“It Has to Be in One’s Head and Heart”: The Understanding of Journalism Ethics in Latvian Media

ABSTRACT

Shared standards of ethics are an important element of the journalism profession. However, considerable cultural and individual differences exist in media workers’ views of what the main principles of journalism ethics are and what conduct those principles prescribe and prohibit. The aim of this paper is to examine media editors’ views on what constitutes ethical conduct and their decision-making concerning the application of ethics principles to practice. The data source is 20 semi-structured interviews with editors of various Latvian media outlets. Only half of the newsrooms included in this study had a code of ethics, and the editors tended to put more emphasis on unwritten rules. Decisions tend to be made situationally though deliberation among the staff or based on the authority of the editor. The interviewees generally agreed on the basic principles of ethics in their abstract form. However, few of them indicated awareness of the ambiguities and constraints of the abstract terms they employ to describe professional ethics, such as objectivity. Furthermore, the editors tended to conflate ethics principles with legal regulations or feedback from the audience. The results show that the way media workers talk about ethics reflects both their professional ideals and non-ethics factors that shape journalism practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Codes of ethics
• ethical decision-making
• interpretations of ethics
• journalism ethics
• Latvian media
• media self-regulation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Agnese Dāvidsone, PhD, Anastasija Tetarenko, and Ieva Luīze Deņisova for their help with the collection of data and Barbara S. Plakans for her support.

Disclosure statement

The author is a member of the Association of Latvian Journalists and its ethics committee, which appear in this paper.

ORCID

Ianis Bucholtz http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6538-5245

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been carried out within the project “The engagement of mass media in the integration of third country nationals in Latvia” (PMIF/7/2016/1/02), which was funded by The Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund of The European Commission.