By David Fortier
Introduction
The Ethical Journalism Network provides a roadmap for this subject. Its Ethical Media Audit lists any number of areas that an organization needs to consider in light of its ethical responsibilities. I see this ethical accounting applying in two situations:
- —for those working with existing news media, using this audit as the foundation for a critique.
- –for those taking on their own citizen-driven community journalism, as with TBE.
My concern here is, primarily, with TBE. But it is no secret that self-scrutiny, some notion of self-awareness, is critical to success, and existing news media, if participants so chose, could focus their attention of one of these entities with the goal of trying to influence their coverage decisions.
In addition, the media audit appears to be a tool for TBE to use in the development of new programs from new workshop sessions, with its own performance and goals in mind.
A process here would simply be to go down the list of subjects in EJN’s audit and chose the ones that should be applied to TBE operations.
An alternative process would be to develop several audits for different areas from sources such as the SPJ Code of Ethics.
The point is to expose the organization to regular reviews to ensure that its goals ally with its principles.