Lesson video

Hi there, I'm Mr. Joy I'm going to be your Citizenship teacher for today.

If you joined me for the first video then welcome back and if you're new thank you for joining me.

Today we're going to be looking at the responsibilities that the media has.

For today's lesson you're going to need a pen and some paper to write on.

It'll also be really helpful if you're able to find somewhere quiet to be able to do your work and make sure that you've also put away any distractions that might be around too.

Just going to give you a little bit of time, to be able to make sure that you're sorted and ready to get started.

And then we'll begin.

So just to go through an overview for today's lesson we're going to start off the lesson by thinking about how we would expect the media to behave.

We'll then look at what the media responsibilities are.

And then we're going to have a look at a case study about what can happen if journalists misbehave and don't follow the rules that they're supposed to.

To start off with, I'd like you to begin with a brief task, we need to think about what characteristics or traits you would expect a good journalist to demonstrate.

So in other words, how would you want them to act and how wouldn't you want them to behave? You could list your ideas or you could write them in a spider diagram the way that you want to present them is completely up to you.

So I'd like you to pause your video here to complete your task.

And then you can continue to play the video when you're ready to move on.

So I'm going to go through some answers that you may have had, to task one.

There's not really a right or a wrong answer so long as you can justify your point of view.

So these are just some ideas you may have had.

Now, if you watched the first lesson in the unit, you might remember, I explained about information neighbourhoods and how the news neighbourhood is the only one that includes verification, independence and accountability.

In case you haven't seen that video verification means that the information reported is accurate and can be fact checked.

So if a journalist was to try and verify the content of the article they would be fairly certain or more certain that what they're reporting on is the truth.

Being independent is important because it means that a journalist isn't going to benefit from what they're reporting on.

So if they were to own a company or to be involved in some sort of issue and they didn't declare that they were somehow connected to it then the information that is published might not be considered to be as reliable.

Accountability means that the author puts their name to their work.

They can take credit for the work if it's good, but also the flip side of that is that they can then take responsibility if there's a problem, they can make an amendment or they can apologise for an error if they need to.

If we don't know who is creating a news article it could potentially then lead to a lack of trust or confidence in the story and the publisher as a whole.

So aside from the VIA acronym that we've just gone through and we went through in the first session.

You might possibly suggest that informing and helping someone to understand an issue is important for the media to do as well.

'Cause that's one of the primary reasons that we have the media out there, to get information out into the society so that people know what is going on.

You might want the media to report news in a neutral way so that they report without opinion and just share the facts.

However, you might also potentially have the opposite point of view where you want someone to be able to give their opinion and to share how they interpret a situation to be going on.

So it could be either side of the coin.

And finally, the last suggestion that I've got is that we probably want the media to report in a timely manner, which links back to the news values that we were discussing in the first session as well.

It's no good for them to sit on a story for four years if it's about a house burning down, because you want that information as soon as possible particularly if that information is urgent and then could possibly have a massive impact on the public as well.

So in 2018 there was a group of researchers in America and they carried out a survey on about 2000 adults and they asked them, "What they wanted from journalists?" And so it's pretty much exactly the same question that I just asked you to complete in task one.

And these are some of the responses they gave.

So 87% of surveyed adults wanted the journalists to verify the information before they published a story.

So quite a high proportion.

"Being fair to all sides involved in the story." Was suggested by 78% and that meant that they didn't want certain groups of people like political parties or political supporters to be targeted or victimised or reported upon in a negative light.

Being neutral or impartial was important for 68% of those who were surveyed.

That's roughly two out of three and that means like I said on the previous slide about reporting the information and not giving a one sided or possibly biassed version of events.

61% of people wanted more diverse views to be shared.

And that's not necessarily about people themselves being diverse ethnically or by age.

It's also about being able to give multiple points of view on an issue.

So giving a wide range of opinions on a topic and not just the standard one or two angles.

54% of adults wanted the media to hold people in positions of authority to account.

Which is something that we're going to come back to in a little bit as well.

And that will be in lesson four of this unit and only 24% of respondents wanted news to be more entertaining.

And I say only because it's obviously the lowest total that's here on this slide.

'Cause you watched the first lesson, then hopefully you'll remember about how the entertainment information neighbourhood is really different to the news or the journalism neighbourhoods.

Because it doesn't focus on facts because it's there to try and entertain and to maybe make people happy or scared or whatever the genre of entertainment is.

I'm not really surprised that this total is so low in the survey, because I would expect that people would hopefully recognise that news isn't designed to be entertaining and so therefore it wouldn't be particularly high.

So here, we've got an interesting overview about what a range of different people want the media to do and to be.

And that could very much closely mirror your ideas or it could be a really stark contrast.

So it's something really interesting to consider and to explore.

I've got a second task right now.

what I'd like you to do is to have a look at the two pictures that are here and I want you to do two things for me.

Firstly, it's like a big game of spot the difference.

I want you to make a list of anything that you can see that is different between those images.

Once you've done that, I'd then like you to write a sentence to suggest why these images might be relevant to what we're learning about today.

So how it relates somehow to media responsibilities.

You can pause the video now while you look at the images and complete the task.

And then I'll explain what the significance of the images is.

And when you're ready to continue.

Now these images come from Adnan Hajj who is a photographer from Beirut in Lebanon.

Now Hajj had worked for a news organisation called Reuters for more than 10 years.

And in 2006, he was in Beirut and there was a conflict between Israel and Lebanon going on.

And he published the photo on the right and that purported to show smoke after an Israeli attack on Beirut the previous night.

So the photo was taken the next morning.

But there was a problem.

The photo on the right wasn't actually an original photo.

So Hajj had edited the image to try and exaggerate the bombing damage.

So you can see that the smoke there is darker and you can see he's changed the colour of the sky.

Had cropped the image a little bit to make it a little bit different as well.

So the image on the left is the one that's actually the original.

And one of the things that really indicated that he had changed the image was that he used a tool in Photoshop called the Clone tool.

And that gives it the bubble pattern that you can see in the right hand picture where you've got in the centre bit, the big cloudy bit and you've got the same pattern which wouldn't normally be there if the smoke was actually real and natural.

So as a result of this when it came to light that he had edited this image and not admitted it, Reuters removed all of Hajj's images from their archives.

So he can no longer sell any of his images through them now he no longer works for them either.

So this was a consequence of him not being honest which betrayed the trust of the people who would have been looking at the image and assuming that it was accurate.

So this leads in really nicely to the main topic of today's lesson.

And we're going to look at the question, what are the media's responsibilities? So there's two major sets of rules which journalists are expected to follow.

One is the NUJ Code of Conduct and the other is the Editor's Code of Practise.

So I'm going to give you a little bit of information about what each of them involve and what rules journalists are required to abide by.

So the NUJ Code of Conduct comes from The National Union of Journalists and NUJ is one of the world's largest journalists' unions.

And any journalist who joins the NUJ must agree to the Code of Conduct.

And you can see from the picture there that there's 12 core rules and obviously they're very small and I'm not expecting you to see them.

I'm going to go through some of those in particular for you.

Now the Code of Conduct talks about correcting harmful inaccuracies and that means that if there is an error that is made then it needs to be fixed.

Particularly if that possibly has a negative impact on an individual or a group of people.

So if something is said that challenges their character or makes them look like they're not a nice person then that would be an harmful inaccuracy if it wasn't truthful.

The code also instructs journalists to really clearly identify the difference between when they're talking about a fact and an opinion and also to be really open and honest when they're gathering materials.

So not lying about what they're doing and not trying to be really sneaky and deceitful.

Not invading privacy unless required and appropriate is another rule.

And we'll come back to that a little bit later in more detail.

It's obvious from the name but we're going to dig a little bit deeper.

Protecting the identity of sources means that journalists don't need to divulge who has given them information.

So keeping them anonymous so you don't have to get them in trouble particularly if they are a whistleblower.

Which is a term used to describe someone who's giving information so that other people can be aware of it.

The last one that I've got here, sorry, the second last one that I've got here is about not discriminating against others.

So not treating them differently based on a given characteristic and those characteristics often are protected by something called the Equality Act 2010.

The last one is about not plagiarising or copying the work of fellow journalists.

And obviously that's not a good thing because they deserve credit for their own work.

So this isn't the full list like I said before I've only got seven of them, actually, I've got eight.

I can count.

I promise.

And I just really want to pick out the ones that were really the most important.

So the second set of rules that we're going to look at is something called the Editor's Code of Practise.

Now, the name of this is a little bit misleading because it doesn't just apply to the editor.

And the editor is the person who oversees the publication of the newspaper or the broadcast if it's TV or something else.

The Code of Practise actually applies to anyone who works for that news outlet.

So that includes the individual journalists, it includes photographers and proofreaders and the editors as well.

So the Code of Conduct sets out the rules that all those people for that organisation then have to follow.

And it's enforced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation who often referred to as IPSO.

And they are an organisation that is in charge of regulating the newspapers and magazines in the U.

K.

So this set of rules, the Editors' Code of Practise is specific just to newspapers and magazines only.

And then on top of that you've also got the fact that being a member of IPSO is actually optional for those newspapers and magazines.

So even then not all journalists are required to follow these requirements even if they are working for a newspaper or a magazine instead.

So from that you've already got two reasons why some journalists don't need to follow these rules and that's either because they don't work for a newspaper or a magazine or because the outlet that they work for hasn't signed up to these rules from IPSO.

So, I've picked out five of the most important rules from the Editors Code of Practise.

So again, we've got some rules about not publishing inaccurate or misleading information and images.

It harks back to the first one that was in the NUJ Code of Conduct as well.

And this goes back to the idea of the media being honest and accurate in their work like we discussed earlier as well.

Also journalists being expected to respect the privacy of individuals so they're not invading privacy of those people unless there is an awfully good reason to do so.

They also need to make sure that they're not intimidating or harassing people.

And they need to be respectful of people and both when they're dealing with them in a day to day basis but then also if they're reporting about something like a crime in particular.

So being sensitive, if we're talking to a victim or being considerate of maybe a witness and what they may have seen.

If you're trying to interview them there as well.

The last one here is about reporting in the public interest and that relates to things that are important to the public.

We're going to come back to that a little later in this lesson because it's a really important one to dissect and get right as to what that term actually means.

So I'm going to stop here for a moment to check your understanding of the rules that we've looked at so far.

And we need to have a look at the four options that are on the screen.

And I want you to decide which of the actions would break the rules that we've just described.

There might be more than one correct answer here.

So option one, publishing a story from a source which later turns out to be false.

Option two knowingly publishing false stories about a celebrity.

Option three publishing an opinion piece about a high profile politician.

And option four passing off someone else's work as their own with their credit.

If you need more time you can pause the video here before I explain the correct answers.

So the correct answers here are options two and four.

Now option two would break the rules because the reporter knows that this story is not truthful before they publish it.

Now that's different from option one.

So in option one, if the journalist thought that the information was accurate and then after they published it they found out it was wrong.

That's not their fault.

So assuming that they retracted the story, so took back what they'd said or they made a clear apology and explains the situation.

Then they haven't really done anything wrong.

So option one is totally fine.

Option three is fine so long as it's sufficiently clear that it's opinion rather than trying to present it as a fact.

And option four violates the rules because plagiarism is clearly forbidden.

Particularly under the NUJ Code of Conduct which applies to all journalists in the union regardless of where they're working for.

What I'd now like you to do for task three is to choose any three of the rules that journalists would have to follow.

That we've mentioned from either the Code of Conduct or the Editors' Code of Practise.

And for the each of those three rules I'd like you to write me a sentence to explain whether or not you think that rule is appropriate.

And then also why you think that.

So justifying your opinion.

So you can pause the video here and then you can go back to the lists for each of the codes on the previous slides.

And then when you are ready you can continue to play the video.

We're now going to come back to the two areas that I teased a little bit earlier about privacy and something called the public interest.

So what does it mean for something to be in the public interest? The phrase in the public interest is something which can be a bit tricky to define really clearly.

But I really like this definition from the Macmillan Dictionary which describes it as something the public has a right to know about because it affects them.

So it's really important to distinguish this from things that are interesting to the public though.

So just because something is interesting or I think it's interesting doesn't mean I have the right to know about it.

So for example, I might want to know who my favourite singer is dating, but that doesn't actually mean that I have a right to have that information because it's private.

It's their private life, they don't have to share it if they don't want to.

So there's a few things which would be probably considered to be in the public interest.

And this isn't like a finite list of only these things but these are pretty typical examples of what might be considered in the public interest.

So talking about things like where someone is detecting a crime or exposing a crime and making sure that people are aware of what is happening.

Where the media was trying to protect the public from being misled about something important.

So again, looking back to that idea of informing the public.

Making sure that people's public health and safety is safeguarded.

So everyone is safe and no one is at risk from something.

Making sure that improper conduct is discussed and identified.

So if someone is in a position of power or authority and they're doing something wrong then that would be something that would be probably deemed to be in the public interest as well.

And the last one is about identifying miscarriages of justice.

So that's where people have been found guilty of a crime that they're actually innocent of or maybe the evidence was tampered with or they didn't get a fair trial in court.

So those sorts of things are going to be examples of what might be considered to be in the public interest.

So in task four I want you to assume the role of the editor of a newspaper or if you really want to it doesn't have to be newspaper.

You could be in charge of a TV news network instead.

In any case I want you to work out what you should publish.

So in the worksheet, you've got a number of scenarios to look at.

There's eight scenarios and I want you to have a think about whether each of those scenarios is or is not in the public interest.

And whether you should publish/air on your TV network these stories.

So you can pause the video here.

You can then click through to see those eight scenarios make some notes about each of them.

Even if you just number one to eight on your piece of paper and write down whether you think they are or aren't in the public interest.

And then I'll go through the same answers.

So of the eight scenarios that I presented you with there are five of them that would be considered to be in the public interest.

So we're going to go through them one by one.

So the first one is the one about the local resident who has been arrested for selling drugs.

So that comes under the idea of exposing crimes and potentially also comes in under public safety as well.

So that will be in the public interest.

The next one is about the products being sold by the supermarket which are wrongly labelled as vegan because that's about the public being misled.

And potentially if we're talking about maybe the risk of allergens and people having some sort of reaction to it you could also possibly say it comes in under public safety as well.

The one about the teacher secretly showing GCSE papers to pupils before the exams that's about improper conduct.

And we know that a teacher obviously shouldn't be doing that regardless of how much they want to help their pupils.

That's really unprofessional behaviour.

In the case where a company's range of electrical appliances are found to be faulty then that's clearly about the public health and safety.

And potentially if the company is covering it up then that might be about them being misled as well.

And the last one is about the local council having overspent on its budget despite warnings that's improper conduct because whoever is in charge of that spending isn't doing a good job in managing that.

And potentially I guess it could be about exposing a crime depending on how the budget was spent and to what extent it was overspent.

So we've looked at what the public wants the media to do and we've seen what the media's responsibilities are according to the two codes.

And now we're going to consider what might happen if a journalist was to break these rules.

This image is really significant in a case study that I'm going to talk you through.

Now, you might be able to see this and have some recollection of what happened or it might be completely new to you.

I'm going to start by summarising some key information about what happened in this case study before we then have a look at what happened afterwards as a result.

You hopefully will have noticed the fact that it's got something to do with the newspaper called "News of The World" and they're saying goodbye.

So presumably something has happened to cause the end of that newspaper and that something is phone hacking.

So the "News of The World" was a tabloid newspaper.

So one of those newspapers that tend to have a lot of pictures and maybe seen as not being as reputable as a broadsheet newspaper.

And they regularly featured stories about celebrities.

So the front pages had gossip or stories about all sorts of famous people.

And so these stories have to originate from somewhere and between 2005 and 2011 there were a number of investigations of the "News of The World" into journalists and their involvement in hacking into the voicemails of celebrities.

This was known as phone hacking where the journalist would gain access to the recordings and listen to them and potentially then even delete them afterwards too.

One of the first times that anyone suspected that anything was going on was when Prince William had organised to meet Tom Bradby from "ITV News" who was the world correspondent at the time.

And the "News of The World" then published an article about stuff that was discussed in a voicemail that was left between the two of them.

The problem was that other than Prince William and Tom Bradby themselves, the only two people who knew that this meeting was happening were two of the princess staff who presumably weren't going to be telling anyone.

So after they had had the meeting and had a conversation about their suspicions.

They came to the conclusion that someone had probably listened to their voicemails.

And then there were other things that went on where other information that also came from Prince William's voicemails also then got published.

After a number of years of denying that anything was actually going on in April 2011.

the "News of The World" officially apologised for hacking into emails, sorry, voicemails of different celebrities and they set up a compensation fund that would give money to people who'd been affected by those actions.

But that then caused so much negative publicity for the newspaper that its owners decided that on July 10th 2011 the final edition of "News of The World" was going to be published.

Now that is a very brief overview of what happened in this situation.

But you can see that a number of journalists had behaved inappropriately by hacking the voicemails and using that private information claiming it to be important for people to know about.

What I would now want to look at is what happened afterwards.

The consequences of these actions.

Later in 2011 The Leveson Inquiry began.

That Leveson Inquiry was a number of hearings which were trying to gather evidence about the cultures, the practises, and the ethics of the media.

So what they thought was right and wrong as well.

And when that Leveson Inquiry ended in 2012.

One of the major recommendations was that the media themselves create a new regulatory body.

And that was quite controversial because some people thought that it should be down to the government to set that up.

And other people thought that what was already in existence, the Press Complaints Commission was absolutely fine as it was.

Now the outcome of this was that IPSO was created.

And if you remember back to early in this lesson, that's the Independent Press Standards Organisation that I mentioned the one that oversees the Editor's Code of Practise.

So we've gone full circle here looking at now how IPSO was created off the back of the Leveson Inquiry.

Another consequence of the actions that took place in the phone hacking scandal, was that one of the former editors Andy Coulson was found guilty of conspiring to hack those phones and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

And another consequence is that since then a number of celebrities who believe that their phones were hacked which include Elton John and Hugh Grant have settled court cases against the company that published "News of The World." So there was also a financial aspect to all of this as well.

I know that that's quite a lot of information to take in.

So what I'd like you to do now is to take a moment to summarise and then reflect upon what happened in the phone hacking scandal.

I'd like you to write a paragraph about what happened and then use some of the questions on the screen here to help you to think about your own opinions of what happened.

Now if you need to, you could rewind the video to go back a few slides and hear some of the explanations again but it would be really interesting to then start to consider whether there is ever a good reason to be able to justify hacking voicemails.

Whether it was the right decision to shut the newspaper down.

And whether you think possibly that the people who carried out that phone hacking should have been punished further.

You can pause the video here to give you time to complete the task go back to the previous slides as I mentioned as you need.

And then we will finish it off.

I'm really, really pleased about how hard you've worked in today's lesson.

So you've looked at your own personal views about how you think the media should act and then you've compared it to the views from the people who were surveyed over in America as well.

We then had a look at the responsibilities that the media has in terms of following the NUJ Code of Conduct and the Editors' Code of Practise.

And then finally we looked at the case study of what happened with "News the World" in the phone hacking scandal and considering what happens if journalists break those rules.

Thank you so much for your work today.

I'd really love to see some examples of your work.

If you'd like to share what you've done today, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Twitter tagging at Oak National.

And with the hashtag #LearnwithOak.

I really hope you'll join me again.

Next time, we're going to keep looking at different ways in which the media affects us.

Bye.