Abstract
Recent research has revealed that senior journalists are in desperate need of training in ethics. The study's author reports his findings
The Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the media has raised profound questions about how journalistic ethics are taught, discussed and disseminated. These are issues which will have to be faced by every major media organisation in this country.
Recently I was asked by the National Council for the Training of Journalists to look into some of these questions. I interviewed senior editors and executives from almost all of the main media groups (print and broadcast) as well as some of the main providers of journalistic training. This article is partly based on that research.
Reactions to Leveson
Almost all the people I talked to felt ashamed about recent events: “Every journalist in this country has to be touched by Leveson and by what's been revealed. Whether we've been directly involved or not, we are all in this together.” They felt the revelations had seriously dented their own personal integrity and that of their profession as a whole. Most agreed that there needed to be changes and that ethical issues in journalism had to be given a much higher priority in the future.
A minority of respondents were more worried about where the debate on ethics would lead. They feared it would lead to the suppression of good journalism and that important stories would go unreported: “There is a big danger that the chattering classes will seek to impose their own values on this process and that they will seek to eliminate what they see as ‘tawdry’ by labelling it ‘unethical'.”
Ethics do matter
There is a large consensus in the industry that ethics matters – and matters a lot. There is a vital compact between the reader and the journalist: “You the reader put your trust in me, I will do my best to honour that trust by being as truthful and straightforward as possible.” There is also a keen appreciation of the harsh commercial reality that will follow if that bond of trust is broken: “If readers no longer trust us then they will no longer buy the paper.” Though, interestingly, no one put forward the idea that at least some of the current decline in circulations might be because of any lessening of that feeling of trust.
The growing importance of social media in newsrooms and news-gathering has complicated existing ethical issues as well introducing new ones. It has made sourcing more complicated; it has blurred the boundaries between what is public space and what is private space. The 24-hour nature of media these days means that there is now very little time for any reflection, debate or questioning. Print deadlines and broadcast schedules that would once have offered at least a little time for consideration, now offer none.
Career stages
In looking at what is currently on offer in terms of teaching the ethical foundations of journalism, there are two career stages. The first is the training of those entering journalism as new joiners. The start of anyone's career is a crucial stage in forming a professional mind-set.
The second is the provision for mid-career and senior journalists. There is a big gap here, yet these are the people who play a crucial part in the management and editorial leadership of newsrooms on a day-to-day basis. In newspapers they will be the people leading the newsdesk or the foreign desk, dealing with reporters and correspondents. With broadcasters, they will be the people responsible for the daily output. Yet often they will have received little or no training since they first joined the organisation. They will be expected to have acquired the leadership, management and editorial skills necessary for their changed roles by osmosis. As I discovered, they are often the neglected “squeezed middle”.
Pre-entry training
There is a lot of teaching of regulation. There is a lot less teaching of media ethics. The words ethics and regulation often seem to be used interchangeably. But they are not the same. It is important to understand the difference. Ethics goes much wider and deeper than regulation.
Regulation is what you can and can't do; ethics is what you should do. There may well be a whole series of journalistic circumstances where there are ethical considerations that are not covered by regulation. Good journalists not only need to know what is right and wrong but they also need to understand why. It is quite possible to meet the considerations of a regulatory code without having much understanding of the reasoning behind the code. There is a world of difference between teaching the letter of the Press Complaints Commission Editor's Code of Practice and its spirit. It is the spirit that needs to be captured in any future programme of ethics.
It is of course important that both the PCC Code and the Ofcom Code are integral parts of journalistic training. Entrants to the professions need to know about them. But teaching regulation without teaching ethics is a bit like preaching the Ten Commandments without giving any understanding of religion.
How much is done on ethics in pre-entry training, over and beyond the basics of the regulatory codes, needs to be seriously looked at. Most syllabuses don't give any impression that ethics is a crucial part of training. There is seldom a separate section on journalistic ethics in the programme of study. Indeed the very word ‘ethics’ or ‘ethical’ occurs rarely and when it does crop up it is usually peripheral. Ethics training needs to be given a higher profile in syllabuses.
Time is clearly a big factor for many providers of training. All acknowledged the importance of ethics but many worried about how they were going to fit anything more into their already-crowded timetables.
Everyone agreed that the teaching of journalistic ethics needed to be grounded in and based on real-life practical case histories. One example of how this can be done is to be found in some of the current modules on journalism and society and the relationship between the two. Courses offering these modules root them in practical journalism and include whole chunks on ethics based on real-life case studies. At the end of the course there is a specific ethical question in the exam that looks not only at solutions but also the reasoning involved. This seems to me to offer something of a model for the future.
Mid-career and senior journalists
When I asked senior news executives about the training of senior and mid-career journalists the quotes were quite startling:
“The gap [in ethics] is really with senior editors.”
“If there is going to be a prompt change in the culture of journalism in this country then there has to be a re-education of editors – this has to start with the back bench.”
“Journalism must be one of the only professions or trades where the only place you do any training or development is at the beginning. After that you are just expected to pick this stuff up.”
“We've got some journalists, now working as editors, who were hired as brilliant writers 20 years ago and who have had no training ever since.”
“Senior journalists are just expected to pick it all up from reading the Media Guardian and the odd PA law report.”
These quotes sum up why I now think mid-career training is crucial. These are the journalists who often have to take the most sensitive ethical decisions. They are the ones briefing reporters before they leave the office; they are the ones junior colleagues come to with their dilemmas; they are the ones who watch over and approve the final copy. But most will have received little or no training since they first entered journalism. Most will have received no training for the job they are now doing.
One shrewd editor remarked to me that at a senior level it's often about the questions you ask of those who are doing the reporting, and that what news-gathering editors need most is training in ‘ethics supervision'.
Newsrooms have always been places where fast decisions have to be made. There has never been much time to pause or reflect. That is even more the case today. Newsroom cuts have reduced the numbers; those who remain are taking more decisions faster than ever. There are fewer people around to ask. The pressures of 24-hour news have speeded up the decision-making timescale even more. As one managing editor said to me with real feeling: “Senior journalists are so busy, they never have to time nowadays to pause and think about any of this stuff.”
How much, if any, training senior journalists receive varies from organisation to organisation. Most news organisations have arranged some short legal refresher courses, some in response to the strictures of the Bribery Act. Some have organised sessions with the PCC to go over some recent cases.
The role of the PCC
In recent years the PCC has taken on an increasingly important role in journalism ethics training. It is not a role for which it was originally designed, nor is it one for which it is funded.
The PCC sends a speaker or a trainer to several diploma-level training courses to speak to entry-level students in order to introduce them to the essentials of the PCC Code. At a more senior level, it offers news organisations update seminars on some of its recent adjudications and cases. These often take place in newsrooms, are open to all staff and usually last between an hour to an hour and a half. They are done on an ad-hoc basis, as and when requested, and when someone is available. There have also been seminars on specific topics at its Holborn headquarters for senior representatives from the main news groups.
When the PCC was in full flow with workshops they were reaching some 100 newspapers a year. But with an uncertain future in light of the Leveson Inquiry, this activity has dropped off. If there is to be a programme of training and development for senior editors and executives in the future, it could well be that the PCC or any successor organisation will have a crucial role to play.
Continuous professional development
Almost all professions now require their practitioners to undertake some form of continuous professional development (CPD) to ensure that everyone is up-to-date with current developments. Lawyers have to do it, so do doctors, even plumbers have to be retrained to fit the latest boiler. The phrase ‘continuous professional development’ is a helpful one to use. It more accurately describes what is involved at a senior level than the word ‘training'.
But apart from the odd refresher session or PCC seminar, there is little training for senior staff in most newsrooms and everyone is too busy for there to be any explicit discussion of the various ethical issues that can arise. This is a big gap. Most of the people I interviewed thought something should be done about it, though views varied as to what and how.
There are some exceptions to this lack of senior training and development. In the wake of the phone-hacking revelations, two groups have launched new initiatives. One group started seminars last year for its senior editors; another is about to launch a series of workshops for its senior journalists called Ethics and Dilemmas. Some years ago, in response to the Hutton Report, the BBC introduced a leadership course for journalists who were becoming editors and this included sections on ethical journalism, such as “What is journalism in the public interest?” and “What is impartiality?”. But so far, these courses are the exceptions across the industry as a whole.
All these courses are being delivered by senior journalists or ex-journalists. A lot of respondents stressed to me how important it was for the credibility of the message that it was delivered by senior working journalists.
There seems to be a substantial need for a programme of continuous professional development across journalism. This need is likely to become even more explicit in the post-Leveson world. This is not a responsibility that can be farmed out to the lawyers or the HR department. Good, effective and credible ethics training has to be journalistically-led and led by journalists. It is important that ethics is seen as something that journalists should worry about and that they should “own” the issues.
Such a programme could be part of a larger package of mid-career development which could also include refreshers on changes in the law such as the Bribery Act; new developments in social media and technology; latest market and readership trends; updates on recent compliance and regulatory issues; as well as leadership and management modules.
Professional development is probably going to be done by most organisations in-house but there is going to be a natural desire among all of them not to re-invent the wheel for every individual scheme. There could be a lot of content and case studies that could be shared across courses as part of a cross-industry initiative.
It won't be easy. This is new territory for journalism. Several people made the point to me that the lead needs to come from the top. If the boards of the various media organisations and the editors-in-chief don't take this stuff seriously then no one else will. The three initiatives mentioned above all came originally from the boardroom.
But if journalism is to regain its credibility and regain the trust of the public it is essential that it takes ethics very seriously – and is seen to do so – and that it creates the right professional forums and programmes where such issues can be discussed and best practice shared.