Covering the FIFA World Cup | Using Disturbing Images of Migrants| World Refugee Day | New EJN events + our round-up of global media ethics news.
26 June 2018
REFUGEE CRISIS: THE IMMEDIATE AND LASTING IMPACTS OF POWERFUL IMAGES
"Recent images and footage of migrant children housed in wire cages near the United States’ southern border have fuelled global outrage.
President Donald Trump has now signed an executive order to end the separation of immigrant families at the US-Mexico border. Trump apparently bent to public pressure from many sides, including the feelings of his wife Melania Trump.
But apart from driving policy in the short term, do confronting images create change in public perception and willingness to act in relation to refugee issues?"
IMPROVING MIGRATION REPORTING - Refugee and asylum seekers share how media coverage affects them and how it can be improved (The Discourse) - How immigration reporting overlooks women (CJR)
MIGRATION & THE MEXICO-US BORDER The editor of Time magazine has defended featuring a crying migrant girl on their most recent cover on children being separated from their parents on the US border. Despite the girl not being separated from her mother, Edward Felsenthal argued that using her image was justified as 'She became the face of this story'.
- An op-ed for the Washington Post described the decision as a "major mistake". - The truth behind this photo of an 'immigrant child' crying inside a cage (CNN)
For context on migration reporting, the Mexico-US border & Trumpsee the Mexico and US chapters of our Moving Stories report from 2015.
Tonight, as part of the Ethical Journalism Network's Ethics in the News series of events at the Frontline Club, the EJN is hosting a screening of The Workers Cup, a film that takes us inside the labour camps of Qatar.
The screening, which is timed to coincide with the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, will be followed by a debate - moderated by our Chairperson, Dorothy Byrne - on how media report on human rights issues connected to major sporting events.
- Lessons from reporting on FIFA World Cup: Q&A with Camila Mattoso (IJNET)
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR BLOG
Turkey: Elections in a fake news climate: Snap elections in Turkey took place on June 25 against a backdrop of turmoil, conflict and crises, and amid a continued clampdown on freedom of expression and civil liberties, writes Beatrice White for the Green European Journal.
Internet Reform: Facebook and a Fight Behind Enemy Lines: Aidan White reviews a new book outlining arguments for abandoning social media by Jaron Lanier, an internet pioneer who says we should reclaim the net for the sake of our sanity and our humanity.
‘Got an angry Muslim for me?’: Investigative journalist Zoë Papaikonomou and organizational anthropologist Annebregt Dijkman examine why Dutch news media still fail to become more culturally diverse in their new book.
Scroll down for our summary of global media ethics news.
WHAT WE ARE READING
Defending Independent Media: A Comprehensive Analysis of Aid Flows (CIMA)
GENDER
How to end misogyny in the news industry: An open letter to the international journalism community (Nieman Lab) US: Study: male political reporters retweet other dudes 3 times more than their female colleagues (Vox) UK: Men still dominate flagship news programmes as improvement in number of on-air expert women stalls (Press Gazette)
MENTAL HEALTH
- Increase in news coverage of mental health issues has led to nearly a third of people feeling 'less alone' (Press Gazette)
PLATFORMS & TRUST
- Facebook tried to block an investigation by Reveal about immigrant children in detention being forcible drugged because it categorised the content as "political". Mashable and others have covered the story.
- Times, Sun, Guardian and Telegraph create joint advertising platform to compete with Facebook and Google duopoly (Press Gazette)
GLOBAL ETHICS NEWS
AFRICA
ETHIOPIA: Photojournalist shares experiences of going into exile (CPJ) NIGERIA: Guild of Corporate Online Publishers Backs New Media Code For Election Coverage In Nigeria (The Eagle Online) ZIMBABWE: Fact-checking around the world: Inside Zimbabwe’s ZimFact (IJNET)
AMERICAS
ETHICS & SOURCES - "How an Affair Between a Reporter and a Security Aide Has Rattled Washington Media". The New York Times on the controversy surrounding one of their own reporters. - With the press under assault, the stakes are too high for journalists to fail on basic ethics (Poynter)
Via Poynter: "Americans believe 39 percent of news in newspapers, on TV or on the radio is misinformation — but their views of social media are even worse. They believe 65 percent of news on social media is made up or can’t be verified as accurate."
US: American media keeps falling for Russian trolls (CNN) US: How the conventions of political journalism help spread Trump’s lies (Washington Post) US: Freelancers are precarious. When should they push back? (CJR)
ASIA
AUSTRALIA: ABC under attack: The fight for public broadcasting (Public Media Alliance) CHINA: What happens when China’s state-run media embraces AI? (CJR)
EUROPE
ITALY: The Outrage Cycle, Italian Style (The Atlantic) ITALY: The negative images on migration portrayed by the Italian newspapers (EuroNews)
MIDDLE EAST
TURKEY:Turkish media plurality 'in agony' under President Erdogan says Reporters Without Borders rep ahead of country's snap elections (Press Gazette)
EJN ANNUAL REPORT 2017/2018
The Ethical Journalism Network Annual Report for 2017 and the first months of 2018 covers a period in which the buzzwords “fake news” and “post-truth” provided a misleading but appropriate focus for the news industry.
In recent months the challenges of a flawed information landscape have been dramatically exposed with Google, Facebook and other internet giants being called to account for their failure to promptly deal with the pollution of the information landscape.
The EJN's Trust in Ethical Journalism reports looks at how the communications revolution is continuing to pose more questions than answers over a public crisis of confidence, both in democracy and in sources of public information.
Can 2018 be the year when ethical journalism, a human instinct beyond encoding and algorithmic definition, finally gets the recognition it deserves?
Last month the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) published guidelines on Media and Trafficking in Human Beingsauthored by the Ethical Journalism Network's Aidan White.
After a screening of 'Another News Story' the Chair of the Ethical Journalism Network, Dorothy Byrne, who is the Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, moderated a discussion with director / producer Orban Wallace, producer Verity Wislocki, and forced migration researcher Ahmad al-Rashid. You can also listen to the event as a podcast.
Watch the EJN's Tom Law talk about how a fake news story triggered a major geo-political crisis in May last year and the effects are still being felt across the Gulf nations on Al Jazeera's Inside Story.
Watch EJN Adviser Bill Orme address an informalhearing at the United Nationsas part of the preparatory process for an international conference for migration to adopt a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration.
