Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations

18 Media ethics at the sharp end

Bill Norris

 

 

 

 

The world is awash with Codes of Journalistic Ethics. The PressWise collection, still incomplete, runs to seventy-four. They range from the succinct homilies of the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), to the ponderous German code. The proscriptions on journalistic behaviour are many and various, but they all have one thing in common: they are not worth the paper they are written on.

This is not because so few of these codes contain any provision for sanctions against offenders. There are laws of libel and other legal restrictions in most countries – some would say too many restrictions – which cope with the grosser journalistic ...