By Jake Lynch
Journalists have long been accused of wielding power without responsibility. But a group of more than 200 UK-based editors, writers, producers and reporters have spent the last year acting on the Primo Levi principle: "If not us, who? If not now, when?" Together they have produced a book, "Reporting the World," a guide to "ethical reporting" in times of conflict.
For most Americans, the shock of September 11 — including the range of the global response — was all the more wrenching and incomprehensible because the media had long abandoned coverage of our increasingly interdependent world. As MediaChannel affiliates have documented, the U.S. press had reduced foreign coverage by 80 percent in the past two decades; trading context, analysis and attention to geopolitics for news-lite and "news-you-can-use." New York magazine's Michael Wolff rightly observed that in the absence of a solid and consistent foundation of serious international coverage in mainstream news, "this story had dropped into our laps, and almost nothing in it made any sense. We've settled for identifying the villain as some pure spasm of all-powerful, far-reaching apocalyptic irrationality."
The failures of U.S. international journalism — trends that are also growing in Britain and throughout our globalized world — have not only led to public ignorance about the impact of one's own culture and government on the world but may actually be exacerbating conflict. In this information age, journalists are not disconnected observers but actual participants in the way communities and societies understand each other and the way parties wage conflict.
Journalists have always comforted themselves with the notion that "we just report the facts." It's been called an "ethic of conviction." But it's in the choice between the facts — which to include and which to leave out — where another ethic takes place: an ethic of responsibility.
For the past year, more than 200 the media experts have been working to shoulder this challenge, to develop a framework to help themselves and their colleagues report on conflict in ways that explore and examine the complexities, context and the possibilities. The result is the new book "Reporting the World." Together they have produced a "checklist" to help reporters think through and engage with the ethical implications of their work.
By sitting down and debating what readers and audiences really need to know about international news and what they should do to provide it, the participants came up with a practical guide for the ethical reporting of conflicts in the 21st century.
A Media-Savvy World
We live in a media-savvy world. There's no way of knowing that what journalists are seeing or hearing would have happened the same way — if at all — if no press was present. This means that policies are born with a media strategy built in. There's nothing pejorative in that, it's a condition of modern life; but it closes the circle of cause and effect between journalist and source.
The only way anyone can possibly calculate journalists' likely response to what they do is from their experience of previous reporting. Every time facts get reported, it adds to the collective understanding of how similar facts will likely be reported in future. That understanding then informs people's behavior. This is the Feedback Loop. It means every journalist bears some unknowable share of the responsibility for what happens next.
The Ethical Reporting Challenge
How often do we see violence in the Middle East attributed to the ill will of deceitful leaders? In Africa, to "tribal anarchy"? In the Balkans, to a spontaneous welling-up of "ancient hatreds"? Where are the stories that explore the intelligible, if dysfunctional processes underlying the violence, constructing enmities between peoples and reproducing conflicts?
Diagnose the attacks of September 11 as "a pure spasm of apocalyptic irrationality" and you provide an incentive to policy-makers to present violence ("destroying it") as the only possible solution.
Diagnose it, instead, as arising out of unresolved issues, grievances, political and socioeconomic breakdown across a complex intersection of partisan groups, and you encourage policy-makers to offer a multifaceted response geared toward tackling the underlying structural and cultural violence that makes our interdependent, yet bitterly divided world a dangerous place.
For the first time, this book offers workable ways for journalists to build into the processes of commissioning, news gathering, reporting, writing and editing, some sense of responsibility for the consequences of their journalism.
Above all, when covering conflicts, the explanations for violence and how it arises from media reports is the prime ethical issue. Is the classic blow-by-blow account — the bullets and bombs — the be-all and end-all of what we see, hear or read? Or do we get some sense of structural and cultural violence? The why to go with the who, what, where, when and how?
The Book
"Reporting the World" takes the form of an ethical checklist, a reliable set of first principles to fortify journalists against self-censorship and consensus, in favor of thinking through these difficult stories themselves. It's already won high praise from across the industry.
See the checklist here.
The book includes five case studies, examples of how the reporting on conflict is transformed when the checklist is applied. As we can see from this excerpt, a report on the bombing of Baghdad in February, 2001, by Britain and the United States, under a newly inaugurated George W. Bush, applying the checklist points dramatically changes the story.
Available on-line as a free PDF download, "Reporting the World" is also published as a paperback book; you can order a copy for £6 by e-mailing reporttheworld@aol.com. (Any proceeds go to fund future events to advance collaborations on ethical reporting.) For more information about the book and the series of seminars that produced it, visit www.reportingtheworld.org.
— Jake Lynch is an experienced international reporter in television and print media, based in London. He was a consultant to the Reporting the World project and is also a widely-traveled trainer and educator of journalists and media students.
Reporting The World: How Ethical Journalism Can Seek Solutions
