EYE ON ETHICS

Mr. Dixit is the author of Dateline Earth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered, and the editor of the Nepali Timesnewspaper in Kathmandu.
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Worldwide, there is a blurring of the line between news and entertainment and an ambiguity about Internet-driven content. Does this change the role of journalism and of journalists?

Is there any point training college students in mass communication if they are going to be sucked up by a money-driven mass media vacuum cleaner? Does journalism expand the public space when anyone can be a reporter on the Internet, or does it fragment readership and erode credibility?

There are basic values like press freedom that need to be protected, of course. Most journalists take press freedom for granted, not realizing what they had until they lose it. Press freedom is like a rubber band, you have to stretch it to make it work. If the media doesn’t use its constitutionally-guaranteed rights, it usually atrophies.

That is why we see that even in countries with long traditions of free press and democracy, over-commercialized media undermine democracy itself by wasting the freedom to do in-depth meaningful journalism. Journalists in these countries have to deal with a much more formidable enemy than government censorship: the censorship by exclusion that is the result of over-commercialization of media.

Such self-censorship is much more insidious because it happens in countries where the press is still supposed to be free, and the readers and viewers are anesthetized by escapist entertainment, celebrity and glamor coverage. More than half the members of the journalism class I polled recently wanted to be television news presenters. The showbiz nature of media has already infected the minds of students even before they enroll.

In Nepal we fought a royal dictatorship in 2005 to rescue press freedom. We defied draconian censorship and found ways to circumvent controls. Across the world, there are plenty of examples of courageous journalists who keep the flame of freedom burning by pushing the media to their limits, and at considerable risk to themselves.

No ethics without freedom

There is no need to talk about media ethics if there is no press freedom. It is the first value that we must struggle to preserve.

Press freedom is not something that can be partially guaranteed: one can’t be half-free. But who is going to watch the watchdogs? The regulation of a free press can only come from an internally-generated discourse on the codes of conduct and the ombudsman role of a Press Council.

Then and only then can we go into the other values that journalists must nurture. How do we rescue journalism and revive its role in safeguarding democracy? How do we get regulators to make a distinction between selling newspapers and selling shampoo? Gatekeepers often say they are giving the public what the public wants. But do they really know what the public wants? Or needs?

There is a debate about whether the role of the media is different in countries at various levels of economic development. How can the rules for journalists be the same in Norway and Nepal? They ask.

True, the focus may have to be different in poor countries. Journalists may need to ask themselves why they are in the profession, and after that introspection come to the conclusion that it is to be a vital part of the process that makes democracy deliver development. After that everything else falls into place and we will see that press freedom is a universal value, whether in Oslo or in Kathmandu.

In the developing world, however, we desperately need to re-invent news content and protect it from the distortions of commercialism. To do that we need to change the way we teach journalism in media schools.

What is journalism for?

We have to start by asking ourselves what journalism is for. Why are we in this business? What motivates us to be reporters? Where do we get our inspiration? Only by asking these questions can we come to the only genuine answer, which must be to strive for social justice, equality and better government so that our citizens can have better living standards.

Half the children in South Asia go to bed hungry every night, but the covers of our news magazines are about weight loss parlors.

Maternal mortality in parts of Nepal is nearly at sub-Saharan levels, but we are obsessed with politics. Hundreds of cotton farmers in India commit suicide every year because of indebtedness, but the media don’t want to cover it because depressing news puts off advertisers. Reading the region’s newspapers, you would be hard-pressed to find coverage of these slow emergencies.

The trouble begins with what we define as news. For anything to make it to the TV news, a lot of rich people have to die suddenly, spectacularly and with good visuals. So, even if thousands of children die of diarrheal dehydration every year it is not news because they are poor and they die silently, separately, and scattered in homes across the country.

This is what our journalism schools should be doing. We must start to redefine what news is and then show young aspiring reporters how to cover it well. And to do that we have to teach them to have commitment and communications skills.

They need a commitment not just to the profession but to one’s society and a conviction that media can be a catalyst for reform and change. You can have the best headline writer, the young journalist may write brilliant captions but without commitment and a sense of indignation at injustice and deprivation it can all be a bit of a waste.

Then of course, there is the craft of journalism. Here, the emphasis should be on the tools of good communications: to understand the medium and to use it well. At the end of four years of journalism school, graduates may know how to communicate, but if they don’t know what to communicate, those four years may have been wasted.