Posted on 24-1-2002

Reporting The World: How Ethical Journalism Can Seek Solutions
By Jake Lynch*

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. www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/checklist.shtml

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.