In the United Kingdom, government threatens to censor social media. A phone-hacking scandal has revived calls for a crackdown on the press, with government-imposed sanctions. Journalists accused of committing libel must prove their innocence, rather than the accuser having to make the case.
CIMA Research Report: Media Codes of Ethics
And all of this in a “free” country, according to the Freedom House index. But the gap between ethical codes and the realities of working journalists in the United Kingdom only serves to underscore the difficulty of defining and enforcing standards–voluntarily, without governmentintrusion–in an arguably “free” society.
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This report focuses primarily on press codes in countries with authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, those deemed less than free by Freedom House, which has found that in 2011 only about 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with a free press.1 “The world is awash with Codes of Journalistic Ethics,” wrote Bill Norris, associate director of the United Kingdom’s PressWise (now named MediaWise).2 “The proscriptions on journalistic behavior are many and various, but they all have one thing in common: they are not worth the paper they are written on.” That bold assertion appeared in 2000. This report seeks to examine whether it is more or less true today.
Center for International Media Assistance