Journalistic ethics, the Press Ombudsman and working with vulnerable people.
1.
“As Ireland’s Press Ombudsperson, my role is to make decisions on complaints from members of the
public about articles published in Irish newspapers, magazines and online publications or about the
behaviour of journalists. My instrument is the Code of Practice which was drawn up by editors when
the Press Council and Office of the Press Ombudsman was founded in 2008, and independent Press
Regulation was introduced in Ireland. Complaints are based on assertions that one or more of the
Principles contained in the Code have been breached.
The Preamble to the Code of Practice sets out the balancing act which the Press Ombudsman has to
perform:
The freedom to publish is vital to the right of the people to be informed. This freedom includes the
right of a newspaper to publish what it considers to be news, without fear or favour, and the right to
comment upon it.
Freedom of the press carries responsibilities. Members of the press have a duty to maintain the
highest professional and ethical standards. This Code sets the benchmark for those standards.
I’ll just quickly run through the Code:
Principle 1 − Truth and Accuracy
1.1 In reporting news and information, the press shall strive at all times for truth and accuracy.
Principle 2 − Distinguishing Fact and Comment
2.1 The press is entitled to advocate strongly its own views on topics.
2.2 Comment, conjecture, rumour and unconfirmed reports shall not be reported as if they are fact.
Principle 3 − Fair Procedures and Honesty
3.1 The press shall strive at all times for fair procedures and honesty in the procuring and publishing
of news and information.
Principle 4 − Respect for Rights
Everyone has constitutional protection for his or her good name. The press shall not knowingly
publish matter based on malicious misrepresentation or unfounded accusations.
Principle 5 − Privacy
5.1 Privacy is a human right, protected as a personal right in the Irish Constitution and the European
Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into Irish law. The private and family life, home
and correspondence of everyone must be respected.
Principle 6 − Protection of Sources
Principle 7 − Court Reporting
The press shall strive to ensure that court reports (including the use of images) are fair and accurate,
are not prejudicial to the right to a fair trial and that the presumption of innocence is respected.
Principle 8 − Prejudice
The press shall not publish material intended or likely to cause grave offence or stir up hatred
against an individual or group on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, colour, ethnic origin, membership of the travelling community, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, illness or age.
Principle 9 − Children
9.2 Journalists and editors should have regard for the vulnerability of children
Principle 10 − Reporting of Suicide
In the reporting of suicide, excessive detail of the means of suicide should be avoided.
Principle 11 – Publication of the Decision of the Press Ombudsman / Press Council
11.1 When requested or required by the Press Ombudsman and/or the Press Council to do so, the press shall publish the decision in relation to a complaint with due prominence. Once I finalise a decision, it is sent to the complainant and the editor of the publication. Either or both parties can appeal my decision on specific grounds, and if they do so the appeal is heard by the 13 person Press Council. The Press Council’s decision is final.
2. Trauma Informed Approach.
The concept of trauma informed approaches to working with people is new. However it is, I think,
compatible with the Press Council’s Code of Practice, which intrinsically requires that journalism
show due respect to the rights of individuals and social groups.
Principle 3 calls for fair procedures and honesty. Principle 4 is founded on protecting the right to a
good name. Principle 5 refers to the requirement to respect privacy and not to intrude in situations
of grief or shock. Principle 7 calls for the presumption of innocence to be upheld in court reporting.
Principle 8 in particular states that:
The press shall not publish material intended or likely to cause grave offence or stir up hatred
against an individual or group on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, colour, ethnic origin,
membership of the travelling community, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, illness
or age. And Principle 9 says the press must take account of the vulnerability of children.
In some circumstances the public interest overrides individual principles – the right to privacy of a
public figure who is seen to have behaved in a hypocritical way in relation to their public stance on
an issue, for example.
The clearest statement of the values which underlie my work is contained in the Preamble to the
Code.
Professor John Horgan, Ireland’s founding Press Ombudsman, wrote in 2014 that:
“The Preamble sets out the basic values on which the Principles of the Code are based. The Press
Council, the Press Ombudsman and all member publications have a duty under the Preamble to
honour the Code in the spirit as well as in the letter. This underlines the fact that the Code is,
essentially, a document which values sincerity, honesty, and fair dealing as much as the specific
prescriptions it necessarily contains.”
Most of the journalists I’ve known and worked with are fundamentally decent and empathetic
people. They want their work to do good. But what they often fail to grasp is the power of their
work to do harm. There is a power dynamic at play when you intervene into the life of a person about whom you are writing, or whose photograph you are taking. Journalists take great care to
maintain boundaries when their subjects are confident, respectable, well-established people with
solicitors to hand. Unfortunately, they sometimes take less care with those who have lower social
status and who are more vulnerable.
Here is a quote from a book called Poor by Katrina O’Sullivan. This book has been No 1 in the Irish
best sellers list for 54 weeks now. Now a university professor, the author grew up in an
impoverished estate in Birmingham with parents who were addicts. As a young woman she returns
to Ireland, where her family was from, gets into a university access programme and flourishes. Here
is what she says:
“I kept being reminded I lived in a city with a hidden class system. Ireland pretends it doesn’t have
class, and systematically perhaps it doesn’t, but the population divides itself into a cruel caste
system and, depending on which side of the street you live on, you are judged….” She goes on: “I
wanted equality.”
3. Belfast Rape Crisis Centre:
When I worked as a counsellor and advocate in the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre in the early 1980s we
used to get calls from journalists. We had set up the Centre because in the North of Ireland at that
time there was what was called “the violence” meaning the guns and the bombs, the activities of the
British army, the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries. As feminists we knew that there was another
kind of violence, the hidden and overshadowed violence of men that was directed at women and
children. So we welcomed media coverage – it gave us a chance to break a terrible silence.
But many of these calls from journalists went as follows:
Can you put us in touch with some victims of rape.
Answer: Maybe, depends. What had you in mind?
We want to talk to a Catholic woman who’s been raped by a British soldier, and we want to talk to a
Protestant woman who’s been raped by an IRA man.
Answer: Oh.
So we’d explain that it wasn’t really like that and that most women were raped by men from their
own community, or even in their own family and then there would be an awkward silence and then
they’d ask again for the matching sets they said they needed for their story. I felt sometimes that
they saw us as a kind of mail order service, what would today be described as online shopping for
victims.
It was a graphic example of a kind of journalism that thinks it knows the story before it investigates
it, and that finds it hard to relinquish the stereotypes even when it knows better.
(There was also an assumption that we would just call up someone who had come to us in distress
and under conditions of confidentiality and ask them if they’d like to tell their story to a newspaper
or a TV station.
We did ask, sometimes, if the journalist was one we knew could be trusted to treat the woman with
respect, and if the woman had indicated she would like to speak out. Often, we would not ask, partly in case the woman might do it because she was grateful for the support she had got from the
Rape Crisis Centre, and thought it was what we wanted.)
4. Bloody Sunday
I grew up in Derry, a city famous around the world for the fact that in 1972, Bloody Sunday
happened, when British soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march, killing 13 people and wounding
many others. I was 15 and my school was about half a mile up the road from the Bogside area
where the atrocity was perpetrated.
But Bloody Sunday was never mentioned in my school. Not one word. Many of the dead were
young, some of them teenagers, like us. But Londonderry High School went on as if it had never
happened.
The demonstrators and their dead were from the Catholic, nationalist community. My school was
Protestant, its students from the unionist community. I grew up in a state founded upon segregation
and discrimination. I know its bigotry in my bones, and I still have to subdue the hateful sectarianism
that was so drummed into me by my upbringing that it feels like a poison in my blood. My point is
that prejudice is perceived by the person in its grip as a normal view. It must be recognised as a
distortion and then it must be unlearned.
5. Journalism principles
The Irish journalist Justine McCarthy has described how shortly after the horrific story emerged into
the public domain of a young woman who had been brutally abused for many years by her father,
including giving birth to a child conceived as a result of rape by him, she found out the young
woman’s name and where she lived. Justine’s editor instructed her to go and get a full
interview. Justine told the editor she thought this would be intrusive. The editor insisted. Justine
went to the woman’s house, told her of the editor’s request and added: “I strongly advise you to say
no.” And the young woman did say no, and Justine conveyed this refusal to her editor.
Sophia’s Story. My first book was called Sophia’s Story and was the biography of a young woman
who, along with her siblings, barely made it alive through a childhood of violent abuse by her
father. She and her brother repeatedly told professional people – police, teachers, doctors, nurses,
social workers – about what was happening. Nothing was done. Disturbing interventions with
potentially momentous outcomes that would be difficult to navigate were avoided. Traditional
religious values were applied. The sanctity of the family was preserved.
Sophia realised she was not going to be taken seriously. She then came up with the remarkable
strategy of getting a third level education so that she could present her case to the authorities as the
equal of those who had dismissed her when she was just a child from a poor and clearly
dysfunctional family. She and her siblings brought her father to court, and he got the longest
sentence ever handed down in an Irish court.
When I asked her if I could write a book about her, she made very sure she could trust me before
she agreed. We agreed that she would have oversight of the manuscript as it progressed. She
worked closely with me on the book, steering me into keeping her remembered perceptions as a
child, and her lived experience in the foreground. It became recommended reading for social
workers and others whose work brings them into contact with vulnerable people.
As a Northern Irish Troubles reporter, I did a lot of interviews with people bereaved by murder. In
2019 I was commissioned by Queen’s University and the Commission for Victims and Survivors, to
write guidelines for journalists working with people who had experienced political violence
themselves, or who had lost loved ones to it.
https://victimsandthepast.org/assets/uploads/Guidelines-for-Journalists-Editors-and-Journalism-
Educators.pdf
I consulted with victims and survivors, their representative groups, journalists, editors and
journalism teachers. The guidelines include reference to the NUJ’s code of conduct, which includes
the rule that a journalist “does nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless
justified by overriding consideration of the public interest.” They advise journalists always to identify
themselves and their purpose, and to offer a business card. To let them know they can change their
mind and stop an interview.
They urge the journalist to check that the person is alright after the interview. To remember that
deciding to talk to the media is usually a big deal for people. To let them know when the piece will
be broadcast or published. To make sure what they publish will not put anyone at risk. Crucially,
they say, “make sure a person is capable of giving informed consent to an interview.” If they are not,
it is unethical and unprofessional to publish it.
The Press Council’s Code of Practice is compatible with those guidelines and with the NUJ’s Code of
Principles. All of us as Ombudspersons fundamentally recognise through our work that high
standards are not just for those who can insist on them. They have to be provided equally to
everyone.
12 June 2024, Bristol
