I'm making space for this column which saw print in the Manila Times
THINKING ALOUD
By Roberto Lazaro
Ethics in journalism
THE world of the media is moved by people, each with his own objectives, his own needs and wants, his own ambitions and preferences and his own mode of deciding.
It follows that people’s behavior will differ from one person to another according to their varying concepts of right and wrong.
Differences enrich our outlook and broaden our perspectives. But we cannot live on that alone. We need something to integrate our differences in these outlooks and perspectives, an ethical standard that transcends individual concepts by which society can judge which is right and which is wrong.
Incidentally, ethics is not something we possess by nature. We were not born with it, nor did we, by heredity, acquire it. Neither is it a faculty, nor a property of man, although man naturally tends toward it as a consequence of his intellectual nature.
We must be taught, and we must learn, that there are certain things that are right which we ought to do, and there are those which are not right which we must avoid. They serve as some sort of a checklist for us to be guided by as we go about our daily journalistic chores, affecting the lives of other people and changing the way society works. We call that checklist media ethics. We are bound by it, and we are held accountable to society and to our profession by virtue of it.
Distributive justice mandates that from him who has more, more be required; from him who knows more, more be expected. Given this premise, more is required of the journalist because he has more; and more is expected of him because he knows more. He has more of what it takes to be a professional; and he knows more of what professionalism is all about. That is distributive justice with social justice subliminized. Moral issues that arise in the media are concerned not only with the motivations of the media people but with a whole range of problems that arise in the context of the media. And anywhere media institutions disseminate news, journalists will be there as their agents representing the media, as trustees of the people in the name of the media, and as exemplars of behavior personifying the media. That is how identified the journalist is with the media, and the media with the journalist.
It is true that in many cases, the press has lost its bearing in the chaos and confusion of its media environment where it competes for profit and survival, losing its independence as the voice of the people and its dignity as the vanguard of truth, justice and decency. In these cases, the sanctity of media ethics is constantly put to a test.
But there will always be journalists who will remain true to the highest standard of journalistic professionalism. We are proud of them. We are proud that we still have within our ranks those dedicated and competent men and women of the press who man the ramparts of professional journalism and stand up to the forces which erode the credibility of the media and debase the values of the journalists. We glory in the thought that we still have in our midst those journalists who by their uncompromising stand on corruption and wrongdoing in our society are giving us much comfort in their reassurance that after all there is hope for all of us. They write stories, and will continue to write stories, without fear or favor, in the name of justice and for everything that professional journalism stands for.
Many good things have been said, and are being said, about good journalism. “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both” so said US President James Madison in 1822, a sentiment echoed by Walter Lippmann a hundred years later: “The press . . . is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” Those are bits of inspiration that keep us going.
We pay homage to the media as the purveyor of truth of justice and the common good. Truth is the foundation of people’s intelligent decisions and right actions, as justice is the underlying philosophy of their quality of life and the common good is the ground work on which the quality of their society stands.
Whether news reporting is for print or for broadcast, the primary purpose is to give voice to the people, and the journalist stands at the forefront of the communications effort. This is in the essence of press freedom, which gives meaning to the Constitutional guarantee of free expression; and in the essence of democracy, which guarantees respect for human dignity.
Such is the high trust vested in the media and the journalists, which should not be violated or compromised for the sake of pecuniary or other unworthy motives. Lets all rally behind it.
