The Ethical Journalist

Tony Harcup

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446237953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"As one of the main scriptwriters of the two internal BBC training sessions which were produced following the Hutton inquiry, I can heartily recommend this book."
- Peter Stewart, BBC Training Department "Packed with illustrations of journalistic heroism and skulduggery... This is an engaging and useful reference book and should become essential reading for serious students of journalism and for those who practise it."
- Times Higher Education Supplement "A must-read for all journalists - be they reporters, editors or bloggers. It is both a straightforward explanation of ethical dilemmas using real-life examples and a subtle commentary on the state of British journalism."
- British Journalism Review "This engaging nd accessible book cannot fail to inspire those who want to be good journalists in every sense of the word."
- Journalism Practice

Everything that journalists do has ethical implications, and in this book Tony Harcup explores the range of issues likely to confront those studying journalism or training to become journalists. The starting point for this engaging and innovative book is that ethical journalism is good journalism.

Building on the reflective and questioning approach of the author?s acclaimed Journalism: Principles and Practice, this book discusses journalists? personal anecdotes alongside relevant critical studies by academics. Original interviews include Andrew Gilligan on his meeting with weapons expert Dr David Kelly and Ryan Parry on being an undercover reporter in Buckingham Palace.

Informed by new research and the author?s own experience within mainstream and alternative journalism, The Ethical Journalist addresses topics such as trust, the public interest, deception, news values, source relationships, crime reporting, regulation and the Hutton inquiry.

This exciting new title discusses ethics as fundamental rather than as a set of problems or an added extra, and it should become essential reading for everyone interested in journalism.

1

INTRODUCTION TO ETHICAL JOURNALISM

It was a small story in a local newspaper. It began:

Mrs Hattie Carroll, 51, Negro waitress at the Emerson Hotel, died last week as a result of the brutal beating by a wealthy socialite during the exclusive Spinsters’ Ball at that hotel.

(Wood, 1963)

That article, published in the Baltimore Sun in February 1963, went on to explain that Hattie Carroll had been hit with a cane by farm owner William Zantzinger. Mrs Carroll was a black woman with 10 children. She died in hospital from internal haemorrhaging. Zantzinger, who was white, was arrested and released on bail. In August of that year he received a six months’ jail sentence for manslaughter, and the story was picked up by other parts of the United States media. According to a report of the court case in Time magazine (1963): “The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until Sept 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop.”

Fleetingly, the case was brought to national attention. Or, at least, to the attention of those paying attention, one of whom was a 22-year-old folk singer going by the name of Bob Dylan. Within days he had written The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. “This is a true story,” Dylan would tell audiences when introducing the song. “This was taken out of the newspapers. Nothing but the words have been changed” (quoted in Corcoran, 2003: 153). In what has been described as a “journalistic narrative” (Hajdu, 2001: 189), The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll introduces us to the characters, gives us the facts, fills in the background to the story, and builds layer upon layer of understanding. It has been described as “perhaps Dylan’s most journalistic song” (Frazier, 2004), telling the story “with the economy of a news reporter and the imagery of a poet” (Sounes, 2002: 176). Dylan’s words continue to speak to audiences down the years. Thanks to his song, countless thousands of people around the world have now heard the story of Hattie Carroll and William Zantzinger: a human interest story of two individuals that tells us something about society.

THE FIRST DUTY OF THE JOURNALIST

As with many journalists, Dylan has on occasions been accused of distorting the facts of a case to fit his own agenda (Heylin, 2001: 124–5). But Dylan is an artist, not a reporter. When a singer says that a song is true, their words are taken as meaning that the song is based on a true story, that the facts are broadly as indicated in the lyrics, and/or that the song is true to the emotion or spirit of real events. A reporter makes a very different promise; a promise that is implicit in all journalism. When a journalist says, “This is a true story,” that is precisely what she or he means. That’s why the very first clause of the international journalists’ code – see Appendix 1 – declares: “Respect for truth and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.” The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) brings together journalists’ organisations from more than 100 countries and, although few of their half-a-million members could recite the code in detail, most journalists understand the principle: that our job is indeed to get at the truth.

Which is not to say that journalists always report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Truth can be an elusive beast to hunt down, even without the help of those philosophers who tell us that it does not exist. And the truth can hurt. Consider the following three examples of truthful reporting.

After the Derbyshire Times reported that Brampton Rovers trounced Waltheof by 29 goals to nil in an under-nines football match, the Sheffield and District Junior Sunday League ordered clubs not to tell local newspapers the results of matches in which any team lost by more than 14 goals. This was apparently motivated by a desire to prevent the defeated children feeling humiliated (Scott, 2004). A minor example, perhaps, but it demonstrates that, for journalists, ethical considerations can arise when you least expect them, even when reporting the football scores.

In common with most local newspapers in the UK, the Kenilworth Weekly News routinely reports on sports days and other events at schools in its circulation area. But it was forced to stop publishing children’s surnames after a bogus kidnapper caused intense distress by telephoning parents and claiming he had snatched their children. Police said the hoaxer had targeted parents whose children had been identified in newspaper coverage of primary school functions (Lagan, 2005). It is another example of a simple, everyday story having potential ethical implications.

Reporters covering the siege at Middle School Number One in the small Russian town of Beslan presumably acted in good faith when they reported the fact that relatives outside the school were receiving mobile phone calls from some of the hostages inside. But when the hijackers heard this on television they forced hostages to hand over their mobiles and shot a man for making a call (Walsh, 2004). It is a life-and-death example of the weighty responsibility borne by journalists, even when reporting accurately. But journalists do not always report accurately.

Not according to Eymen, at least. He is a Kurdish refugee who fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Talking to a group of journalists in the UK, he told us about taking a call on his mobile one day: it was a friend, asking if he could help a new asylum seeker who had just arrived in town with nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, and no money. The call came just as Eymen was passing a newspaper kiosk that displayed banner headlines about asylum seekers being housed in luxurious mansions. The irony was not lost on him. So obsessed are parts of the UK media with asylum seekers that, when they are absent from the front pages, he asks the shopkeeper: “What’s the matter, have asylum seekers done nothing wrong today?” (quoted in Harcup, 2003a).

Such coverage is beyond a joke for Sandra Nyaira, former political editor of the Daily News in Zimbabwe and now a member of the Exiled Journalists Network in the UK, who explains:

In the last year alone I have read articles, mostly in the tabloids, that blamed refugees, nay, asylum seekers … for the rapid spread of infectious diseases like TB, the dreaded HIV/Aids virus, Sars, as well as housing shortages and even terrorism … As soon as they land at Gatwick or Heathrow, they blight Britain’s services. It is all sheer hypocrisy … The public trust most of the things they read in newspapers so journalists must be responsible in the way they present issues that directly affect the lives of others, especially those who are in no position to answer back.

(Nyaira, 2004: 34–6)

Asylum seekers are people with histories and, therefore, with stories. But sections of the UK press too often seem intent on demonising them as a group – a label – rather than treating them as individuals with their own tales to tell. That is not just unethical journalism, it’s bad journalism.

There is certainly too much stereotyping going under the banner of journalism, just as there is too much clichéd coverage, empty-headed celebritychasing, peering into people’s bedrooms, hysterical yapping and yelping … and far, far too many columnists taking up resources that could be devoted to reporting. As the redoubtable journalist Paul Foot put it, when discussing “freedom of the press”:

Nothing wastes newspaper space more than columnists “letting off steam”, especially if they are billed as “frank” or “fearless”. There is nothing specially free about a courageous or fearless opinion which involves no courage or fear whatsoever.

(Foot, 2000: 79)

Yet even our popular newspapers look positively highbrow in comparison to those “lads’ mags” in which the height of journalistic ambition seems to be to persuade a model to pose in what one editor describes fondly as “subservient poses with her arse in the air” (quoted in Turner, 2005).

GOOD JOURNALISM

However, there is also journalism that can inform, surprise, challenge, shock, even inspire, as well as entertain. When I wake up in the morning I can turn on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, for example, and discover something that I didn’t already know. I can even learn the “unknown unknowns” that (to paraphrase US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) I didn’t know that I didn’t know. It’s far from perfect, and I often shout at the radio in exasperation, but listening to the Today programme invariably leaves me better informed, having been exposed to a mixture of reportage and discussion, interesting questions, and even the occasional straight answer. It is essential listening.

Similarly, I can never pick up a quality national newspaper without finding something to interest me. It might be the front-page splash or the hard news in the early pages, but it is just as likely to be an analytical backgrounder, a quirkily written, warts-and-all obituary, or a photograph that captures some moment of sporting ballet in all its glory. The UK “popular” papers may leave me cold with their tales about the antics of celebs, but such papers also have the ability to highlight social issues in as dramatic and powerful a manner as does any journalism anywhere on the globe. They can also make me laugh out loud. And there is something deeply pleasing about falling asleep at night listening to journalists describe a football match on the radio, then waking up and finding a newspaper on the doormat containing an account of the same game, complete with pictures. And if you don’t want to wait for the morning, you can go online and get similar coverage almost instantly. It feels like magic, but in reality it’s just people getting on with their jobs, often in difficult circumstances. Even the freebie Metro newspaper, despite its lack of investment in editorial staff, can provide enough clearly written bite-sized news items to brighten up a brief bus journey. It also has the potential to surprise, as with its description of a motorist who was fined for splashing pedestrians as a “puddle toll martyr”¹ (Metro, 3 November 2005).

The BBC and our national newspapers may be regarded as the regular “agenda setters” of journalism, but thousands of journalists work elsewhere in the media. There are magazines that cover virtually every subject imaginable, often with flair and imagination as well as specialist expertise. There is a minority ethnic press serving sections of the population that feel misrepresented or simply rendered invisible by much of the rest of the media. There are local and regional newspapers that – despite relentless staffing cuts – can still tell people more about what is going on where they live than they hear from their neighbours, and that can run lively campaigns on behalf of their readers. And there is Private Eye, which is in a must-read class of its own for most journalists.

On television there are investigative current affairs slots that – sometimes, at least – tell us things we don’t already know. The powerful and challenging journalism of John Pilger can be found on ITV, albeit infrequently and usually late at night. There are 24-hour news channels that can broadcast live coverage of press conferences, parliamentary debates, and events such as a whale swimming into central London. There are broadcast journalists who do everything from distilling local events into brief bulletins on commercial radio to analysing world events at length every evening on the frequently excellent Channel Four News. There are journalists whose work goes straight onto the web, combining traditional elements of print, TV and radio reporting to make something new. And there are freelance reporters and news agencies who try to ensure that nobody can cough or spit on their patch without them hearing and, if possible, making a story about it. Beyond all that there are international media, mostly now available online. There also exist alternative media that make use of journalistic techniques to challenge and critique what we get from mainstream media (Harcup, 2005b; 2006).

Then there are the countless bloggers, whose online web logs include the good, bad and the ugly of the internet age, and who can inform, educate and entertain while “stretching the boundaries” of journalism (Allan, 2004: 180). And there is the potential for citizens increasingly to get in on the act, believes broadcast journalist Jon Snow. He points to the way in which coverage of the “barbarity of American troops in Fallujah” was made possible because, although journalists were kept out of the Iraqi city, footage was taken by local people. “It has only been exposed because people have been able to take video and use the web to get it to us,” says Snow. “The opportunities are fantastic. I just can’t see the secret society surviving” (quoted in Kiss, 2006).

ETHOS OF THIS BOOK

There is, then, much to celebrate about journalism. But we cannot take good journalism for granted. The ethos of this book is that to be good journalists we need to be thinking journalists, or reflective practitioners. By this I mean that journalists should be encouraged to reflect critically on our job – both individually and colle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to Ethical Journalism
• 2 Why Journalism Matters
• 3 Knowledge is Power
• 4 In the Public Interest
• 5 Danger: News Values at Work
• 6 Can I Quote You on That? Journalists and their Sources
• 7 Round up the Usual Suspects: How Crime is Reported in the Media
• 8 The Regulation of Journalism
• 9 Standing up for Standards
• 10 Ethical Journalism is Good Journalism
• Appendices
• References
• Index