ETHICS IN EDITINGBy Andrew Bishop Mkandawire (AB Deevado)-MC Yr 4 4th May, 2012 Share World Open University-BT Campus

Definitions and Backgrounds

The most common way of defining "ethics": norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior (www.niehs.nih.gov).

Media ethics are a complex topic because they deal with an institution that must do things that ordinary people in ordinary circumstances would not do. Media ethics draw on a range of philosophical principles, including basic Judeo-Christian values, Aristotle’s ideas about virtue and balanced behaviors (the golden mean), Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s principle of utility, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, and the Hutchins Commission’s social-responsibility ethics. One way contemporary journalists can resolve their ethical problems is by using the Bok model for ethical decision making.

Reporters face a range of ethical issues on a regular basis. Those issues include the following:

• Truthfulness. Journalists need to make a commitment to telling the truth. This includes not giving false or made-up reports, and telling truthful stories that are not intended to deceive the audience. This may require reporters to provide not only the facts but also the context surrounding them. Truthfulness requires a commitment not only from the journalist but also from the organization he or she works for.
• Conflicts of interest. The interests of a corporation that owns a news organization may sometimes be at odds with the nature of the news being reported. Journalists need to be careful not only to portray their parent company in an accurate light but also to give no special favors to companies connected to the organization’s parent company.
• Sensationalism. News organizations sometimes emphasize news that is interesting but unimportant. This happens when reporters put more effort into attracting and pleasing an audience than into reporting on the critical issues of the day. This can happen because of the increased pace of the news business brought about by cable television, the Internet, and the parent company’s desire for profits.
• Authenticity and appropriateness of photographs. Photos can be among the most controversial media materials, both because of their disturbing content and because they can be altered with digital editing tools.

Journalists and their employers can apply a variety of methods for enforcing and implementing ethical behavior. These include employing an ombudsman, requiring commitment to ethical behavior on the part of all employees, and adhering to a code of ethics.

The advertising industry became concerned with protecting its image during World War II. Among the major ethical issues in advertising are the following:

• Truthfulness. How important is it that claims such as “Tastes great” or “It’s the best” can be demonstrably true?
• Taste. Is it appropriate for ads to attract attention by shocking audiences?
• Media control. Do advertisers have a right to control the editorial material that surrounds their advertisements?

In the public relations industry, practitioners need to work at balancing their clients’ interests against those of the public at large. This can become problematic when a client is attempting to influence the public to support an issue such as going to war.

Ethics also advocates for equality. No biased writing and publishing of news stories. This takes the position of egalitarianism which according to (www. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism.com) Egalitarianism (from French égal, meaning "equal") is a belief of thought that favors equality of some sort. Its general premise is that people should be treated as equals on certain dimensions such as race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and cultural heritage. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status. In large part, it is a response to the abuses of statist development and has two distinct definitions in modern English. It is defined either as a political doctrine that all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people or the decentralization of power. An egalitarian believes that equality reflects the natural state of humanity. Egalitarianism is the opposite of elitism.

Whenever you change to improve your copy, you’re editing. The editing process involves cooperation among reporters, section editors, and copy editors. It takes team works and time. Teamwork and time will make your copy perfect. The process of editing copy occurs in several phases. The final phase of editing before it’s dropped into pages is called copyediting (Levin 2000: 120).

Editing is done for several reasons. The major reasons are:

Ethics; where communicators behavior towards job conduct abide by truth telling, accuracy, honest, fairness, transparency, none-discrimination, unbiased, etc.

Laws; where matters of contempt of court, defamation, privacy, obscenity and indecent, etc,

Grammar and Language; where matters of language rules, punctuation and sentence structure, and

Style; mostly for unique identification of the news paper for example that are considered.

Importance of ethics in editing

Ethics are important in editing mainly because they guide professional conduct of editors and newsroom team and enable a desired approach towards legal application.

For example, (www.vjmevement.com) argues that Ethics in editing are important because they guide the journalistic manner to a favorable and desired taste of practice and position their work with trust which reflects credibility because of the following:

Accuracy

• Pursue comprehensive, accurate, careful and balanced reporting and interpretation of the facts within context.
• Present information in clear, precise language.
• Use first-hand sources wherever possible.
• Clearly cite sources and verify their claims and allegations, stating whenever verification is not possible.
• Avoid unfounded speculation.
• Avoid sources that knowingly or recklessly provide false information.
• Validate the authenticity of all footage.

Fairness

• Strive to represent accurately, thoroughly, and without bias all perspectives on an issue.
• Treat sources and the public with decency.
• Strive to minimize harm.
• Take every possible effort to allow an individual that is the subject of negative assertions in a story to respond to those assertions.
• Translate language to accurately and clearly convey the meaning of a person's speech, and accurately translate the words of a public figure. Honor the boundary between pursuit of the story and an individual's right to privacy.
• Act responsibly when interviewing children under 18 years old and editing those interviews.

Honesty

• Distinguish between fact and opinion.
• Do not plagiarize or otherwise deceive by presenting the works of others as our own. Attribute all facts originally reported by another organization.
• Do not edit information in ways that distorts its meaning.
• Avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest that could compromise credibility, and disclose any unavoidable conflicts of interest.
• Grant anonymity to sources only in rare, individual instances where to do otherwise would place them at grave risk.
• Maintain independence and do not allow subjects or third parties to edit stories before publication or otherwise censor reports.
• Do not deceive in the pursuit of information, nor use our positions as VJ Movement staff or contributors to make inquiries that fall outside the boundaries of The VJ Movement work.

Transparency

• Admit mistakes and act in a timely manner to both correct them and prevent them from happening again.
• Publish self-profiles that reveal relevant information about the journalist's background and motivations for reporting stories.

Relationship between ethics and the law

There is a big relationship between ethics and law. This is because ethics ensure that behavior and conduct towards the job of news gathering and editing should be within accepted and desired taste and have a proper application of legal demands.

For example ethical application will enhance editors to be lawful in editing in which matters of contempt of court, defamation, privacy, obscenity and indecent, etc, interfere much with editing principles and media conceptual theories like public interest, public service broadcasting, social responsibility, constructionist, normative just to mention a few will be controlled and served accordingly. However it has to be communicated that not all ethical editing efforts can be legal and vice versa. For example it may be ethical to publish government malpractice to serve the right to know but may be illegal to publicize government private information.

However, the laws of privacy and defamation often conflict with editing. According to (Carey et al 2007: 39) defamation is the publication to a third party of matter which in all circumstances would be likely to affect a person adversely in the estimation of reasonable people generally. This comes in two forms, libel-written or recorded statement(s) either criminal or civil and slander-spoken statement(s).

Libel for example which has defenses at most being truth has grave consequences to a media organization. A media organization can lose credibility, can cost organization money, may lose existing and potential and liable news sources and may affect close members’ family stability and sometimes jobs and property. 

 How Malawian media organization can enjoy ethics amidst power clashes for ideological dominance

But although media editing task risks conflict with laws even if it may be ethical to serve the public tight to know and information through social responsibility and public interest concepts, it is necessary for editors to realize that they serve different ideological powers that all race for dominance in the society. The ruling party would be willing to maximize its national legitimacy but all racing against opposition parties; Muslims may be trying to prove they understand God principles better than Christians do; Airtel may be racing against TNM; the rich against the poor; the believers against the pagans, etc.

With this realization, the news organization has to consider need to have in-house lawyer who may be advising on matters or issues like pictures or stories that raise questions of breach of watchful laws before the news can be published.

Conclusion

It is therefore important for editors to lean more on how ethics and laws have to conform to editing interest. And to have the code of conduct and in-house legal practitioner may be necessary for a media organization to enhance editing efforts and tasks without conflicting with ethical and legal issues.

Recommendations

With professional knowledge therefore for editors to ensure that they are conducting the editing duty with Ethical behavior apart from legal behavior, editors have to follow a model. This model includes 10 points that have to be considered.

1.                            What bothers me about this story or picture?

2.                              What do my colleagues think?

3.                              Is the story complete?

4.                              What is the good and what is the harm?

5.                              Is there a conflict of interest

6.                              Does the story rely on unnamed sources or deception?

7.                              How will my audience react?

8.                              Does timing matter?

9.                              Is there any middle ground?

10.                          Should we explain our decision?

REFERENCES

Carey, P et al .2007. Media Law. 4^th edition. London: Thomson.

Levin, M.  2000. Handbook for Journalists-A Handbook for Journalists. Chicago: National Textbook Company

JVMovement. 2011. Ethics. Accessed at www.vjmovement.com/ethics - [29th July, 2011]

Resnik, DB. 2011. Defining Ethics. Accessed at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/whatis.cfm [10th August, 2011]

Richard, A.2002, "Egalitarianism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002.) Accessed at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism. [29th July, 2011]