Slides and links on mass communication codes of ethics

#ethicssymposium “our sense of right and wrong changes in other parts of life” so why not journo? @stevebuttry asks pic.twitter.com/cPZpe1jzNV

— Phil Tenser (@pstenser) March 14, 2014

I taught a class today in professional codes of ethics for various media careers.

A central point of the class was to discuss whether and why ethics codes should be updated: How much do they present timeless principles and how much should they provide specific guidance relevant to today’s ethical situations and challenges?

I won’t review all the points I made here, but I cited these ethics codes (or principles):

• Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics
• The Institute for Advertising Ethics’ Principles and Practices for Advertising Ethics
• The Accountable Journalism database of journalism ethics codes
• Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics
• Poynter Institute’s Guiding Principles for the Journalist
• Radio Television Digital News Association Code of Ethics
• The Online News Association’s Build Your Own Ethics Code project

I also cited these narrower but more detailed examinations of slices of journalism ethics, all of them completed in the past few years:

• Rules of the Road
• Verification Handbook
• Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting
• Telling the Truth and Nothing But

We discussed native advertising, product placement as efforts to blur the lines between advertising and news or entertainment, including the Cities Energized paid post in the New York Times.

I also cited blog posts by Tom Rosenstiel and Tim McGuire about the relative merits of independence and transparency as core principles of journalism ethics.

I also cited Bob Steele‘s 10 questions to make ethical decisions as advice that is as helpful making ethical decisions today as when he first published them in 2002.

I made points covered in more detail in these earlier blog posts:

• Upholding and updating journalism ethics: My Colorado keynote
• ONA project provides helpful, detailed ethics advice
• Journalists’ code of ethics: time for an update?
• New SPJ Code of Ethics: an improvement but a disappointment
• New Guiding Principles for Journalists a big step forward (but they neglect linking)
• Journalists need to use links to show our work
• Other journalists correct a story the New York Times stubbornly refuses to correct
• Applause to the New York Times for effective use of an on-the-record source
• New York Times story based on unnamed sources: 2 big corrections
• New York Times frequently violates its attribution standards
• Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism wasn’t ‘low-level;’ no one’s is

These were the slides I used in the class:

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Links and slides for Excellence in Journalism ethics discussion

Update: The final draft of the code update was revised again yesterday. I like what I’ve heard about the changes, but I haven’t analyzed it yet.

I will be leading a session at the Excellence in Journalism conference today about the broader ethics discussion in journalism.

At the EIJ conference, the Society of Professional Journalists will vote on adoption of a new ethics code. Here is the latest draft of the code, though it could be amended in floor debate today. My criticism of the revision stands, and I won’t belabor it either in this post or in my EIJ session.

Other ethics initiatives I will discuss include:

Poynter’s Guiding Principles

The new Poynter Guiding Principles for the Journalist, published in the 2013 book, The New Ethics of Journalism, edited by Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel. I blogged in 2012 from a Poynter event to discuss updating the Guiding Principles, then blogged again with suggestions for the new principles and in 2013 with praise and criticism for the completed guidelines. Among other changes, the guiding principles changed two of the three core values from the original Guiding Principles, authored by Bob Steele in the early 1990s. The 1990s principles were organized around the values of truthfulness, independence and minimizing harm. Now the core values are truthfulness, transparency and community. The 1990s SPJ Code and Guiding Principles were strongly similar, with SPJ using the same three core values, plus accountability (Bob dealt with accountability in his elaboration on the other values). In the final draft of the SPJ update, the core values are unchanged, except that transparency is paired with accountability in the last section.

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