Beyond clickbait and commerce

Mel Bunce’s case study of the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (BMGF) in funding ‘development journalism’ raises
all these questions, and more, at the global level. The Gates
Foundation requires that its money be spent on journalism that
has some kind of assessable impact. Defining journalistic impact is
hard enough; measuring it is laden with unresolved methodological
challenges. The requirement to show ‘impact’ could have possible
consequences for the story proposals journalists offer when
seeking a grant: they may be more likely to pitch stories about
micro-level problems on which evidence of progress or impact is
easier to adduce, rather than addressing long-term issues that may
be objectively more important to the public interest.
The Gates case study shows that the foundation has an advocacy
agenda, which the journalistic work it funds is expected to
advance. This presents a challenge to conventional notions of
journalistic impartiality. Moreover, as Lyn McGaurr’s account of a
conservation photography expedition shows, advocacy agendas
can conflict with one another, and so can the uses to which the
journalistic content is put. In the case of the Great Bear Rainforest,
conservation photography was initially obtained for the purpose of
raising public awareness about a threat to the environment, and
non-profit funding was used to achieve it. However, some of the
images were later re-purposed to promote tourism in the area, and
their original conservation-oriented context was stripped away.
At the local level, Dave Harte reports research into the financing
and issues of editorial independence at a newspaper established by
a community housing organisation on the outskirts of Birmingham
in the UK, and reveals similar questions there. His work also raises
the question of ‘whose news’: is hyperlocal journalism really the
‘voice of the people’, as some imagine, or do the professional
norms of journalism mean that there is an unbridgeable gap
between what the community wants to read about itself and
what professional journalists produce about it, even when they are
employed to provide that local voice? As Harte says, the mantra of
the newspaper is to ‘tell it like it is’, but the question of what ‘it’ is
remains contested.
This question of story ownership is starkly illustrated by Jocelyn
Williams’s account of how the stories of seven community groups
in New Zealand were developed and told as part of a series of
joint exercises between tertiary teachers and students on the one
hand and the community groups on the other. Degrees of control
over the stories varied widely, with one group in particular taking
more or less complete ownership and asserting control on their
own terms. This illustrates another facet of editorial independence.
When the subject of a story takes the story over, where does
professional accountability fit in?
4 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016