Beyond clickbait and commerce

Tanner et al. (2005: 187) identify three levels at which conflicts
of interest may occur in media settings: institutional (arising from
conflicts between editorial and commercial sides of a media
organisation); process (which may occur, for example, through
‘capture’ of journalists by valued sources and contacts, or from
pressure induced by gifts of such goods as travel), and personal
(arising from individual loyalties).
It will be seen from the three case studies in this paper that lack of
disclosure, plausibility and institutional culture are major factors in
contemporary media’s conflict of interest problems.
Professional expectations
The importance of managing and resisting conflicts of interest is
reflected in journalism’s codes of ethics across the Western world,
as noted by Keeble (2001) in his enumeration and analysis of the
values underpinning these codes. Avoidance of such conflicts
ranks with other core values such as fairness, separation of fact
from opinion, factual and contextual accuracy, respect for people’s
personal characteristics and privacy, and editorial independence.
RESEARCH
PAPER
Management of conflict of interest was part of a larger set of
institutional arrangements inside media organisations that went
under the rubric of ‘church and state separation’. Borrowed from
constitutional principles enshrined in writing or by convention
in many Western democracies, the concept of church and state
separation in the journalistic context came to mean the separation
of news copy from commercial content (Friend and Singer 2007:
181). It was the means by which the ideal of editorial independence
was given effect to, allowing what C. P. Scott described as a
newspaper’s moral and material existence (Muller, F. 1946) to
live side-by-side, albeit with the inevitable tensions created by
commercial and competitive pressures.
These arrangements were grounded in certain assumptions about
the nature of news, the nature of journalism, the role of the news
media in society, and the means by which commercial media could
plausibly serve the public interest whilst maintaining material
viability.
The nature of news
In his lapidary work, Public opinion, Lippman (1922: 338-357) strips
the concept of news back to its bare essentials: ‘when the life of
anyone … departs from ordinary paths, or when events worth telling
occur’. What is ‘worth telling’ has been analysed and described
many times and is now established as a set of professional norms
known as news values (see, for example, McQuail 1994: 271 and
Brighton and Foy 2007: 31-45). From these norms there follows an
ethical principle, that material published as news should exhibit at
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