EYE ON ETHICS

The article was first posted on UPI Asia Online last May 5.
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NAKHONRATCHASIMA, Thailand– Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi warned the country’s media on Friday that they need to cooperate, be responsible and ethical. Seeming to mimic a wizened statesman, he enjoined Malaysia’s media to understand the subjects they report on, to earn public respect, and to convey correct reports to the public. So far, so good — in principle.

Maybe it was like Thailand’s Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, who in a February 2008 interview with Al-Jazeera condescended at the end of the interview to tell the better-informed female reporter, “Next time, you should do your homework.”

So the leaders of two Southeast Asia neighbors somehow feel up to giving the media guidelines on how to be reputable, helpful, correct and ethical. It’s a shame that they don’t always adhere to the same guidelines themselves, especially in Samak’s case. With a memory that doesn’t allow him to recall his part in the October 1976 massacre where some four dozen pro-democracy protestors were killed, and to add insult to injury, foolishly insists “only one unlucky guy was killed” in the state-incited bloodbath, Samak is hardly the one to advise anyone on accuracy in reporting, being ethical or accurate.

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Mr. Alam is Lahore bureau chief of the news magazine The Herald.
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A middle-level official working at the Lahore office of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency has been suspended for ‘leaking’ a story to the media. A television reporter conned him to get the video film of a suicide attack on his agency’s local office on March 11, 2007 – an act that subsequently created huge broadcast waves across Pakistan and well beyond it, but also threatened the job of its ‘source’.

The reporter’s boss does not want to discuss the moral predicament the case poses: Is it ethical to get a news story even if it means endangering other people’s lives and livelihood? But he is quick to point out that at least a couple of other news channels in Pakistan did not acknowledge his channel as the source when they also ran the attack video some hours later.

Similar incidents are not uncommon in the world of cutthroat competition the electronic media in Pakistan has become of late. In the rush to break the news faster and earlier than the rest, television reporters seem to have precious little time to waste on bothering about the ethical implications of their assignments.

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Prof. Haque teaches Agril.Extension, Apllied & Agricultural Journalism at Shere-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Government-sponsored ethics. Ethics is a matter of voluntary compliance, but some governments have issued their own codes of ethics, or demand that journalists comply with their concept of ethical journalism. The following piece, adapted from Bangladesh’s The New Nation on Feb. 21, 2008, assumes that that country’s government is well within its rights to expect compliance with its views on ethical journalism. Your views and comments would be welcome.

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Recently I read an apology from the editor of a reputable English daily for publishing an article in that newspaper which was malicious, sweeping, and full of innuendos and few facts.

I was glad to see the editor’s goodwill and courage to admit a mistake and to express his regret for it. He mentioned three reasons why he apologized. While stating his third purpose, he raised a core ethical question–whether a columnist has the right to malign individuals, families or groups without any proof.

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