Professionalism grants respect and trust to its members from the general public. No matter what the profession is, once a member of society is deemed as a professional, he/she is granted trust and respect.
But what does professionalism requisite from an individual? It requisites one main condition: adherence to the profession’s ethics. Alternatively, an unethical worker, considered unprofessional, does not prioritize the profession’s ethics above his/her own interests.
Almost anyone could be considered professional in what they do if they follow the over all conditions created by a relevant bureau or syndicate, or a group of professionals from the same profession. Can a trash collector be professional? In general terms, any person that abides by the set of regulations generally agreed to be the proper ethics for the profession, is a professional, be it a trash collector, a sales woman, a teacher, a gardener, and even an assassin! Indeed, even assassins have their ethics that set the professional from the novice, and that is a fair proof that some professions could be outlawed or unrecognized as organized professions under the law of a certain time and place. For instance, tap-dancing is not recognized as a profession in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but that does not make an American professional tap-dancer unprofessional. Whale hunting is considered a profession in Japan and Norway, but not so in many other countries around the world, yet a professional whale-hunter is a professional never the less.
This leads us to conclude that professionalism is guided by ethics, which could or could not be recognized by the laws of states and communities. Needless to say, a profession that is recognized by a state as such is one that had developed over the years to implant its own standards and ethics within the legal system through syndicates, bureaus or institutions that represent members of the profession. Such laws have a main purpose: forcing professionals to remain professional, and correcting the damage of unprofessional members. Recognition of the state brings the legal system as a main player in organizing the practice of a profession thus transforming ethics into laws.
Journalism is a recognized profession in all modern states, but just like laws differ from one country to the other, so do the laws that guide journalism as a profession. What makes laws mature and grow are free markets. Because with free markets comes freedom of press. And with freedom of press, comes an increase in the public’s interest in knowledge and pubic information, which puts the state interest in conflict with the public interest on what is to be treated as the highest national interest: freedom of speech or national security?
Ever since the fall of communism and the growth of globalization, it has become generally accepted, that within a reasonable frame of freedoms, no matter what the political system (democracy or not) is, journalists are always expected to seek the truth while taking cultural sensitivities into consideration. With it came a general spread of Western capitalism, openness of markets, growth of media transnational corporations, the start of the age of information, and the rise of the religious right. All this made competition an inevitable devil to deal with. In the age of growth of information, in size and quantity, journalists are under so much pressure to maintain a polished image while trying to beat the competition.
When time is the currency, no market trades with ethics.
It is probably the most obvious when television stations rush to compete in coverage. In the 1980s in Canada, television stations bribed hunters to tag their journalists on seal hunts. Why? Because back then Greenpeace was aggressively campaigning against seal hunting in the North Pole and Northern Canada, the public was extremely sympathetic with the defenseless creature and appalled by the footage and images of blood trails over the stretches of ice and snow. Canadian television stations did not care if seals died or not, in fact, their bribery encouraged the practice. It was not about revealing the truth. It was about getting best coverage.
Some twenty years later, like many Western media transnational corporations, CNN was neither allowed, nor could afford, opening multiple offices in the third world. Instead, CNN took advantage of the widespread technology and appealed to the ego of young, third world residents to join an army of unpaid reporters. With that, CNN managed to cover remote events no other station managed to reach, and the price is obviously professionalism in reporting and the ethics and truth behind each report.
In Lebanon, the media generally lack credibility. The public highly questions the motives and political agenda of every report being done, no matter what station and what topic is at heart. For instance, when a station gives a criminal the opportunity to discuss a crime or the ethical motive behind the crime, people automatically tie the criminal to the political side that supports the station, this creating a chain of organized crime in their conscious consisting of a political party, a media institution, and a crime. It is thus the increase in competition and financial gain expected that puts pressure on the institution and the journalist to take unethical decisions.
This is not to say that ethics are set in stone. They are not. In fact, the most they could get to be is to be set in laws, which they are not either. Nevertheless, being a journalist is different than being a jeweler. A journalist cannot weigh all situations with the same ethics-balance. It is in fact a profession that entails adventure and risk and requires intelligence and mature assessment of every situation to be able to reach the truth without sacrificing one’s own life for it or reaching a dead-end. That is known as situational ethics.
I personally appreciate confrontation in journalism. It is with such an attitude that the public gets to know the truth no matter how hard it may be sometimes. The biggest loser of such an approach is the truth-revealer, or perhaps truth-hider, being confronted by a journalist. Audacity has taken place of elegance in journalism ever since the rise of civil rights and crumble of Catholic-media in Europe and North America in the mid twentieth century. It is not hard to respect an audacious journalist and disrespect his guest if the journalist manages to make his guest crack under pressure and reveal the truth, any truth that was previously unknown, even if it was a personal matter of no benefit to the public. You could find a popular journalist known for being able to make his guest cry, or one known to generate scandalous scoops on his show. Or a news journalist that mixes lies with truths and sarcasm to attack a public figure. While I highly appreciate the boldness of contemporary journalism, I still believe that news needs to be entirely true and newsworthy. I believe a journalist needs to put ego aside when performing the job.
But who am I to judge? And why would my opinion matter?
I am one of the millions of viewers, who constitute not only the clients of every media institution, but also the citizens of the world in which these institutions operate, and that is where my rights, and the rights of others, come from. But to put that in legal terms is much harder, because the media laws of one state do not apply to a media channel airing from a different state, or a different continent. And for local media, the laws, if any, happen to be ancient and obsolete in many countries. It is the fast development of technology that took media from the slow traditional to the absolute immediate, making them much more advanced than the laws initially made to guide the profession.
And here a question comes to mind: will the laws ever catch up with the progress of technology?
My answer is simple; they do not need to catch up with technology, they need to catch up with ethics. Ethics change, but not with the speed of technology. What is ethically incorrect in Lebanon is ethically incorrect whether the media is printed-paper, or virtual Internet. It might become ethically correct after a while, but then, it would be ethically correct on all mediums, no matter what the technology is. That is why I think what needs to be regulated is the main contributor to the profession, the journalist.
Journalists, like doctors, need to be judged not just by mistakes of practice but also by mistakes of ethics. They must be trained not to compete for the most selling news, but for the most newsworthy news. And while they achieve all that, they must abide by the basic principles of fairness and truth. All this must be done by boards and panels of professionals that do not have profit and gain in their priorities, but the rights to knowledge and expression as bottom lines.
It will remain possible to regulate the performance and outcome of media institutions, but in the absence of such boards that shape the individuals that are to be called professionals, I find it very difficult to grant professional licensing to journalists. In such conditions, it remains the responsibility of states and laws to protect individual privacy rights and collective cultural rights against a chaotic world of individuals aspiring to become professional journalists.
In states ruled by a fair legal system, the majority of people feel secure because of the trust they put in their laws. There, journalists tend to be less indifferent about breaking the law. In such circumstances when citizens feel under attack, they could resort to the law to regain their rights from vandalistic acts of journalists. Yet, in an open market that we live in today, every profession brings corrupt fruit. And it is easier in a field less organized than one with strict laws. In journalism, bribes and gifts are very common and do not constitute a break of any law, because journalism is freedom of press, and that is protected by the freedom of speech, and thus cannot be considered right or wrong, but essentially an opinion that has the right to be told. It is primarily unprofessional for a journalist to report information or opinion against the facts present. Whether it was a dinner, a drink, a cup of coffee, a family invitation, or a flat Down Town Beirut, I think that any kind of encouragement to form or change an opinion against facts is a form of bribery that journalists must not fall into.
Having said that, I do not think journalists are entitled to sainthood, nor should aspire for it. Journalism is a profession with a high degree of ethics involved, yet remains a profession that should be dealt with as a job. And while some journalists tend not to hold a degree in journalism or have experience in proper press release writing, it is a valid and proper use of talent to utilize ones abilities in writing to fulfill monetary gain. Speech writing and press release drafting is a much technical job that could only be done by those good at it, and it would be a waste of talent not to utilize one’s own talents in that field if one could, for there is much financial gain in it that does not jeopardize professionalism or job ethics and standards.
It is highly probably though that what a journalist writes could be taken by a private industry player or a public interest group as a tool, which requires attention from journalists who do not agree to the content of the speech they are selling. For instance, a speech against abortion written by a journalist who believes in the right to abortion could reflect negatively on the writer’s credibility as being framed as a spokesman of the highest bidder. Yet if the speech content agrees with the opinion of the writer then that is not bad in its own right, since a journalist, as any other citizen, is entitled to his/her personal opinion in matters of life. So, I personally think that whether a speech job is being paid for or done for free is an acceptable personal choice of a journalist, yet must not jeopardize a journalist’s credibility. And since credibility of journalism is synonymous with truth telling and objectivity in presenting facts, it becomes a highly unlikely matter if a journalist decides to get polarized politically in anyway other than patriotism. For, I consider any political devotion to any political entity smaller than a nation to be destructive to the credibility and mission of journalists. Needless to say, campaigning for one political player against another is of such unacceptable polarity, unless one player is a national hero, while the other seeks end of the nation.
Thus with regard to speech or press release writing, a journalist is advised to be cautious and if, in general, credibility is at risk, such outside work must not be taken, nor payments from sources who seek to adopt a journalist as a public figure. A journalist is also not to campaign for a politician against another in local political race.
Due to the sensitive information that journalists could come across, and due to the means at hand, journalists should not disseminate personal information of individuals of society, no matter how publicly in demand this information is or how publicly popular those individuals are. Information being sold or made public must be of public right, not personal in nature. The means of collecting this information must also abide by the norms and laws of state. For instance, information collected under torture is not considered legal or ethically collected. Similarly, information got by phone tapping or secret recording is not ethically acceptable and should not be used in journalism.
In summary, what follows is the list of ethics of journalism debated:
· Broadcast information that you know to be accurate, fair, and complete.
· Tell your audience what you don’t know
· If you make a mistake, tell your audience
· Respect the privacy of others
· Do nothing to misrepresent your identity
· Whenever you disclose information that damages a person’s reputation, disclose the source
· Leave the making of secret recordings to authorized officials
· Respect the right of all individuals to a fair trial
· Promise confidentiality to a source only if you are willing to be jailed to protect the source
· Pay for your own meals, travel, special event tickets, books, and records
· Accept only gifts, admissions, and services that are free of obligation and equally available to the general public
· Avoid outside employment or other activities that might damage your ability to report fairly or might appear to influence your ability to be fair
· Avoid making endorsements of products or institutions
· Guard against arrogance and bad taste in your reports
· Stay out of bushes and dark doorways
· Never break a law to expose a wrong
Sincerely,
Nael Gharzeddine
