Beyond clickbait and commerce

Denis Muller
least some of the characteristics of news. These characteristics are
defined in news values. Material published as news that contains
little or nothing by way of news values may rightly give rise to a
question about the propriety of the motive for publishing it as news.
Lippmann further enlightens us with his insight that before
something takes on the nature of news, it must enter a factual
realm that takes it beyond mere rumour or speculation and in
so doing manifests itself in a definable form – a fire, a riot, the
introduction of a legislative Bill. He writes of news as thus assuming
a definable shape. It then becomes a question of who does the
shaping. In Lippmann’s now seemingly far-off world, the shaper is
the ‘press agent’:
Were reporting the simple recovery of obvious facts, the press
agent would be little more than a clerk. But since, in respect to
most of the big topics of news, the facts are not simple and not
at all obvious, but subject to choice and opinion, it is natural
that everyone would wish to make his own choice of facts
for the newspaper to print. The publicity man does that. … It
follows that the picture which the publicity man makes for the
reporter is the one he wishes the public to see. He is censor and
propagandist …
Note, however, that in this model, which obtained for many
decades, the publicity agent and the reporter are two different
people and are assumed to have different responsibilities and
interests: the publicity agent to his or her client in acting as censor
or propagandist, the reporter to the public in providing the best
available version of contemporary truth. In the world where
news-like content is created, these two personas, with their often
conflicting responsibilities and interests, merge into one.
Bull (2013: 74-83) has argued that ‘brand journalism’ is not
necessarily unethical because it is open to brand journalists to
adhere to the profession’s codes of ethics, but there is an inherent
contradiction here. Typically, the codes require independence,
impartiality and transparency, qualities that are by definition absent
from brand journalism.
It may also be argued that in these new circumstances, the conflict
of interest disappears because the interests and responsibilities are
congruent and inhere in the one journalistic practitioner. This is
a fallacy. It ignores the deception involved in making one thing,
advertising or promotion, appear like another, news.
The nature of journalism
Journalism as a professional practice exhibits certain characteristics
that enable the profession to keep the implied promises it makes
98 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016