 2003 review of the PCC, although it changed its mind in the subsequent 2007 and 2010 reviews. That some journalists at least feel obliged to push the limits of ethical nicety was underlined by the Clive Goodman affair when the News of the World’s former royal editor was jailed for illegally hacking mobile phone messages. The part played by his editor, Andy Coulson, who quickly resigned, and other NoW executives will probably never be fully known thanks to what the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee described as collective amnesia in its 2010 report. Re-examining the affair it said in its report:

The readiness of all concerned – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out full investigations is striking... We have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.