work

1. National Union of
Journalists.

2. Social and Cultural awareness-
Journalists play important roles in our society. They can shape it through what they write. Their words have
the power to influence peoples views of certain events. Journalists will often write about groups of people
their readers might have little or no first hand experience of. The way they write about people can affect how
their readers feel about them. It is important that journalists do not create biased, unhelpful representations
of people, particularly in news reporting. The National Union of Journalists has prepared a range of ethical
guidance sheets for it’s members to use when writing about different groups of people.
The NUJ have created guidelines that includes a range of topics of ethics, for when writers write about certain
people, It also has a hotline for writers to ring up and get information from for what to write.
These are what the guidelines include-
 Terrorism
 Race
 Asylum and Immigration
 HIV
 Age
 Disability
 Suicide
It is important that journalists have social and cultural awareness because they are constantly writing about a
diverse range of people and they can not be writing anything that is going to discriminate people and create a
bad image of a certain group of people. That is why the guidelines are set up so journalists know the ethics.
Journalists need to have this awareness because they can not be bias and portray a certain group of people as
something their. As an example if a journalist was writing about disabled people they would have to be careful
about what they wrote about the group of people because they are a small group minority of society and it
could be seen as you being biased towards them. That is why a hotline for journalist is created for if they
needed to find

3.  Another aspect to look at is how people are represented within news stories. Through this Journalists
need to stick to the guidelines to make sure that they do not represent subjects in a bad light. A codes of
practice is set of by the NUJ which governs the way that journalists should work. The code has 12 rules
members of the union are expected to abide by. The code covers things such as:
-Ensuring that information is...accurate and fair
-Differentiating between fact and opinion
-Not producing material likely to lead to hatred or discrimination on the grounds of a persons age, gender,
race, colour, creed, legal status, disability, marital status or sexual orientation.
This is here for Journalists to make sure they do not discriminate the subjects in their writing or they could be
sued a lot of money. An example of this would be this newspaper. This front headline of this paper is
putting foreign workers in a bad light. It is saying that basically they are steeling our jobs. This is not
acceptable and is seen as discriminating foreign workers. Not all of them are the same and some of them
are just earning a living. Codes of practice and guidelines are there so the representation of different
groups of people are not racially discriminated or represented in a way in which we make negative views
of them.

4. Connotation-
In writing language can be a powerful tool in shaping our views. What Journalists write can be very powerful
towards peoples views. They can create negative and positive effects on subjects. They need to be careful that
they do not do this. Journalists must be careful of the connotations of the work they produce. They need to be
careful that their work does not have strong connotations as these could be a big effect for changing someone's
views on a subject .A connotation is the idea or feeling that a word creates in addition to it’s usual meaning.
For example, the word elderly, refers to someone who is old. Or the word handy caped has the connotations of
disabled people. Journalists need to make sure that they do not use words that include connotations. This could
create negative connotations which would not be a good aspect to the subject that writing was about. However
connotations can create a lot of words like elderly can have connotations of sick, ill, frail, old or OAP can
marginalise a person and create a negative representation of them.
This is a news headline for the daily mail. It uses words with very strong
connotations like foreign, murderer and rapists. Foreigners is a very
emotive subject and the discussion is usually dominated by politicians
and newspapers editors rather than foreign people themselves.
Even the word foreigners is tinged with negative connotation and is
often linked with words such as ‘asylum’, ‘failed’ and ‘bogus’.
Then you have words like rapist and murderer which have connotations
of crime, illegal, evil, law. These are very strong words to use as a
headline. They connotate very negative aspects.
Connotation can influence the response to a piece of writing because if the
journalist uses a word like ‘foreigner’ in the same sentence as rapist this is going
to connotate a lot of negative words like ‘crime’, ‘disgusting’, ‘evil’ and that is
going to influence peoples response to foreign people. By making them think
that all foreign people are like this

5. Alternative Reading-
When journalists write an article although they will have an audience that they are aiming their writing at , other
people may read their work.
Journalists should be careful to think about the possible, different readings of their work by different groups.
They need to make sure what they write will suite and be not harmful to any other group of people. Stuart Hall
considered this when working on Reception Theory. Minority groups, subcultures and victims of crime might
have very different interpretations of an article, depending on their experiences. For example, a report on
immigration should be careful to present a balanced and fair assessment of the situation. If it does not, it could
cause offence to groups of immigrants and provide an unfair platform for anti-immigration groups.
News papers will often shape the story to fit their audience and the people that they are not aiming their
newspaper at.

6. For a journalist to be credible they need to impartial, unprejudiced and unbiased. It is something very
important when writing a story. It is important for journalism to be trustworthy and reliable. If it is not,
then people will question the credibility of it. If journalists are not seen as credible, then it can diminish
the value of the story that they are reporting on.
In order for journalism to be credible there are some things that all journalism should be, Objective,
accurate, truthful, fair, balanced.
Journalists need to write with a political view. Most newspapers have a political agenda. This seems them
go from the left to the right of the political spectrum. Stories will be pushed to the front if they suite the
papers political agenda. Stories, which don’t suite the political agenda, are sent to the back. This follows
whether the paper is on the right wing or the left wing, which I have talked about previously.
Here is a reminded of the wings.
Left Wing- the Guardian, the independent, the mirror and the observer.
Right wing- the express, the daily mail, the telegraph, the sun.

7. If journalists have an agenda, then from the start, they will look for evidence to support their ideas and
discard evidence, which does not. The work that they produce will then not provide an independent look
at an event and instead it will be heavily influenced by the journalist’s ideas.
Accurate- It is very important that for a journalist to be credible they have to be accurate. They need to
have the correct facts including, times, dates, and sources. Failure to use the correct facts could land the
journalist in a lot of trouble. It could damage to the person being wrote about and distress. Once a piece
of writing is out there the damage has already being done. It is already in that persons mind. If this
happens you have the likes of the PCC getting involved and they will have to investigate the piece of
writing.
An example of this was when a Glasgow-based daily newspaper The Herald published a series of reports
between 2001 and 2013 about a man charged with and subsequently acquitted of rape. They were not
accurate about this story and the PCC had to get involved with this. As what they was writing was not accurate
therefore it was causing damage to the man and to his family. In a ruling published today, the PCC upheld the
complaint of inaccuracy but also said that the newspaper offered a sufficient remedy in the form of a series of
corrections and amendments. The newspaper had to face court and they got sued a lot o money for this
mistake that was going on for a long period of time.

8. Truthful: Perhaps the most important thing for journalism to be is truthful. Presenting the truth to people is key
to being seen as credible. Journalism is about facts and the truth. If journalists move away from the truth they
write fiction instead. Producing work which is not true can have serious legal and ethical consequences.
This rule is constantly bent and broken as newspapers try to grab attention and follow their political agenda.
Statistics and figures can often be twisted to make a point which serves the papers viewpoint.
Allegations can be made about people which have no basis in reality. Magazines that seem to bend this rule a lot
are more women's gossip magazines like Heat and Star. These seem to over excaudate on stories to gain their
readers.
Katie Price went through a divorce with her husband peter and there was many stories that were in magazines
such as heat and now that were not true. They had over exadurated talks the couple had, had and called them
huge arguments and they had stirred up quotes from unknown sources which had been false and had never
actually been said. This was not being truthful and they were not presenting the truth to the readers. They did
not have huge legal and ethical consequences but they had to apologise to the couple and they were sued
money.

9. Fair and Balanced:
Writing should be approached with an open minded and be non-discriminatory. The NUJ code of ethics
specifically states that their journalists should not produce work which is likely to lead to hatred or
discrimination .To produce credible journalism, writing should even handed, giving a balance to both sides of the
argument and allowing the reader to make their decision based on the facts presented to them. Again, this is
often overlooked or ignored. We might like this to be the way but newspapers and journalists on all sides are
likely to break this rule. Papers constantly give precedent to stories which suit their audience and use emotive
subjects to increase sales.
An article on fox talks about how Fox gave Obama his worst press and John McCain his best press of any
network during last year’s presidential election? If the reader was into politics they would know this was not fair
or balanced. But any other reader would think this was accurate and it is not. Fox had the most balanced
coverage of any network during the same campaign? So they should of wrote a balanced and fair press release
as any other news associate did. But Fox are having a ongoing by the Centre for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).
That both these have given an unfair statement in the news and that they had the facts there but they have been
biased and swayed more to one side. Readers are upset because they trust Fox news to give them an accurate
report. They have been making very strong worded comments in the comments boxes below the article.

10. Copyright:
Copyright covers the ownership of work that people create. Journalists must be careful not to break copyright
law by reproducing work which is not theirs without permission.
Journalists must be careful not to plagiarise the work of others as well. Plagiarising work could lead to a
copyright infringement.
In the case of photos, videos or text, it is a reference to content which is no longer subject to copyright protection
either because the copyright term has come to an end all because of the copyright owner has effectively waived
any claim to those rights.
A young south African man made a about a journalist at a popular magazine who sourced a picture of him from a
Facebook profile and published it as part of an article about him. When he complained about the journalist’s use
of the photo in the article he was informed that this was perfectly legitimate because “Facebook is a public
domain and anyone can access Facebook accounts if the right privacy settings are not installed”.
Although it is correct that if a Facebook user wishes to restrict access to his or her content or data, the right way to
do that would be to limit other people’s access using Face book's privacy settings, the rest of this statement is not
quite accurate. Whether you can use content depends largely on the extent to which that content is protected by
copyright law and whether their content is available under a particular license which permits you to use the
content in the way that you would like to use it.
In this particular case two references were looked at. The first one is the Copyright Act itself. Photographs are
categorised as “artistic works”. In addition to describing which rights a person may not exercise because this would
constitute an infringement of copyright, the Copyright Act includes a set of general exceptions from copyright
infringement.
When it comes to photographs, the Copyright Act says that “Copyright shall not be infringed by any fair dealing”
with an artistic work “for the purpose of reporting current events … in a newspaper, magazine or similar
periodical”.

11. Children and young persons:
When dealing with children or young people, or stories concerning them, the Editors Code of Practice is very
clear on the way this should be handled.
The editors codes of practice are defined rules when it comes to children: Young people should be free to
complete their time at school without
unnecessary intrusion. A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own
or another child’s welfare unless a custodial
parent or similarly responsible adult consents Pupils must not be approached or photographed at school without
the permission of the school authorities.
Minors must not be paid for material involving children’s welfare, nor parents or guardians for
material about their children or wards, unless it is clearly in the child's interest.
Editors must not use the fame, notoriety of position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing
details of a child’s private life.
The rules are particularly clear surrounding children and criminal cases but also cover consent for contact with
and photographs of children.
They need to protect children as these are the most vulnerable in our society so set rules and a lot fo rules
compared to some areas need to be set at as you have a lot of nasty people who are wanting to hurt people.
At the moment a doctor has been jailed for 20+ years for abusing young people and on the news to protect the
children they have used actors to tell the public the stories of these abused children to protect their identities for
from the public. They have not told the public the names of the children and they have blocked there faces out
on the news.

12. Confidentiality:
Sometimes, journalists speak to people who are breaking the law or attend illegal events as part of an
investigation. Journalists are protected from having to reveal their sources of information and the names of
people involved in these activities. The Editors Code of Practice states that Journalists have a moral obligation to
protect confidential sources of information.
Channel four do a lot of very hard hitting documentaries. This includes illegal activities that people get involved
in. They go in with these activities and film them and a lot of the time to get the story they make confidential
agreements with the people involved in these documentaries. They do this by blurring out faces and keeping
their names off camera. They do not reveal the identities of these people. Recently a documentary about
women in strip clubs and the kept some of the women's identities protected by not naming them or showing
their faces on camera. As obviously they did want anyone to see them on there.

13. Official Secrets:
The Official Secrets Act is a piece of law that protects state secrets and national security.
It is common to for people to have to sign this the official secrets act before and after a period of employment
that involves access to secrets. The Official Secrets Act has been used previously to try to force journalists to
reveal their sources, if the authority believes that are a matter of national security.
The guardian has wrote about the phone hacking scandal in conjunction with the official secrets act. The
metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters
disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal. They are trying to protect the
information that was sourced from Milly Dowlers phone. This information was breached in July when
reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of this women's phone. As of this they
breeched the Official Secrets Act and are facing court.

14. Ethical:
There are also ethical responsibilities that journalists need to consider when going about their work. Having
regard to the requisite conditions and basic principles, the media must undertake to follow ethical principles
guaranteeing freedom of expression and the fundamental right of citizens to receive truthful information and
honest opinions.
In order to supervise these principles, self-regulatory bodies or mechanisms must be set up comprising
publishers, journalists, media users' associations, experts from the academic world and judges; they will be
responsible for issuing resolutions on respect for ethical precepts in journalism, with prior commitment on the
part of the media to publish the relevant resolutions. This will help the citizen, who has the right to information,
to pass either positive or negative judgment on the journalist's work and credibility.
Codes of practice:
There are codes of practice, such as the NUJ codes and the Editors Code of Practice which give guidelines to
journalists regarding how they should conduct their work and how they should write.
Having these codes gives journalists, editors and the public a set of standards to look to, particularly when things
go wrong. The industry self-regulates these codes of practice so their interpretation and use is variable. In some
recent cases, the codes of practice have been revealed to be broken with almost daily regularity by some
journalists and editors.If a person feels that a journalist or newspaper has acted inappropriately then they can
complain to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO).

15. Privacy:
The Editors code of practice includes a section on privacy. Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private
and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications.
Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent. Account will be
taken of the complainant's own public disclosures of information.
It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent.
The NUJ says in its code of conduct that journalists should not ‘intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or
distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest’
It is says by the NUJ in their code of conduct that journalists should not intrude into anybody's private life's, grief
or distress unless it is justified. Although it overrides if it is in the public interest so basically if it is the public
interest it is sometimes ok.
n practice, peoples privacy may be disrupted, if the editor can prove that disrupting someone's privacy is in the
public interest.
There is a fine line, one which is often crossed, between the public interest and the interest of the public.
Jamie Oliver- He often complains of invasion into his family's privacy, but he lets the cameras in his home while
filming his latest series, Jamie's Great Escape. The daily mail has wrote an article about him saying that it is the
publics interest to having his family life on camera for his TV show.
Having invited the cameras into his daughter's bedroom to kiss her goodbye before he left on his trip to Italy, the
chef then led his wife into the street for a public bye and she was in a lot of tears. Jamie was quite happy to let
the TV cameras keep rolling, but once he turned round and spotted a clutch of photographers snapping the
emotional farewell he suddenly became indignant. "That's £50,000 you've just made one of those guys," he told
Jools, before moaning about how trivial the story was.
It's not the first time Jamie has exposed his emotional wife to the cameras. He once allowed the TV cameras to
film an obviously distressed Jools reacting to newspaper allegations that he'd had an affair. Just to show how
nasty and invasive the media can be, obviously.

16. Intrusion:
The Editors Code of Practice says that journalists can not get involved In cases involving personal grief or shock,
enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively. This
should not restrict the right to report legal proceedings, such as inquests.
It also talks about the rules with journalists reporting about suicide. ‘When reporting suicide, care should be
taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used’
They need to be careful because this is a very sensitive subject.
NUJ Code of Conduct also covers intrusion
Does nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of
the public interest.
A example of this was Chris Hoy and the death of his uncle he had his private life intruded when a reporter went
undercover and went to the funeral in hope to get a story. He went round and sneakily interview the mourners. It
was then un covered that the reporter went to the funeral after a story was published and he had to apologise to
the family. This was a big deal as he breeched the codes of practice.

17. Harassment:
The Editors Code of Practice is very clear about harassment. It states...
Journalists must not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit. They must not persist in
questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist; nor remain on their
property when asked to leave and must not follow them. If requested, they must identify themselves and whom
they represent. Editors must ensure these principles are observed by those working for them and take care not
to use non-compliant material from other sources.
Journalists are not supposed to intimidate, harass or persistently pursuit people. They must stop contacting or
photographing a person once asked to do so. But in some cases this does not always happen. Journalists are
always trying to get the new stories in which they try there best by pestering celebrities.
Again, in practice, this line is often crossed. The defence of harassment usually revolves around the idea of the
‘public interest’.