Beyond clickbait and commerce

to its audiences. To engage in journalism is to establish an implicit
contractual relationship with the audience. This relationship
contains promises about factual and contextual reliability,
impartiality, independence, and separation of factual information
from comment or opinion. If these promises are broken, society
is robbed of something essential to the healthy functioning of
democracy: a bedrock of trustworthy information people need to
make informed choices as voters, consumers, and participants in
social life (Muller, D. 2014: 3).
The standards that enable these promises to be kept are that factual
material will be checked before publication to ensure its accuracy
so far is it possible to know at the time; that factual material will
be presented in a way that is contextually truthful and represents a
fair portrayal of the people, events, organisations and ideas that are
the subject-matter of the material; that an impartial assessment will
have been made concerning the weight of evidence to be accorded
to issues in contention; that the journalist will have brought an
open mind to these tasks, and that the content will have been
prepared independently of improper or distorting influences. By
convention, these include political or commercial considerations, in
particular the influence of powerful people or valuable advertisers.
RESEARCH
PAPER
These standards have been set out in codes of ethics for journalism
across Western democracies for many decades (see, for example,
Keeble 2001). They form the basis of contemporary assumptions
among practitioners and the public alike about what constitutes
journalism.
The role of news media in society
The functions the news media are understood to perform in society
have been articulated with reasonable clarity for at least 70 years.
A seminal influence, at least over modern practice and scholarship,
was the analysis of news media functions by the United States
Commission on the Freedom of the Press. In his summary and
analysis of the commission’s report, one of its most influential
members, William Ernest Hocking, wrote (1947: 224-232):
The functions of the press, typified by the news function, are
‘clothed with a public interest’. … One begins to speak of
the ‘right’ of the public to have its news; this language has
no necessary legal implications – a moral right lifts its head
to announce an answering responsibility on the part of the
institution.
The phrase ‘freedom of the press’ must now cover two sets of
rights and not one only. With the rights of editors and publishers
to express themselves there must be associated a right of the
public to be served with a substantial and honest basis of fact for
its judgments of public affairs.
Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 99