7.1: Ethical Principles

Ethical journalists do not put words in people’s mouths or pretend to have been somewhere they have not. And they do not pass off the work of others as their own. Fabrication and plagiarism are violations of basic journalistic standards the world over. Ethical journalists never make up stories. Journalists only report real facts from real sources. Ethical journalists respect the law (Potter, 2006).

But journalists face ethical dilemmas every day, under pressure from media owners, competitors, advertisers, and the public. They need a process to resolve these dilemmas so that the journalism they produce is ethical. They need a way of thinking about ethical issues that will help them make good decisions, even under a deadline.

The Ethical Journalism Network in the United Kingdom – an organisation that represents editors, media owners, and media support groups around the world – identified five principles to ensure ethical journalism. These are:

• Truth and accuracy. Journalists should always make sure they provide all relevant information and check the facts. If it is not possible to corroborate information (to find evidence for the information), you should tell your readers.
• Independence. Journalists should not be influenced by any special interests, including political parties, financial stakeholders, or anyone else. Journalists should declare conflicts of interest when they arise. A simple example, if you are asked to do a story about someone you know very well who has been accused of something, you should tell your news editor you know the person and cannot do the story. In South Africa, in 2021, a journalist was suspended after it became known that she had fallen in love with a convicted murderer while covering the story. She was clearly not independent because she was in love with the main subject of her story.
• Fairness and impartiality. It is important for journalists to remember that a story has two sides or more; therefore, they must always provide the full context and remain impartial.
• Humanity. The sole purpose of journalism is to provide the public with important information and not to intentionally cause any harm. Journalists should be aware that their words may be hurtful to others and carefully consider the consequences of what they publish or broadcast.
• Accountability. Journalists should hold themselves accountable. If they make a mistake, they should apologise and correct the error (EJN, n.d.). This means that you should always take final responsibility for whatever you publish. As a journalists you should be willing to face the consequences of you publish untruths or slanderous information.

There are many other principles¹² to keep in mind when making ethical decisions.

• One example is coverage of minorities, migrants, discrimination and hate speech. This would include coverage of the LGBTQI+ community, migrants from other countries who come to South Africa, or people with disabilities. Reporting about these groups require care and understanding of their situation. You need to inform yourself so that you do not base your reporting on misperceptions or use derogatory terms. Journalists should never use discriminatory language or hate speech. If you quote someone in a story who uses hate speech or derogatory language, you should replace the derogatory words with a blank space or a dash. This would depend on the standards of the community. According to the South African Constitution, discrimination against anyone based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical disability, or mental illness is illegal. Take care not to break the law in your reporting. Even if you quote someone who breaks the law by using hate speech, you as the journalist will be held accountable.
• Privacy is also important; people have a legal right to privacy. People who are in the public eye – such as politicians and celebrities – give up some of their right to privacy once they enter public life. It is more acceptable to report about the private lives of famous people because they are in the public eye than ordinary people who have the right to their privacy. For example, you cannot publish a picture of someone that you took with a secret camera inside their own house. This would be a breach of privacy and breaking the law in most countries around the world. In the US, this is called “intentional intrusion” (Baron, 1998). This is also true for celebrities or famous people. But you can publish a picture of someone on the street because the street is a public place and people give up their right to privacy when they enter a public place. You can also use someone’s picture from social media if their social media page is public. This is just the same as a public street. But if someone’s Instagram page, for example, is private and only open to their friends, and you somehow get hold of a picture from that page, it would be a breach of privacy to use that picture. It comes from a private page. Privacy also refers to South African cultural customs and protecting the dignity of people who are bereaved.
• People should also always have the right of reply. This is essential in ethical journalism. Whenever someone is implicated in a story in some way, you should give them an opportunity to respond. Let’s say a university is being accused by student leaders of providing students with inadequate accommodation. You cannot publish only the accusations; that would be unethical. You need to contact the university and give them an opportunity to respond to the allegations.
• Reporting about children should be approached with care. Under South African law, anyone under the age of 18 is considered a child. Children must be protected. You cannot publish the names of children or their pictures without the permission of their parents or guardians.
• Victims of crime may never be identified if the crime was of a sexual nature. You should also take care to not publish any kind of information that may inadvertently lead to the identification of the victim, for example, by saying that the victim is the principal of a local school. The audience will know who the person is, and this is not allowed.
• As we have already discussed in the previous section, you should also ensure that you gather information for your stories in an ethical way. This means you may not gather information secretly; you may not go undercover to observe someone without their knowledge; you may not intercept someone’s personal communication; and you may not obtain documents in an unauthorised way (for example, by just taking documents from someone’s office without permission). All these examples are invasions of privacy and not just unethical but also against the law.

When you are faced with difficult choices, such as exposing information about someone that you know very well, or, for some people, this may be covering sexual minorities or political groups who have opinions that you might not agree with for personal or religious reasons, you must always remain objective and fair. Journalists should never allow their feelings or personal beliefs to interfere with their work. It remains the task of a journalist to inform the public about issues of the day in a fair and accurate way, without judgement.

The Ethical Journalism Network (n.d.) explains:

The most common justification that journalists make for their work is that it is ‘in the public interest.’ It is this notion that underscores the moral authority of journalism to ask hard questions of people in power, to invade the privacy of others and to sometimes test the limits of ethical practice in order to discover the truth.

Put simply, the public interest is about what matters to everyone in society. It is about the common good, the general welfare and the security and well-being of everyone in the community we serve.

You should always ask yourself whether your story is in the public interest. Do people need to know this? But sometimes that is not enough. Also consider whether the story is really necessary, whether your story might affect those involved in unnecessarily negative ways without really serving a purpose.

Reference

12. This section is based on information from the South African Press Code, the Independent Online Press Code, and the Code of conduct of the SA Union of Journalists.