Code of Ethics

The US-based Society of Professional Journalists has published a Code of Ethics on its website. Given the extraordinary conversations I have encountered on various journalism forums in the UK, I would like you all to read it and count the number of points where your journalistic activity has failed to come up to their measure.

It's an interesting exercise, and probably going to be quite alien to the experience of some journos out there. But there's food for thought here even for journalists who acknowledge the responsibility of their profession. None of us are perfect and most will cross the line at some point in their careers. The dividing line is between those that learn from their mistakes and have a social conscience, and those who don't even acknowledge that a line exists.

The last section of the code covers transparency and accountability:

Journalists should:

* Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
* Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
* Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
* Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
* Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

One of the most positive aspects of the current journalism revolution is how technology is breaking down the walls between journalists and readers. Monopolisation and commercialisation of news outlets are more to blame for the percieved elitism, arrogance and disengagement from readership of news gatherers than the actual traditions of journalism itself. Renaissance journalism, as Kevin Anderson of Strange Attractor has coined it, is much more than technological innovation, it's about a return to collective ownership of the news and pre-monopoly news values, taking advantage of smarter tools to achieve this.

Another working definition...

Les Hacks word du jour:

Journalsim - simulated journalism. Just because it's written by a journalist don't necessarily make it journalism...

Here's an example. Ex-Mirror editor Roy Greenslade has jumped on the blogging bandwagon. Mostly a series of links to other sites' stories about journalism and journalists - something you could easily throw together yourself using a couple of RSS feeds from keyword searches of Google News. Is there any added value to this aggregation because it's done by a journalist? No. Any decent blogger would bring something more to the table, journalist or not.

Give it a miss. If you can't be bothered to go the DIY route, try the vastly superior Editors Weblog instead - it's written by editors who still have their jobs...

A tale of two professions..

Take a look at these quotes:

"The concerns about conflicts of interest are much more at the top of my mind than they were 10 or 15 years ago."

On close links with industry, this person says...
"...we are going to have to wean ourselves off a dependency that is generally inappropriate. This relationship is one of those things we need to clean up. The sooner the better."

"Some conflicts are unavoidable; but that doesn't make all conflicts permissible. Conflicts of interest should be avoided when possible, and the conflict resulting from the acceptance of gifts from industry is both voluntary and unnecessary."

"Disclosure is a highly limited tool for dealing with conflicts of interest,"

Many of us would think these quotes come from academic journalists? Perhaps people working in journalists' associations? Maybe just individual journalists at some meeting about ethics? But we'd be wrong. Those quotes are actually from doctors. All of them concerned about the influence industry is having on the medical profession and how it is skewing health decision-making leading to bias in research and harming patient care. Whole issues of leading medical journals have recently been donated to covering just one issue: ethics and conflicts of interest in medicine.

Similar issues are often discussed by journalists. Many of us are worried that journalists are too easily influenced by industry; too cosy with PR departments. Others are worried about professional standards. It isn't right that, on some publications, it appears to be standard practice to dream up case studies; to fiddle around with quotes to make them fit the narrative rather than the other way around; and, to ignore even basic ethical codes.

'Embellishing' is becoming accepted practice - and not just in some of the glamour titles. Its hardly worth pointing out that readers are becoming less and less sure what they can trust. Perhaps they'll start to look for alternatives.

But if some doctors and some journalists are concerned about ethics - there the similarities between the two professions ends. Colleagues argue that ethics and publishing no longer mix. Ethics is for wimps. A culture is in place where you can't question the ethics of the advertorial - even where readers aren't aware that the copy amounts to advertising.

Yet our medically qualified cousins can't stop debating the issue. Doctors commit whole journals to the subject. New professional groups such as nofreelunch.org and healthyskepticism.org are growing in strength and confidence and fighting industry influence in medicine. Doctors are increasingly questioning industry sponsorship of training, education and the notorious weekend symposium. Even more significantly, some medical journals are putting in place rigid new systems to ensure that conflicts of interest are declared. Leading journals are now starting to put real pressure on drug companies on the issue of biased research.

So what's my point? Just this - if doctors can get to grips with the issue, why the inertia among journalists?