In this project, we assessed 242 codes of media ethics from 94 countries across the globe, focusing on their treatment of moonlighting. The analysis included whether the codes dealt with moonlighting, whether geopolitical and geoeconomic characteristics affected the treatment of the issue, and whether the type of media organization was significant. Only about half the codes addressed moonlighting; Eastern European countries paid the greatest attention to moonlighting, and newspapers and chains were more likely than other media organizations to deal with (...) the issue. Overall, it appears that codes of ethics do not provide clear, strict, or consistent guidelines. (shrink)

Journalistic practice and professionalism across the globe are characterized by certain universals as well as unique particularities. In most post-colonial societies, the ethical philosophies and professional ethos of journalists reflect the tension between the commitment to integrity and social responsibility, shared by journalists worldwide, and the contextual interpretation and application of these principles. This article examines the ethics and ethos of development journalism as a philosophically, culturally, and historically evolving professional ideology. It surveys the ethical landscape of development journalists and (...) shows how development journalists balance the dialectic of a universalist ethical philosophy and a relativistic professional ethos. (shrink)

For thirteen consecutive years, Catalan public broadcasting journalists have protested against the so-called coverage quotas established by Spanish electoral regulations. According to those regulations, during election campaigns, broadcasters are required to use a calculated number related to the proportion of votes cast in the previous election to determine the amount of broadcast time they allot to each party. Journalists have repeatedly and publicly complained about the quotas, while simultaneously explaining the effects of the quotas to the audience and not crediting (...) authorship of this news. This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of the case and its historical roots from different angles: the protests, the journalists’ professional roles, the political parties’ strategies, the roles of the regulatory boards and the initiatives taken by some professional organizations and institutions. The theoretical framework focuses on the mistrust between the political class and journalists in the context of a mediatized conflict with ethical implications. The methodology includes extensive document examination, news content analysis and interviews. The results indicate that the Spanish political class has deemed the performance of the Catalan public broadcaster as tending to equate political information with electoral spots controlled by parties. The consequence of this has been an enduring conflict between politicians and Catalan journalists that distances citizens from both of them. Keywords: Spanish public media, media conflict, journalistic-political conflict, politics and ethics in media. (shrink)

Journalists’ and publics’ relationship with truth-telling is so messy because the term “truth” holds multitudes of competing senses that are rarely acknowledged in journalism discourse. People approach contested subjects from many, sometimes incommensurate, senses of truth. When journalists fail to identify the competing senses embedded in varying truth claims, they reproduce confusion as to the validity and verifiability of such claims and contribute to a rolling epistemic crisis in the public sphere. This essay explores six senses of truth – logical, (...) empirical, affective, ideological, authoritarian, and narrative – and discusses their interaction and problematic conflation. (shrink)