Media Professionalism and Training by Sarah Niblock

Author:Sarah Niblock [Niblock, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Reference, Media Studies, Sociology
ISBN: 9781137368416
Google: DMW9CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2013-12-13T04:18:47+00:00

To whom are journalists accountable?

A fundamental place to begin any discussion around accountability is to reflect on who journalists are responsible to. It is no easy question for any paid reporter to answer and opinions vary. Typically, we might think of the following groups as being the main recipients or beneficiaries of journalists’ work:

1 Their audiences

2 The public interest

3 Fellow journalists

4 Employers

In the first instance, journalists have a remit to deliver content that meets their audience’s expectations. If they do not meet demand, viewers, listeners, readers and surfers will turn away from the outlet. As such, there is a drive for consistency in tone and in editorial judgement over the selection of stories, angles, pictures and vocabulary. The choice of sources will also tend to reflect the priorities of the readers the outlet is seeking to target in order to engage them. As all news outlets publish to the Web, they are ploughing resources and know-how into interactively so as to build communities of news consumers. Newsrooms wish to be seen as in conversation with their audiences, not merely delivering content in a one-way route.

But audience expectations and audience needs are different things. Most journalists and indeed news organizations would say that their primary responsibility is to serve the public interest. Gans’ (1980, pp. 234–5) study discovered that journalists see themselves as professionals working for a predominantly lay clientele, the audience, who the journalists give what they need rather than what it wants. For example, the BBC College of Training states on its website:

Being a journalist in any news organisation carries with it a responsibility to the public – both to your audiences and to the public more broadly.

Journalism that isn’t accountable to the public is no more than entertainment.5

This is little different from what the US-based National Association of Citizen Journalists says about its approach:

NACJ membership and training empowers citizen journalists for the exciting task of discovering, writing and reporting news with a level of professionalism that was once the standard in major media outlets.6

Journalists are also encouraged to be accountable to their fellow professionals. By upholding high standards, especially levels of accuracy, journalists are ideally meant to preserve the occupation’s status in the eyes of the public and officialdom so as to remain a credible watchdog for democracy. Sloppy grammar, failure to check facts and a tendency to break ethical and legal codes has a knock-on effect on all journalists, not just the perpetrator. This has been proven to be the case in the UK local media in the wake of phone hacking by national journalists. Senior newsroom personnel told the 2011 Society of Editors conference that regular sources and even official bodies such as the police were now reluctant or resistant interviewees over fears that journalists of any sort cannot be trusted.7

Accountability to employers operates at the fundamental level of professional propriety in terms of adhering to a contract. But a journalist is also accountable to the symbolic role of the media as the Fourth Estate, resisting any influence from outsiders.

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