Analysis of COVID-19 news coverage by Televisión Española (TVE1)

This article analyzes the news coverage of the COVID-19 health crisis by Televisión Española (TVE1), to determine if this media reported the news with rigor and in accordance with journalism professional codes and best practice guidelines. For this purpose, content analysis was conducted on the universe of news stories (n=1,449) in the TVE1 daily newscast, starting with the first outbreak of the pandemic on the Iberian Peninsula on February 26, 2020, until the end of the first state of emergency on June 21, 2020. Our categories of analysis were: information sources, news frames, predominant topics, resources used for dramatic effects, and breaches of journalism ethics in reporting news. In general, TVE1 did not engage in sensationalized or dramatized news coverage, but instead attempted to transmit a message that was educational and instructional. Its policy was to provide information on measures adopted by authorities to help prevent the spread of the pandemic. Nevertheless, TVE’s benevolent attitude towards the government and its policies can be observed in its news reporting, revealing a lack of impartiality and editorial independence by this media. Despite the importance of specialized and expert information in times of a pandemic, eyewitness sources were those most used in reporting news, even in economic news framing. Furthermore, these latter sources were employed instead of expert ones, which were in fact the least used, and whose presence progressively declined during the analyzed period.

Deontology of French Journalism in Contemporary Political Context

In the focus of the article are different views of French media representatives on the appropriateness of the Council for Deontology and Mediation, founded in France in December 2019. Te Council positions itself as an independent structure that carries out the functions of self-regulation (within the profession), and co-regulation (between journalists and audience) in the feld of mass media based on French and international codes of journalism ethics. Te Council considers mass media audience complaints about journalists’ violation of professional ethics and acts as an intermediary in resolving information disputes between journalists, publishers and the audience.Te main goal of the Council on Deontology and Mediation is to restore the audience’s trust in mass media and create a culture of honest journalism. However, its establishment and activities provoked a ferce debate in the French journalism community, splitting it into two camps. Te opponents, who happened to be in the majority, do not recognize the legitimacy of the Council and refuse to work with it.In this respect, the article examines the following issues: a brief history of French and international codes of journalism ethics; the reasons of the crisis of trust to traditional media; the political context in which the Council for Deontology and Mediation emerged; the Council’s structure and functions; arguments put for and against its activities; analysis of two cases that illustrate its activities.Te article is based on materials taken from traditional French media: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, Les Échos, L’Express, La Croix; online media: Médiapart and Contexte, as well as TV interviews with media representatives.

Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity

This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity.