Media must uphold higher standards

IT WAS Claude-Jean Bertrand, writing about media ethics, who declared that expecting too much from ethics is just as dangerous as ignoring ethics.

This thought came to me as I reflected on media ethical issues that have been in the news recently, and the scepticism from both the public and government about ethical lapses.

There is no doubt that newspapers act swiftly when faced with such lapses. Over the years, there have been ethical issues like plagiarism, and more recently a case of "brown-envelope journalism", in which journalists were found to have pocketed payoffs and tender favours facilitated by a high-ranking politician in the governing party in order to write positively about him.

The two journalists, both senior writers on major Western Cape newspapers, left in a cloud of protest, not only from readers, but also from the journalistic community. They had let the team down, they had brought journalism into disrepute and many felt they had tainted journalists' collective name through their actions.

Journalists have to learn to live up to their own standards - even though the standards might not be high enough in the eye of those who seek to control media content. Brown-envelope journalism is not unique to South Africa - it happens throughout the world.

The critical point, however, is that those who are found out pay a heavy price and have to leave the profession.

Clearly, what the then premier of Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, allegedly did was to ask journalists to fabricate positives about him in order to gain advantage over his rivals. They also had to misrepresent the story of the day, for if it were newsworthy the story would have made the news pages anyway, meaning there was going to be no need to pay off anybody to do the story.

Even if the journalists just did their job, and had stories published legitimately, the fact of accepting envelopes would itself have been unethical. If the whole episode were indeed, true, Rasool would be just as guilty of unethical behaviour as the journalists on this matter.

Does society expect too much from the media? Does society judge politicians as harshly as they do journalists? The truth is that media management does not take kindly to this kind of behaviour, which is not what one gets from the government, acting against its own people. And particularly, considering the high rank of the official in this case, it would require even greater sanction.

However, what seems clear is that people in government live in glass houses, and none of them, including the president of the country, want to be the first to throw stones.

On the contrary, in the case of the Western Cape Brown Envelope Journalism case, life goes on for those journalists. One holds an executive position on a media group that does publications like the SAA in-flight magazine, Sawubona. SAA is a state-owned enterprise. They also publish a magazine of Government Communication and Information Systems. By all accounts, he now holds a better job than he held in his previous life, probably better paying as well.

The media can only stand by and watch. People who have given the profession a bad name are getting cushy jobs as reward - by government and the ruling party, it seems. And yet they stand on podiums and declare how the media is failing society when they are engaged in corrupting media people. Often, the media is accused of being defensive, and losing the fundamental issues that society is worried about regarding the media. But the media generally does work hard to resolve errors.