Media regulation

The following article was published online by Business Day. Professor Jane Duncan from Rhodes University has a go at Monday’s Business Day editorial ‘Media needs an independent fix’. Peter Bruce responds.

Your editorial of 11 July (‘Media needs an independent fix’) refers. I disagree with your argument that for a press regulatory system to work, ‘there should be no journalists or publishers anywhere near its structures’, and it should rather be run by retired judges.

In making this argument, you betray a profound misunderstanding of what press self-regulation is about. Many of the problems we have in the press do not flow from the fact that we have too much journalistic self-regulation; they flow from the fact that we have too little of it.

The concept of self-regulation is sound. Self-regulation is about peer review. It recognises that journalists are in the best position to judge other journalists, as they are least likely of all the power holders in society – such as governments, parliaments, business, civil society leaders, media owners and managers – to have a vested interested in how they report on issues. All of these constituencies may at some stage or another have a vested interest in seeing reporting that casts them in a good light. That is why editorial decision-making, and reviews of such decisions, should be kept as far away from them as possible.

Journalism has an ethical basis, and journalists’ only vested interest should be in protecting the principles of their craft. Hence the International Federation of Journalists’ Code of Conduct states that ‘Within the general law of each country the journalist shall recognise in matters of professional matters the jurisdiction of colleagues only, to the exclusion of any kind of interference by governments or others’.

Pure self-regulation, though, may be politically unwise, and co-regulation with members of the public is a more pragmatic idea that increases the chances of public buy-in.

Furthermore, while journalism is not rocket science, it does involve some level of skill in editorial decision-making, which journalists have and others don’t have. Even lawyers are not well placed to review ethically-based decisions, as you propose, as the domains of law and ethics differ. That is why the balance of power in a Press Council should be held by journalists.

The problem in South Africa is that the journalists are not well organised, which means that we do not really have self-regulation, strictly speaking. Owners and editor’s organisations dominate the landscape, including in relation to the Press Council of South Africa. This is not healthy.

Granted, South Africa is very far away from Britain in terms of Press standards; the tabloid culture that exists there, and that led to the NoW scandal, does not exist to the same extent here. But there is cause for concern. The 2008 report into ethical lapses in the Sunday Times report – which your newspaper leaked several weeks ago – suggests that commercial considerations may trump ethical decision making even in South Africa.

If journalists’ voices are weak, all manner of things can go awry in the press. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in the UK became a poodle of the publishers and owners partly because Unions like the National Union of Journalists, which could have checked the decline of ethical standards from within, had been weakened by Rupert Murdoch’s union bashing tactics. The PCC members, Murdoch and the government, both Labour and Conservative, are all part of the same political class; hence the tendency to scratch one another’s backs (or cover one another’s backs).

The NoW scandal shows the corrupting power of politics and money on independent journalism. Until journalism is protected from this power, it will not be able to return to its ethical base and rebuild trust with the public. This means resisting the establishment of review bodies that disempower the very people who are best placed to defend journalism. And this is the main lesson that South Africa should take away from this scandal, not that journalistic self-regulation is inherently flawed.

Prof Jane Duncan

Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society, Rhodes University

Peter Bruce’s response

Jane,

You cannot sustain your claim that in all of society, journalists are the least likely to have a vested interest in how journalists report. You would have to completely disregard competition between newspapers and between individual journalists in various fields. In many cases, careers depend on one journalist being better than a competing one. One journalist making an error in a big story is often a life-saver to a competing one who may have missed the story altogether.

Our proposal does not give an independent regulator a role in making editorial decisions, as you imply. Editorial decisions are made in newsrooms, where they should be, and would continue to be. But a regulator may be asked to judge the quality of those decisions and I cannot see the problem in that. They may not teach ethics to lawyers but they teach it at universities, I am sure.

What is this ‘editorial decision-making’ that must everyone else be kept away from? The publication of a correction or an apology would be no more an editorial decision under an independent regulator than it is now, under the Press Ombudsman. It can only be considered an editorial decision when an editor decides, in the absence of any outside coercion, to print one.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say the PCC in the UK has become “the poodle of publishers and owners”. Publishers and owners are pretty much the same thing. I would welcome the formation of a good union for journalists but I doubt it would spend much time on trade standards. Pay, holidays and other conditions have consumed the time of every effort at organising that I have seen, here and in the UK in 38 years in the trade. Having been a member of the NUJ in Britain long before Mr Murdoch moved his empire to Wapping, I can assure you I was never asked to participate in any form of discussion or debate about how we worked and what we printed.

The most important lesson of all, you write, is not to allow politicians and media owners to become too cosy. Agreed. But did you not read the whole editorial you are responding to? We specifically said that politicians and journalists and publishers should be kept well away from the independent regulator. I don’t know how else to say that and mean it.

I don’t believe you can protect journalism from the corrupting power of politics by putting regulation in the hands of journalists (neither it seems, do you really — you write of a ‘co-regulation’ with members of the public, but which ones, chosen how?). You protect it by keeping politicians and their institutions and their friends away from it. Where there’s a journalist, there’s going to be a politician.

I also hope our position doesn’t come back to bite us. I know I’m out on a limb and your position attracts a lot of respectable support. But, right now, we journalists are in a fight for our freedom here and by sticking sanctimoniously to self regulation, we’re losing.

Source: Business Day