National Union of Journalists.

Social and Cultural awareness-

Journalists play important roles in our society. They can shape it through what they write. Their words have the power to influence peoples views of certain events. Journalists will often write about groups of people their readers might have little or no first hand experience of. The way they write about people can affect how their readers feel about them. It is important that journalists do not create biased, unhelpful representations of people, particularly in news reporting. The National Union of Journalists has prepared a range of ethical guidance sheets for it’s members to use when writing about different groups of people.

The NUJ have created guidelines that includes a range of topics of ethics, for when writers write about certain people, It also has a hotline for writers to ring up and get information from for what to write.These are what the guidelines include- Terrorism Race Asylum and Immigration HIV Age Disability Suicide

It is important that journalists have social and cultural awareness because they are constantly writing about a diverse range of people and they can not be writing anything that is going to discriminate people and create a bad image of a certain group of people. That is why the guidelines are set up so journalists know the ethics. Journalists need to have this awareness because they can not be bias and portray a certain group of people as something their. As an example if a journalist was writing about disabled people they would have to be careful about what they wrote about the group of people because they are a small group minority of society and it could be seen as you being biased towards them. That is why a hotline for journalist is created for if they needed to find

Another aspect to look at is how people are represented within news stories. Through this Journalists need to stick to the guidelines to make sure that they do not represent subjects in a bad light. A codes of practice is set of by the NUJ which governs the way that journalists should work. The code has 12 rules members of the union are expected to abide by. The code covers things such as:

-Ensuring that information is...accurate and fair

-Differentiating between fact and opinion

-Not producing material likely to lead to hatred or discrimination on the grounds of a persons age, gender, race, colour, creed, legal status, disability, marital status or sexual orientation.

This is here for Journalists to make sure they do not discriminate the subjects in their writing or they could be sued a lot of money. An example of this would be this newspaper. This front headline of this paper is putting foreign workers in a bad light. It is saying that basically they are steeling our jobs. This is not acceptable and is seen as discriminating foreign workers. Not all of them are the same and some of them are just earning a living. Codes of practice and guidelines are there so the representation of different groups of people are not racially discriminated or represented in a way in which we make negative views of them.

Connotation-In writing language can be a powerful tool in shaping our views. What Journalists write can be very powerful towards peoples views. They can create negative and positive effects on subjects. They need to be careful that they do not do this. Journalists must be careful of the connotations of the work they produce. They need to be careful that their work does not have strong connotations as these could be a big effect for changing someone's views on a subject .A connotation is the idea or feeling that a word creates in addition to it’s usual meaning. For example, the word elderly, refers to someone who is old. Or the word handy caped has the connotations of disabled people. Journalists need to make sure that they do not use words that include connotations. This could create negative connotations which would not be a good aspect to the subject that writing was about. However connotations can create a lot of words like elderly can have connotations of sick, ill, frail, old or OAP can marginalise a person and create a negative representation of them.

This is a news headline for the daily mail. It uses words with very strong connotations like foreign, murderer and rapists. Foreigners is a very emotive subject and the discussion is usually dominated by politicians and newspapers editors rather than foreign people themselves. Even the word foreigners is tinged with negative connotation and is often linked with words such as ‘asylum’, ‘failed’ and ‘bogus’. Then you have words like rapist and murderer which have connotations of crime, illegal, evil, law. These are very strong words to use as a headline. They connotate very negative aspects.

Connotation can influence the response to a piece of writing because if the journalist uses a word like ‘foreigner’ in the same sentence as rapist this is going to connotate a lot of negative words like ‘crime’, ‘disgusting’, ‘evil’ and that is going to influence peoples response to foreign people. By making them think that all foreign people are like this

Alternative Reading-

Journalists write article for a target audience. All journalists will have a audience in mind that they want to target there text at. However they know that not only will the target audience read their work other people who are not in their target audience read their work. These could be people from al sort of groups. You can have different beliefs, different genders, sexual orientation could read your work so a Journalist needs to be careful to think about the different readings of their work and what would be appropriate. Even though they have a target audience they need to make sure that what they write will suite everybody and not be harmful to absolutely anyone and any groups of people.

Stuart Hall considered this when working on Reception Theory. Minority groups, subcultures and victims of crime might have very different interpretations of an article, depending on their experiences.

An example of the alternative reading is a report of immigration. Newspapers must be careful with this as writing about immigration can show different parties in good and bad lights. So newspapers need to be careful to write a balanced and fair story. If the newspaper did not do this they they could put a group in a bad light for example the migrants and this could offend them and not be a fair and balanced pieces of text. Newspaper will try their best to shape a story to fit their audience. Like The Sun do not use as fancy words as the Guardian because it has a target audience of a working class people.

For a journalist to be credible they need to impartial, unprejudiced and unbiased. It is something very important when writing a story. It is important for journalism to be trustworthy and reliable. If it is not, then people will question the credibility of it. If journalists are not seen as credible, then it can diminish the value of the story that they are reporting on. In order for journalism to be credible there are some things that all journalism should be, Objective, accurate, truthful, fair, balanced. Journalists need to write with a political view. Most newspapers have a political agenda. This seems them go from the left to the right of the political spectrum. Stories will be pushed to the front if they suite the papers political agenda. Stories, which don’t suite the political agenda, are sent to the back. This follows whether the paper is on the right wing or the left wing, which I have talked about previously.

Here is a reminder of the wings. Left Wing- the Guardian, the independent, the mirror and the observer.Right wing- the express, the daily mail, the telegraph, the sun.

If journalists have an agenda, then from the start, they will look for evidence to support their ideas and discard evidence, which does not. The work that they produce will then not provide an independent look at an event and instead it will be heavily influenced by the journalist’s ideas.

Accurate-Being credible is really important for a journalist. This is really important as being accurate with their stories is again really important as Journalists need to tell the truth. They need to have the correct facts including, times, dates, and sources. If a journalists did not have the correct facts and they did not have the truth and lied (being accurate) it could land that journalist a lot of trouble. The inaccuracy could cause that person/subject being wrote about a lot of damage and distress. It is already in that persons mind. If this happens you have the likes of the PCC getting involved and they will have to investigate the piece of writing. This could cause you to be breeching terms and conditions.

An example of this was when a Glasgow-based daily newspaper The Herald published a series of reports between 2001 and 2013 about a man charged with and subsequently acquitted of rape. They were not accurate about this story and the PCC had to get involved with this. As what they was writing was not accurate therefore it was causing damage to the man and to his family. In a ruling published today, the PCC upheld the complaint of inaccuracy but also said that the newspaper offered a sufficient remedy in the form of a series of corrections and amendments. The newspaper had to face court and they got sued a lot o money for this mistake that was going on for a long period of time.

Journalists need to truthful. There job is to write about true events and report to the public so the events and writing that they publish needs to be truthful. Journalists are always presenting the truth to people as it is key to being seen as credible. Getting the truth the important because journalists need to get the facts. Writing the truth is writing friction. However if a journalist was to lie and writing a piece of text that was not true and then this could cause them to be in a lot of trouble. They could have serious legal and ethical consequences. However being truthful is not always easy to follow as this rule of being truthful is constantly being bent and broken by different newspapers and magazines. They do this because if something is not as juicy as they want it to be they will twist the storey to create more drama. This then grabs attentions and creates more sales. Magazines often can make allegations about celebs that have no basis in reality. Women gossip magazines often do this like Heat and Star because there readers want to read juicy gossip and drama from their favourite stars

This is an example that I got from The Sun online… Katie Price went through a divorce with her husband peter and there was many stories that were in magazines such as heat and now that were not true. They had over exadurated talks the couple had, had and called them huge arguments and they had stirred up quotes from unknown sources which had been false and had never actually been said. This was not being truthful and they were not presenting the truth to the readers. They did not have huge legal and ethical consequences but they had to apologise to the couple and they were sued money.

This kind of publishing constantly happens to celebrities such as Katie Price. As these are the publications that are the worst for making up lies about celebrities to sound like gossip.

Truthful:

Fair and Balanced:Writing needs to be balanced and fair and for a journalist this needs to be something that they do every time they write about something. They need to make sure that they write about topics with an open-mind and they can’t involve their opinion and they definitely can not discriminate. The NUJ code of ethics specifically satesthat “their journalists should not produce work which is likely to lead to hatred or discrimination.” As journalists need to be balanced and think about the views of all parties involved they can not be balanced.

For a journalist to produce real journalism that is fair and balanced writing should be even handed. It needs to give both sides of the argument and allowing the reader to make their decision based on the facts presented to them. However journalists can overlook this and put in there opinions as they get to carried away and then this becomes discriminating to the other parties that are not being seen in a good light. Some newspapers however break the rules at times due to wanting sales to increase.

I scrolled this internet to look for an example that could give me a scenario that showed fair and balanced. Source – www.foxnews.com

An article on fox talks about how Fox gave Obama his worst press and John McCain his best press of any network during last year’s presidential election? If the reader was into politics they would know this was not fair or balanced. But any other reader would think this was accurate and it is not. Fox had the most balanced coverage of any network during the same campaign? So they should of wrote a balanced and fair press release as any other news associate did. But Fox are having a ongoing by the Centre for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). That both these have given an unfair statement in the news and that they had the facts there but they have been biased and swayed more to one side. Readers are upset because they trust Fox news to give them an accurate report. They have been making very strong worded comments in the comments boxes below the article.

Copyright:Copyright stops journalists copying other journalists work. Writing is very easy to be copied so journalists need to make sure that work isn't plagiarised. Journalists must not break the copyright law. The Copy Act law states that “Copyright shall not be infringed by any fair dealing” with an artistic work “for the purpose of reporting current events … in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical”.( Source fromhttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-acts-and-related-laws )If a journalists was to plagiarise work this could lead to a copyright infringement.

In the case of photos, videos or text, it is a reference to content which is no longer subject to copyright protection either because the copyright term has come to an end all because of the copyright owner has effectively waived any claim to those rights.A young south African man made a about a journalist at a popular magazine who sourced a picture of him from a Facebook profile and published it as part of an article about him. When he complained about the journalist’s use of the photo in the article he was informed that this was perfectly legitimate because “Facebook is a public domain and anyone can access Facebook accounts if the right privacy settings are not installed”.Although it is correct that if a Facebook user wishes to restrict access to his or her content or data, the right way to do that would be to limit other people’s access using Face book's privacy settings, the rest of this statement is not quite accurate. Whether you can use content depends largely on the extent to which that content is protected by copyright law and whether their content is available under a particular license which permits you to use the content in the way that you would like to use it.In this particular case two references were looked at. The first one is the Copyright Act itself. Photographs are categorised as “artistic works”. In addition to describing which rights a person may not exercise because this would constitute an infringement of copyright, the Copyright Act includes a set of general exceptions from copyright infringement.

This is an example of copyright that I got from a source from the internet www.nyccounsel.com/.../who-owns-photos-and-videos-posted-on-facebook.

Children and young persons:

When journalists are dealing with children and young people which they can do regularly they need to go by the editors code of conduct. This shows how they deal with handling children and young persons to make sure they are thinking about their welfare as they are the most vulnerable in our society. The editors codes of practice have rules which are made very clear when need to protecting a Childs/young persons welfare. I went on to the following website where I gathered my sources from in what the codes of practice says…( http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html )“Young people should be free tocomplete their time at school withoutunnecessary intrusion. A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own or another child’s welfare unless a custodialparent or similarly responsible adult consents Pupils must not be approached or photographed at school without the permission of the school authorities.Minors must not be paid for material involving children’s welfare, nor parents or guardians formaterial about their children or wards, unless it is clearly in the child's interest.Editors must not use the fame, notoriety of position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child’s private life.The rules are particularly clear surrounding children and criminal cases but also cover consent for contact with and photographs of children.”An example of these rules in practice is I was watching the news and this became a very good example of children being protected by… A doctor has been jailed for 20+ years for abusing young people and on the news to protect the children they have used actors to tell the public the stories of these abused children to protect their identities for from the public. They have not told the public the names of the children and they have blocked there faces out on the news. I think this is a really good example of the Editors Codes of Practice.

Confidentiality:

Confidentiality is something that is very important in Journalism as some sources may not want to published or some people may not want to be made public which is understandable when they could be in trouble with the law or in the public eye. Journalists need to be smart and make sure that they keep them confidential and keep what they say confidential. Sometimes journalists will speak to people who may have broken the law or journalists will attend illegal events a part of investigation. So speaking to potential sources they need to keep there identity confidential as this could endangered their life's. Protection is there to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources. Sometimes in magazines and newspaper when they talk about something someone has said about someone they will put “unknown source” this is to keep that person confidential.

A reliable source from http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html which is the Editors Codes of Practice states that “journalists have a moral obligation to protect confidential sources of information” This is what journalists must follow and they can as the Editors Codes of practice have made this clear in their principles.

Channel four do a lot of very hard hitting documentaries. This includes illegal activities that people get involved in. They go in with these activities and film them and a lot of the time to get the story they make confidential agreements with the people involved in these documentaries. They do this by blurring out faces and keeping their names off camera. They do not reveal the identities of these people. Recently a documentary about women in strip clubs and the kept some of the women's identities protected by not naming them or showing their faces on camera. As obviously they did want anyone to see them on there.

This is picture from Google images which is from a Channel 4 documentary about death row America to keep the source confidential they have blurred out his face in the interview.

Official Secrets:As much as this sounds like some secret MI6 element. Do not get that excited as it really is not. This is an Act of the law that aims to protects state secrets and national security. Well I suppose it could be something mission impossible like? The official secrets act needs to be signed and this is very common for journalists to do. This the involves access to secrets after a period of employment. However this act has been used to try and get journalists to try and reveal sources this has been done before if authority seem to believe that they are a matter of national security.

This comes into place with scandals that have happened previously with journalists. Breeching the act is a serious offence. I found a source online from The Telegraph newspaper and they wrote about the guardian being involved with the phone hacking and the official secrets act. This showed a good example about what this act is about.

‘The phone hacking scandal was in conjunction with the official secrets act. The metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential

sources about the phone-hacking scandal. They are trying to protect the information that was sourced from Milly Dowlers phone. This information was breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick

Davies revealed the hacking of this women's phone. As of this they breeched the Official Secrets Act and are facing court.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8778216/Phone-Hacking-Met-admits-it-was-wrong-to-use-Official-Secrets-Act-against-Guardian.html

This is a very reliable source as it is a newspaper website and it shows what happens when you breech this act.

Ethical:

Ethical responsibilities are very important for journalists. They have to be considered when going about their work because ethical issues are what journalists sometimes write about. Principles need to followed in this area of work as some of the writing needs to be written fairly. The media must follow these principles to create ethical writing. In order to supervise these principles, self-regulatory bodies or mechanisms must be set up comprising publishers, journalists, media users' associations, experts from the academic world and judges; they will be responsible for issuing resolutions on respect for ethical precepts in journalism, with prior commitment on the part of the media to publish the relevant resolutions. This will help the citizen, who has the right to information, to pass either positive or negative judgment on the journalist's work and credibility.

COPE are a committee for publication ethics. They are sent cases of publication work and then make sure they are following the ethic principles in publication. COPE provides advice to editors and publishers on all aspects of publication ethics. http://publicationethics.org/about

A case they received recently was about a manuscript that look like it had been copyrighted or either that or it was really poorly written. They are ongoing looking into this because it is not ethical to copy someone else's work. The case was from 2014 and is still on going.

Codes of Practice:

NUJ have a Editors codes of practice and I have talked about this throughout my presentation. The Editors codes of practice gives the guide lines to journalists. These are the guideline for writing their work and how they should write. These were set up so journalists have rules to follow so no one gets damaged by their writing or no body gets there private lives written about etc… Having the set of rules give journalists a set of standards to go by their work. It’s to make sure nothing goes wrong.

The industry which journalists are working in self-regulates these codes of practice. The industry counts on these to make sure publication writing is ethical and does not cause anyone damage that they want to sue. As in the publication industry a single sentence and someone could take it the wrong way and sue the publication for thousands so sticking by these codes prevents this from happening.

If someone feels that a journalist/newspaper/magazine has acted inappropriately or written something that is out of order then they can complain to the independent press standards orginisation. (IPSO)

These are the NUJ journalist rules. They are on the NUJ site and journalists can download a codes of practice package. They get all the rules and all the information they need. Source-https://www.nuj.org.uk/about/nuj-code/

Privacy:Privacy is something that is very important especially to people that the journalists are targeting. This is because these people have the right to have their privacy which is really important to people such as celebrities who have there life in the public eye. They need to have privacy and they have the right not. That is why celebrities have orders that are placed like a gag order.

This is something that defiantly needs a code and needs to be on the editors codes of practice and following this the editors codes of practice treats this as something serious and they regulate this with very strict codes. This is to make sure a journalist does not get into trouble on the( http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html ) PCC website which I find a trusted and reliable sourced and retrieved the code for privacy.

“Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications.Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent. Account will be taken of the complainant's own public disclosures of information.It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent.”

Privacy gets brought up a lot because it is something that it constantly getting crossed by journalists. Especially with celebrities are they are targets for stories getting told about them about there life outside their job. An example of privacy getting crossed when it comes down to journalists and celebrities is the phone hacking scandal that happened in 2012. Many celebrities phone were hacked such as Callum Best, Prince Harry, Katie Price and many more. There private lives were made public and they had there privacy betrayed. The public found out very damaging stories about these people. A source from the internet ‘the guardian’ wrote an article on all 300 high profiled people that got their phones hacked. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/29/leveson-inquiry-list-victims-phone-hacking. This all happened because of journalists thinking all about the public interest and the interest of the public.

Intrusion:

Intrusion is something journalists are seen to do a lot as they are jumping into peoples personal lives to retrieve stories and find out elements. So intrusion is one of the codes in the editors codes of practice to keep it under control. On the editors codes of practice website it shows you what they say about intrusion and what journalists should stand by. http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html

“Journalists can not get involved In cases involving personal grief or shock,enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively. This should not restrict the right to report legal proceedings, such as inquests.It also talks about the rules with journalists reporting about suicide. ‘When reporting suicide, care should betaken to avoid excessive detail about the method used’ They need to be careful because this is a very sensitive subject. NUJ Code of Conduct also covers intrusionDoes nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest.”

This website is a reliable source as it an established PCC website.

A example of this was Chris Hoy and the death of his uncle he had his private life intruded when a reporter went undercover and went to the funeral in hope to get a story. He went round and sneakily interview the mourners. It was then un covered that the reporter went to the funeral after a story was published and he had to apologise to the family. This was a big deal as he breeched the codes of practice.

Harassment:With harassment the editors code and practice is very clear as it something quite serious that they need to make sure they have monitored it. I went on the Editors Code of practice website which was a reliable source to find out exactly what they said about harassment. Source- http://www.pcc.org.uk/cop/practice.html

The Editors Code of Practice is very clear about harassment. It states...“Journalists must not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit. They must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist; nor remain on their property when asked to leave and must not follow them. If requested, they must identify themselves and whom they represent. Editors must ensure these principles are observed by those working for them and take care not to use non-compliant material from other sources.”

Journalists need to find the line between harassing someone for a story and just genuinely trying to get information for a story. This is crossed a lot because the line is very fine and some journalists will not know when to stop. They always must stop contacting a person once ask if they carry on then they are breaking laws and this is classed as harassment. Celebrities are most common to get harass by journalists as journalists are constantly trying to find stories about there life's which usually revolves around the ‘public interest.’

A celebrity that recently has been harassed is Susan Boyle. A source from the internet newspaper website ‘ London evening standard’ stated “Richard Peppiatt told the Leveson inquiry into press standards that he was sorry for harassing the singer by chasing her across Scotland for a week.” So as the Journalist chased the singer he then had to apologies as this comes under the harassment of the editors code and practice.