Good Journalism

It has been stated ad nauseum that the narratives that we are told in the West by politicians and cultural elites to help us make sense of the world are breaking apart. The ‘rules-based world order’ has evaporated and has been replaced with ‘might is right’ directives. Western liberalism, as argued in the previous issue of Critical Muslim, has all but collapsed. The resulting vacuum has been filled by malicious actors taking advantage of these vertiginous circumstances to further the post-truth agenda. In his 2016 documentary, Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis, discusses the influence of the relatively obscure Russian political strategist Vladislav Surkov. The politician and businessman, a Kremlin insider, drew on subversive public relations tactics to sustain Putin’s hold on power. These resembled a form of Jackson Pollock inspired conceptual cum-avant-garde high artistry, curating and propagating multiple conflicting political and media messages. The effect was to generate a perpetual ‘fog of war’ that shrouds everything. The goal was to lessen the hold, or even the desirability, of discovering the truth behind any official media and government narratives. The tactics of diminishing the truth behind tissues of fabrications to make the truth appear like another consumer simulacrum was subsequently mastered by the US President, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

No professions or industries have been immune to these disorientating developments. None more so than journalism and, by extension, the mainstream media industry. A number of interesting questions arise. What are the responsibilities of journalists in the post-truth age? Are the rise of social media influencers and citizenship journalism presents an acute challenge to, what is often referred to as, the ‘legacy media’? Or, is it perhaps ademocratic challenge, as many human rights organisations support networks of citizenship journalists in war zones? Are there any professional standards still operating in an industry that is supposed to be underpinned and checked by certain ethical principles? Does generative AI make the journalist’s lot easier? Or does it only serve to reinforce deeply held biases and drown us in an endless plethora of pernicious deepfakes, clickbait, and fake news?

Eric Wishart, Ethics Editor of AgenceFrance-Presse (AFP, the international news agency) sets out to answer these questions. His guide for early career journalists with a concern for adhering to ethical principles is one of the very few recent books written on the ethics of journalism. One of the pressing reasons for Wishart’s publication — which draws on a collation of ethical frameworks and guides produced by different media agencies — is to reestablish the integrity of a profession that has come under sustained attack from all sides: the public that has lost almost all trust, authoritarian regimes, Left and Right of the political spectrum, forcing it to become their PR outlets.

Many of the values that he is keen to uphold in the profession are, of course, decent and necessary. But they may appear somewhat quaint and old-fashionedin a world in which the constant onslaught of misinformation is very real. Perhaps, more than anything, this reflects the road we have travelled down to get to this point. The untruths or ‘fake news’is exactly what sound journalism issupposed to expose. Investigative and news journalism ought to present well-researched and evidenced, corroborated details, and leaves them hanging in the court of public opinion for well-informed citizens to make the final judgement. That is, the ultimate judgement should be left to a Habermas public sphere, where individuals come to have a rational and critical debates about important issues of our time.

The path to rebuilding trust between the press and the demos must go through the deontological – duty based – ethics that Wishart professes. Unsurprisingly, his writing is replete with the language of duty, care, responsibility, integrity, and neutrality. There is a sense that young journalists wishing to gain a foothold in the industry need to practice this responsible stewardship of the profession, to revolutionise it — in the conventional sense of revisiting the original principles that constitute the foundations of good journalism.

Much of the tenor also implicitly evokes the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire’s notion of teaching as an ‘ontological vocation’. In his original rendering, this meant that pedagogy could assist in supporting others to reimagine their own social reality. In other words, teaching can upend uncontested assumptions about how the world operates, allowing us to see a new world of present and future possibilities. Good journalism can undertake a similar task, Wishart suggest, penetrating into the darkness of corruption, falsehoods, scandal, and the definitive issues of our time in order to empower and inform a media hungry public. The investigative journalists Carl Burnstein and Bob Woodward’s uncovering of the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post can be considered the textbook example of this. The profession’s tussle with misinformation and conspiracy theories (and not merely acting as a means to amplify them) is of the utmost importance as a vocational mission.

One of the principles Wishart advances, alongside ensuring accurate and fairness in reporting, and balance in coverage, is the imperative for journalists to seek the truth in the story that they are covering. The seemingly Platonic language here invokes a very traditional view of journalism as the profession that works in the public interest to hold those in power to account. It does seem as though Wishart is stating the obvious. But given the media control of vested interests, as well as unscrupulous upstarts wearing the garbs of anti-establishment insurgency, emphasizing that the function of journalism is to speak truth to power is an imperative. In the tumultuous aftermath of the UK phone hacking scandal and the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press, the sad necessity to repeat this again and again is all too evident. Yet, the message has not been received. The unabated streams of Islamophobia and unbalanced reporting on Palestine-Israel not just from right-wing broadcasters such as GB News but also from mainstream outlets like the BBC, in addition to the right-wing print press, from the Daily Telegraph to The Express, clearly suggests that ethics has all but vaporized. The chasm in confidence is particularly deep amongst minority communities; Muslims being the favoured targets of misreporting and demonisation in the British press. This may be business as usual in a context in which the business model itself is increasingly under threat of becoming bust.

Conversely, Wishart is content just to push the stance that all journalists should stop to carefully consider whether they have the public interest at heart in pursuing a story. Reflexivity is paramount. Not simply reflecting on the story being covered but the impact that the reporting makes on the story itself. A corollary of this is the salience of going out of your way to follow all stories to their natural conclusion and not being tempted into dropping it once the sensationalism has evaporated. Humane and empathetic reporting, Wishart argues, minimises the harm to the public (echoing the UN principle of ‘do no harm’), including victims of crime and vulnerable people. Thus, the obligation to bring marginalised communities into the stories in ways that enhance their agency and enables them to comment as spokespeople of various issues and not only on the topics that directly affect them. Needless to say, this also touches on the lack of diversity in the industry as a whole; something that crucially shapes editorial decision making.

What complicates the picture of reinstituting good journalism is the multiplicity and radical heterogeneity of publicsthat exist in the contemporary times. There has been fracture and fragmentation in the media landscape. The lines have been blurred between journalism and simple documentation of and commentary on events through modern communications technology, such as through smart phones. This speaks of a profession very much in flux. The spate of well know print newspapers, such as the UK’s The Independent, going under and resurfacing as online shadows of their former selves is a case in point. It is something that Wishart is all too aware of. He constantly suggests the need for standards in print and online journalism to be mirrored in the realm of social media.

In distinguishing the practices of excellence within journalism, the epistemology — in philosophical parlance — behind journalist practice is of key concern. Or, to put it in a more anodyne manner, what is strongly advocated is adherence to procedures for verifying knowledge behind reporting. The usual method of doing this, seeking several sources and reliable witnesses, constitutes the basics of professional practice. Nonetheless, where generative AI poses a risk by generating précis with questionable attributions is when every journalist shows their true worth by conducting diligent fact checking and effective background research. Alongside this, and more interestingly, Wishart argues for framing and tonality that deploy the American linguistic and philosopher George Lakoff’s ‘truth sandwich’. It is a technique that circumvents the simple echoing or reproduction of falsehoods. The idea is to surround an outrageous statement designed to grab headlines from a prominent public figure with the facts of the matter. It is a cognitive frame that disarms the rhetorical potency of the original statement to fan the flames of disinformation, safely ensconcing it in the evidence. Techniques such as this should be standard practice. But these constructions appear for the most part inthe guise of firefighting. Typically, in responseto controversial statements directly broadcast to followers. For instance, via platforms that circumnavigate the mainstream media, such as Elon Musk’s ‘X’ and Donald Trump’s preferred channel, the crudely and very ironically named, Truth Social.

The sections of the book that overlap with some very raw, live events, concern reporting during conflicts and war, and balance, impartiality and fairness. Wishart reiterates the importance of avoiding double standards, although stays clear of mentioning Palestine-Israel. His basic principle stresses the importance of reporting overseas events in the same manner as domestic ones, not diminishing the dignity of people overseas in a way that would not occur in the national context. This applies in cases of war and conflict, as well as instances where there is coverage of vulnerable communities.

However, when speaking of instances of war and conflict, one cannot, as Wishart does, gloss over Israel’s actions in Palestine. How media outlets have covered the horrifying events unfolding in the Middle East has much to tell us about the ethics of journalism. In the climate of ever rampant Islamophobia in the West, civil society organisations like the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM)havebeen instrumental in documenting media misrepresentation of Muslims in the British Press.

CfMM exposes media biases in a bid to both educate and hold guilty parties accountable, with the aim of raising editorial standards. The Centre’s report, BBC on Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standards is an absolute tour de force of meticulous analysis and sustained scrutiny of news coverage across a period of year in the aftermath of 7 October 2023. Within it, the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese — who has been particularly outspoken on the treatment the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state — provides a sobering endorsement: ‘most mainstream media have failed in their basic duty: they have largely manufactured consent, enabling Genocide in real time’.

The BBC’s lack of impartiality, the role it has played in ‘manufacturing consent’ through the creation of a lopsided ‘moral universe’, comes under the spotlight. The disposability of Palestinian lives — invoking Stalin’s chilling remark that one death is a tragedy while a million deaths are a mere statistic — and the ‘marginalisation of their suffering’ underscores the grotesque lack of impartiality and balance. To add to this grim predicament, international journalists have been barred by the Israeli regime from entering Gaza; Palestinian reporters have had to carry out live reporting, documenting their own demise for the world to see. One tragic case comes to mind. The Palestinian, Al-Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat poignantly left a letter to be published in the event of his death (he was killed by an Israeli airstrike). His remarkable testament can be read as a vindication of Wishart’s argument that good journalism is ultimately at its heart an uncovering of the truth despite many who conspire to hide it. In the letter, Shabat reflects on his dedication to reporting the ‘horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.’ Shabat was killed by an Israeli airstrike, and his death was widely reported by the press in the Middle East. But CfMM has shown that the death of less than a fifth of journalists killed in Gaza have been covered by the BBC. This is a significant failure to represent the full extent of the sacrifices made to capture gross violations of human rights.

The varying standards in reporting across different conflict zones sharply accentuates the point on BBC impartiality. The Ukraine-Russia war has received fuller reporting with discussion of the broad range of facts, in contrast to the decontextualisation that suffuses coverage of Palestine. The history of the Palestinian people, their cause and struggles, is very rarely done any justice by news agencies. In this flow of ahistorical content from media broadcasts, Palestine-Israel is presented as a conflict of equivalence, which does nothing to inform the public’s views on such issues.

With this entrenchment of double standards as seemingly intentional policy, we see reporting techniques such as the ‘truth sandwich’ have been wholly cast aside. Wishart makes the argument that fair balance in journalism does not crudely mean giving the oxygen of publicity to a preposterous, discredited opposing view, what he labels it ‘false balance’. For example, scientifically evidenced facts on climate change cannot be balanced by absurdities of climate deniers, or giving a platform to bigoted views that are designed to cause harmrather than further the debate. However, the purported balance and neutrality observed by the mainstream media, as pointed out by the Palestine Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, has only served as a means to conceal oppression and injustice.

The imbalance is striking. On the BBC alone, Israelis are more than twice as likely to be interviewed compared to their Palestinian counterparts. One daresay that the BBC’s editorial standards fall far short of honouring Wishart’s ethical principles. Extreme commentators that routinely spout dehumanising rhetoric in relation to Palestinians are given plenty of airtime. The Times columnist Melanie Philips has been a regular feature of political panel shows such as BBC Question Time. She has gleefully seized on such opportunities to deny the existence of the Palestinian people and to circulate tired and tawdry Islamophobic tropes. Other polemicists such as the neoconservative Douglas Murray have been given prominent platforms on news programmes such as Newsnight. He has mused openly, in his usual egregious manner, that Israel, ‘will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip...It could be a good time to do it.’

This in turn raises another contentious issue. The terminology and language deployed in BBC reports on Palestine have sought to limit the responsibility behind Israeli actions that have resulted in Palestinian deaths. Palestinians killed by Israeli military operations are cast as passive victims of an anonymous force. Inversely, the episodes of Palestinian attacks have been described more readily as ‘barbaric’, as ‘massacres’, acts of terrorism, or with a similarly charged rubric. The attribution of malign intent is unmistakable. The death of Israelis at the hands of Palestinians have been accompanied with predictably emotive verbiage. There has been a ‘one-sided humanisation’ in operation here, whereby editorial decisions have only reinforced the lack of dignity granted to Palestinian victims of Israeli state aggression and violence.

The ethical journalist, of the variety that Wishart would approve, ought to fairly record the extent of the harm that conflict causes. In the cases of those people and communities who are already greatly marginalised in political discourse, this becomes even more of a duty. Both the magnitude of harm meted out to the Palestinian people, and the unspeakable order of the destruction of the Gaza Strip, has tested the inclinations of the mainstream media and journalists as a class.Whether journalists aspire to an ontological vocation, to liberate us from preconceptions and the worst of our prejudices, is the fundamental question that follows from this.

Wishart’s answer to the question of the liberatory power of journalism is to foreground the strong relational ethics inherent to good journalism. It is praiseworthy that the journalistic practices he advances puts concern for people before, for instance, satisfying editorial teams’ obsession with being the first to break a story, or prioritise commercial purposes.This is notable in his chapter on climate change, where journalism can play a critical role in cutting through the lazy narratives; the ‘war on woke’ rhetoric being a prime target. The ethical journalist is obliged to convey the scale of the challenge but also centre positive stories and initiatives that break up the gloom that can induce severe anxiety or indifference in the public.An interesting point to note is thatWishart wants ordinary citizens to be able to differentiate between a good ethical and a bad morally dubious journalist. So he provide study exercises at the end of each section, designed to getting the reader to consciously think about people- centred journalism.The scenarios that he sets up very effectively stimulates the reader into actively ruminating on who may be harmed by a news report, what may undermine credibility in reporting,and what responsibilities need to be discharged in fulfilment of ethical obligations.

Overall, what stays with you after reading Journalism Ethics is how integral and essential good journalism is for preventing society’s slide into authoritarianism and autocracy. This is sometimes taken for granted or said somewhat glibly, but the seriousness of this sentiment cannot be made understated. Even so, we, somewhat despairingly, get a sense of how far away the current journalism of ‘legacy media’ is from embedding Wishart’s ethical principles. This, after all, is a time in which traditional forms of media are being vigorously contested or coopted for political agendas. Undoubtedly, the mainstream media has been complicit in amplifying harm to already marginalised communities. It has hidden itself behind so-called balance and neutrality to aid and abet injustice, enabling it to thrive unchecked. Now it is in danger, once the corporations and ‘tech bros’ take over completely, of becoming the soapboxes and megaphones of oligarchs to vent their deranged worldviews. Thus, the enormous and very necessary task — the ontological vocation undertaken by Wishart — of strengthening and developing ethical frameworks in journalism. It is the return to ethics as first principles that will in the end save the profession; and, with it, society itself.