IMMJ Code of Ethics

This code of ethics has largely been copied and condensed from the Reuters
handbook of journalism. I’ve tried to boil down some of the key points and put things into simple language for non native speakers. Please be clear, this guide is not intended as a set of “rules”. Some transgressions are obvious — such as plagiarism, fabrication or bribe taking, however journalism is a profession that is governed by guiding ethical principles rather than by rigid rules. This document is an attempt to map out some of those principles, to help guide you to make good decisions and act in the best interests of your contacts, audience and the profession. Another great short but to the point resource is the NPR Guiding Principles and it’s more comprehensive the NPR Ethics Handbook.

Our Top Ten
1. Seek truth — be as accurate, honest, fair and complete in gathering, reporting and interpreting information as possible.
2. Never assume that the collection of facts and assumptions, and the point of view that you have arrived at, is the “truth.”
3. Strive for balance and freedom from bias
4. Don’t lie or fabricate information
5. Protect your sources — if there any risk of implications then ensure informed consent
6. Protect fixers & translators
7. Never plagiarise
8. Never alter a still or moving image beyond the
requirements of normal image enhancement
9. Never pay for a story and never accept a bribe
10. Always reveal a conflict of interest to a tutor If in doubt — ask
Accuracy
Accuracy is at the core of journalism. It is your job to get information quickly but it is more important to get it right. Accuracy, as well as balance, always takes precedence over speed. In today’s world of information overload, it is very easy to find “information” quickly, especially online. A good journalist, however, must never publish any facts, data or information without first verifying them as accurate. Regardless of the size, scope and audience of a story, always report with the goal of 100 percent accuracy of all facts, quotes and ideas presented. You verify information by checking facts by two
reliable sources. (Here’s a good tip sheet on fact checking and here’s another). Another important part of accuracy is understanding the context in which events and issues occur. Nothing happens in a vacuum — This is why researching around your topic is imperative.

Sourcing
Accuracy and for freedom from bias relies on good, credible, diverse sourcing. A named source is always preferable to an unnamed source.
Journalists should work to understand and represent true diversity of the issue / community you are covering. You should recognise your own cultural biases and work hard to remove them when reporting and interviewing. Journalists should present a range of facts, opinions and sources. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states that it’s the journalists job to “give voice to the voiceless” and to “tell the story of diversity and magnitude of human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so”

• Use named sources wherever possible because they are responsible for the information they provide. Press your sources to go on the record.
• Use unnamed sources only where necessary when they provide information of market or public interest that is not available on the record elsewhere. If they are unnamed, question motivations.
• When talking to sources, always make sure the ground rules are clear. Take notes and record interviews.
• Cross-check and verify information wherever possible. Two or more sources are better than one. In assessing information from unnamed sources, weigh the source’s track record, position and motive. Use your common sense. If it sounds wrong, check further.
• Talk to or get information from sources on all sides of a deal, dispute, negotiation or conflict.

Quotes
Quotes must never be altered other than to delete a redundant word or clause, and then only if the deletion does not alter the meaning of the quote in any way. Selective use of quotes can be unbalanced. Be sure that quotes you use are representative of what the speaker is saying. Reflecting reality (as fairly as you can) Accuracy means that images and stories must reflect reality. It can be tempting for journalists to “hype” or sensationalise material, skewing the reality of the situation or misleading the reader or viewer into assumptions and impressions that are wrong and potentially harmful. A “flood” of immigrants, for example, may in reality be a relatively small number of people just as a “surge” in a stock price may be a quite
modest rise. Stop and think about the words you use.

Attribution
Accuracy means proper attribution to the source of material that is not ours,
whether in a story, a photograph or moving images. It is essential for transparency that material you did not gather yourself is clearly attributed in stories to the source. Failure to do so is plagiarism. Do you want to lift a quote from a blog, news report, academic report, another newspaper report — ATTRIBUTE it, better still hyperlink to it too. (Better still contact the person who’s quote you want to use, and verify it directly — they may even give you an original and better quote).

Graphic images and obscenities
As journalists, we have an obligation to convey the reality of what we report
accurately, yet a duty to be aware that such material can cause distress and
damage the dignity of the individuals concerned. Journalists do not sanitise
violence or euphemise sex. However, graphic images or obscene language should not be published gratuitously or with an intention to titillate or to shock. There must be a valid news reason for running such material and it will usually require a decision by the course leader.

Freedom from bias & conflict of interests
Journalists must remain independent and free of commitments to businesses, organisations or individuals. It is therefore necessary to avoid payment or gifts in exchange for covering a story, or for covering a particular angle of a story. Also, if a person has a personal relationship with a subject of the story, it’s difficult to remain objective. On the other hand gift giving is common in China — so what if you are shooting a story in a school and the headmaster allows you to board in the dorms for free — it’s going to be great for your story, what do you do? On another story, you are offered a fancy dinner by the boss of the company you are reporting on — what do you do? An NGO provides you with transportation to where you need to go, what do you do? When in doubt over whether a gift or a personal relationship creates conflict of interest in writing or reporting, ask a teacher.
Discriminatory language and stereotypes
Journalists should avoid inappropriate references to gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, appearance, age, and sexual orientation. Journalists must be also be sensitive to unconscious stereotyping and assumptions. Is it really novel that the person in the news is black, blonde, female, overweight or gay? If it is relevant, does the fact belong in the lead or should it be woven in lower down? Reporters must resist the assumption that their cultural values, religious beliefs or social mores are the norm. We should also be suspicious of country stereotypes — the usually negative notions about a national character. These can be offensive and inaccurate.

Independence
Checking back with sources: Will you submit stories, scripts or images to sources to vet before publication. This breaches independence. You may however, check back with a source to verify a quote or information. Some organisations or companies sometimes ask to see the quotes you plan to publish or broadcast. Resist such requests where possible

Bribes
This is one of the very clear cut rules — Never take money or a bribe, never give money or pay for a picture or interview. In some situations, for example if you are working with somebody for a long time or they are taking time out to host you a gift maybe acceptable. However the gift should be nominal. A box of tea from your home country, cookies or so forth — never give or receive anything of value.

Integrity
Identifying yourself: If you are just asking around for background information you do not need to identify yourself to everyone, in fact in many countries it maybe a bad idea to broadcast that you are a journalist as it may compromise your work and your sources — however if you intend to actually interview someone and use there quotes or photograph or film someone as an identifiable character then you must identify yourself clearly. You are students studying journalism and you intend to publish your projects online. This all needs to be very clear. Dealing with sources
We encourage you to cultivate sources but also expect them you to be conscious of the need to maintain a detachment from them. Do not exceed the bounds of proper, professional contact. While it is appropriate to entertain sources, including outside working hours, regularly spending substantial leisure time with them may raise a potential conflict or a perception of bias. A good measure of the propriety of the relationship is to ask whether you would be comfortable spending as much time with another source on a different side of the issue or story. If in doubt, seek guidance from your tutor.

Dealing with people
Your reputation for accurate, balanced reporting is going to be one of your biggest assets. You also need to seek to minimise any harm to the public through your actions. The people who make the news are vulnerable to the impact of our stories. In extreme cases, their lives or their reputations could depend on our reporting. If in doubt ask your tutor.

A Brief Guide to Standards, Photoshop and Captions
Photoshop These are Reuters guidelines — they are good ones. Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation programme. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour. Significantly altering a picture in Photoshop or any other image editing software will lead to a fail.
Rules

• No additions or deletions to the subject matter of the original image. (thus changing the original content and journalistic integrity of an image)
• No excessive lightening, darkening or blurring of the image. (thus misleading the viewer by disguising certain elements of an image)
• No excessive colour manipulation. (thus dramatically changing the original lighting conditions of an image)
• Cloning, Healing or Brush Tools are not to be used. The single exception to this rule is sensor dust removal.

Guidelines

• Only minor Photoshop work should be performed in the field. (Especially from laptops). Such as cropping, sizing and levels. You may also wish to lighten / darken, sharpen, remove dust or do basic colour correction.
• Saturation should be used with care
• Colour Balance adjustment should be kept to the minimum, especially on laptop screens which tend to have a blue dominance.
• Auto Levels should be used with great care.
• The Burn Tool in most cases should only used to subtly darken areas that have been overexposed. When the burn tool is used in shadows a visible element of everything that can be seen in the raw file must remain visible.
• Highlights and Shadows should be used minimally and with care.
• The Lasso Tool s essential that great care is taken with this tool to avoid the ‘halo’ effect which is produced when the feathering is too great and the tonal change ‘bleeds over’ into the unselected zone.
• Multiple-Exposure pictures must be clearly identified in the caption and drawn to the attention of pictures desks before transmission.
• To Recap Allowed:
  • Cropping
  • Adjustment of Levels to histogram limits
  • Minor colour correction
  • Sharpening
  • Careful use of lasso tool
  • Subtle use of burn tool
  • Adjustment of highlights and shadows
  Not Allowed:
  • Additions or deletions to image
  • Cloning & Healing tool (except dust)
  • Airbrush, brush, paint
  • Selective area sharpening
  • Excessive lightening/darkening
  • Excessive colour tone change
  • Blurring
  • Eraser tool

Photographers may direct the subjects of portraits, formal interviews and non- news feature images needed to illustrate a story. The caption must not mislead the reader into believing these images are spontaneous.

Accuracy in Captions
Adhere to the basic rules of accuracy and freedom from bias. Captions must
answer the basic questions of good journalism. Who is in the picture? Where was it taken? When was it taken? What does it show? Why is a subject doing a particular thing? Captions are written in the present tense and should use concise, simple English. They generally consist of a single sentence but a second sentence can be added if additional context or explanation is required. Contentious information, like death tolls in conflict, must be sourced. The caption must explain the circumstances in which a photograph was taken and state the correct date. Captions must not contain assumptions by the photographer about what might have happened, even when a situation seems likely. Explain only what you have witnessed. All other information about an event must be sourced unless you are certain of your information. Captions also should not make assumptions about what a person is thinking e.g. England captain David Beckham ponders his future after his team was knocked out of the World Cup soccer finals … Stick to what the photo shows and what you know.
Caption examples
• An employee of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd shows the media the
company’s new 32-Gigabit NAND flash memory card (top) and chip during a
news conference in Seoul September 11, 2006. Samsung said it has
developed the world’s first 32-Gigabit NAND flash memory devices.
REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (SOUTH KOREA)
• Actress Helen Mirren poses with the Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival
September 9, 2006. Mirren won the Best Actress award for her role in
director Stephen Frears’ movie ‘The Queen’. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
(ITALY)
• A man lies dead in the street May 7 after a NATO daylight air raid near a
market over the town of Nis some 200 kilometres south of Belgrade. The
Yugoslav army took media to show them damage it said the raid caused to
two residential areas and a hospital. REUTERS/Desmond Boylan
• Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai hugs a tree for photographers in Nairobi October 9, 2004. Maathai, a Kenyan, became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Nobel given to an environmentalist. REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
A Brief (slimmed down for IMMJ purposes) Guide to the Standards and Values of Reuters Video News
Never accept bribes nor accept gifts beyond those of nominal value. You should generally pay your own travel. Sometimes, however, you may travel with other organisations as it is the only way to access or get to a story safely. If, for example, you have gone to the scene of a story as part of a military embed or with an aid agency going to a disaster, you must say so in the script: e.g. “… in a trip organised by the Israeli military, journalists were taken to…” Various organisations often try to manipulate or stage-manage events — from military areas to business and entertainment. If you are restricted from going to certain areas or prevented from asking certain questions, we should make this clear. If you feel you are being unduly restricted and that the result would be a slanted story, you should be ready — in consultation with your tutors — to refuse to cover an event. Organised news events should be identified as such e.g. “…the CEO was speaking at a live media event organised by the company…” Never fake, fabricate or plagiarise a story. Video stories must not be shot, edited or scripted in a way which misleads the viewer. For example, when shooting demonstrations, convey the scale of the event accurately, using wide shots as well as close-ups. (There are very good online examples of this — protests made to look bigger and scarier than they actually are for example). Do not lift sections of copy from other news sources, Web sites or online encyclopaedias. Be aware how your presence with a camera affects action — take a look at this video
which documents photojournalism ‘machine’s’ coverage of East Jerusalem and West Bank protests

Reports
Do not use “reports” or “unconfirmed reports” as the basis for a story. You can quote an acceptable source commenting on them, e.g. “the minister said he could not confirm reports that 100 people had died” as long as the report is clearly newsworthy. Avoid using the word “reported” as a source in a headline. If forced to do so for space considerations, specify the source in the lead paragraph. Avoid writing…”it was not known…” In many cases what is meant by this phrase is that the reporter does not know. It is ridiculous to say, for instance, “It was not known who committed the robbery, the murder, planted the bomb”. Use a source in such cases,
e.g. “Police said they did not know…”
Analysts
Do not quote “analysts” or “experts”. Specify their area of expertise e.g. “a strategic affairs analyst with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations in New York” or “a media company analyst at Bear Stearns in London”.
Picking up from Twitter and social media Social networking and micro-blogging sites on the Internet, such as Twitter, are virtual venues where users around the world may sometimes post information and images of great interest that are not available elsewhere. This is especially true
in countries or circumstances where the regular free flow of information is impeded. You may sometimes retransmit such material, or refer to it in text stories. Handled correctly, material from such sites can enhance reporting.
• It is important to remember that Twitter and similar sites are not sources per se. It is wrong to talk, for example, about “picking up Twitter”. It makes no more sense to source a story to Twitter than to source it to “the Internet”
• Governments and other institutions are increasingly using Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites to get official information and news out to journalists and the general public. Journalists using official material from Twitter should mention that the information comes from Twitter (as one does with information from a press conference or press release), especially if Twitter is the only channel used.
• Verification can be a major issue. Textual, video or photographic material
might not be what it purports to be, either due to sloppy information from the person posting it or to deliberate deceit.
• In many cases, information initially coming via Twitter will serve simply as a tip, you need to check out and report the information in the regular way,
quoting more solid sources.
• If you go ahead, state “Twitter users said/ posted xxx”, say how much or how little we know about the source and whether you were able to contact them directly.
• Be mindful that copyright applies to the Internet. The person posting material might hold copyright, or worse, they might not hold copyright. The material could originate from a private individual, a company or another news organization. Wherever possible, we must seek to find and seek permission from the originator of the material.

Finally here are some further selected links:
SPJ Code of Ethics
BBC Editorial Guidelines
Los Angeles Times Ethics Guidelines for Reporters, Editors
National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics
National Public Radio Ethics Code
CHIP BERLET — Ethics