If you know me pretty well then you probably realise how much I rant on about media standards and how much they seem to mean to me. I figure that this would be an easy rant to start with. I could probably write for hours about this issue, meaning that I’ll probably be annoyed with this attempt of explaining my views and I’ll most likely write about this issue a number of times as the enquiry goes by.
For starters, those of you who say “oh no not this again” every time the hacking scandal or recent standards panic is mentioned are simply ignorant, if you could be bothered doing your research into the topic you would realise how poor media standards currently are and how the media are essentially taking basic human rights away from people.
In my opinion the most fundamental of ethical standards are basic human rights, all human ethical guidelines are based on the human rights act. I think most of us are forgetting that privacy is part of the human rights act and that celebrities are human too (I know it’s hard to believe sometimes). To start off simple, think of it this way: you set out to have a peaceful day but your phone has been bugged by journalists, your friend leaves you a voicemail telling you that they can’t make the coffee meeting today but the journalist listens to your message, transcribes it and then deletes it. You get out of your car in town and some camera men start following you. You go to the coffee shop where you meet a friend of the opposite sex who is merely just a friend, you both wonder why the other person’s partner hasn’t turned up to the coffee meeting. A few days later you’re browsing the internet and find an article that claims your friend who couldn’t make it to the coffee shop had an argument with you via voicemail because their partner had cheated with you, the article then provides snaps of you and the person of the opposite sex sitting close to each other in the coffee bar and then claims that shortly after the photos were taken you passionately kissed. This isn’t the first time an article has been published that told lies about you. Take time to reflect, how would you feel if you were in this situation? I’d feel as though I’d had my privacy taken away from me and I’d also feel deceived and awfully upset.
If you would react similar then we’re finally on the same page. What I’m trying to get across is that celebrities are human too, so surely they have human rights! privacy and not being deceived are the most basic of human rights and needs. I find it kind of funny how the majority of the public weren’t bothered about the phone hacking scandal when it just effected celebrities such as David Beckham but as soon as it involved Milly Dowler the world were really disgusted. Part of me thinks that this could be because of the tragedy but a bigger part of me thinks that this is because the Dowler’s are a normal family, i.e. not celebrities. People tend to dehumanise celebrities, I’m not saying that you should pretty much worship them, but you should consider them as being human beings.
So, why does the media (journalism in particular) allow such poor standards? This is where having a degree in psychology would help me to explain. You’re probably expecting a behavioural explanation of what’s going on but in fact my explanation comes from an ethical perspective. Last year I wrote an essay that was partly about the media and ethical standards, at the time I was actually interested and appalled by the phone hacking scandal and doing the research for the essay helped me to build up a clear overview of media ethical standards in general. I’m not sure whether you’re aware of this but every profession that involves working with people (and animals) has its own set of ethical standards based on the human (or animal) rights act. This is to ensure that people and animals are treated fairly. The standards are based on the same set of principles but applied to the particular profession (for example: psychology, sociology, health, biological, political and general research). These professions have governing bodies which all people of the profession must be members of in order to practice. By signing up to the governing body you are agreeing to follow the compulsory ethical guidelines, failure to do so could lead to losing your job and no longer being able to practice your profession.
What I found odd was that when I was researching journalism ethical standards (in order to compare them to psychology ones) I found that journalists do not have a compulsory professional governing body. What I found was that in the UK there is a governing body for journalism (called the National Union of Journalists, [NUJ]) but it’s completely optional to join the professional body. What’s worst still is that they do have ethical standards but they are so ambiguous, it’s basically a list of excuses that could be used if someone said that you weren’t practicing journalism ethically. I’m not going to give any example here, if you’re really interested then go to the NUJ website and read the guidelines for yourself, they’ll either disgust you or make you laugh, or maybe both! I blame the lack of a compulsory governing body for the shaky standards and practice in journalism.
I think that the core solution to the problem is to actually create a compulsory governing body for media standards. I’m not saying that the ethical standards should be as strict as social sciences and health (for example never revealing a name to protect confidentiality), what I’m saying is that the standards should be more structured and objective. For example, with the issue of consent, if a journalist is merely observing an event and then writing an article on it, it is ok to just ahead and write without permission, however if the journalist talks to anyone then they should sign a consent form and be provided with contact details incase they want to be withdrew from being mentioned in the article. Confidentiality should be respected, if people want to remain anonymous they have every right to. With the issue of deception, all forms of deception should be prohibited, this includes misrepresentation of the truth in the media and also deception by means of hacking or other forms of spying.
The idea behind membership of the professional body is that it will be compulsory in order to practice any form of journalism. It should take the same format as the British Psychological Society (BPS) where members pay membership fees but get monthly magazines about how to improve standards and recent news in the field, this will help to encourage journalists to engage in ethical practice, keep up to date with the field of journalism and also feel a sense of community. If journalists break any of the ethical standards the serious precautions will be taken and this may result in the journalist never being able to practice again depending on the seriousness of the offence.
This may seem like it’s taking the fun out of the media and their celebrity gossip rumours and photographs of them looking at their worst (I forgot to mention that consent forms are required for photograph publication also), but you should think back to the paragraph where I asked you to imagine if it were you. I do realise that some celebrities are determined to be all over the media, no matter why, where and when but not all celebrities are the same … as not all human beings are the same. Technically my fictitious ethical standards are giving celebrities (and the public I guess) the option to have bad press if they want to and also protecting celebrities and the public from having bad press if they don’t want it.
Remember that this is just my idea, nothing is set in place and nothing will probably come of it but I just felt like getting my opinions across. I hope you enjoyed the read, please contribute if you have any further ideas of an opinion of your own on the issue.
Thanks
- Jodie
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