Award-winning foreign correspondent Peter Greste has told Catholic media there needs to be a way of upholding the principles and ethics of journalism in the digital age. Source: The Southern Cross.
Referring to the Australian bishops’ 2024-25 Social Justice Statement on “Truth and Peace”, Greste said that in a world awash with social media it can often feel as though journalists’ jobs are redundant.
“How do we describe who is and who is not a journalist?” he asked during his address to more than 170 attendees at the Australian Catholic Communications Congress dinner in Sydney last week.
“How do we define the boundaries of what we do when anybody with a smartphone nowadays can produce journalism-like content, when anyone can produce a story that looks like a piece of news.”
But trying to define who is a journalist is the wrong approach, according to Greste who lectures in journalism at Macquarie University and is a vocal campaigner and advocate for media freedom.
“What we should be doing is thinking of not who is a journalist, not as a particular class of individual, but thinking of journalism as a process … as a methodological system for gathering, organising, assessing and presenting information in line with a recognised code of conduct; a set of ethics, a set of procedures and processes that give this information that we’re trying to convey a certain quality which elevates it beyond mere ‘bloggery’, beyond mere punditry, that gives it an authenticity, that gives it a credibility and an authority that sets it apart.”
Greste said this is what the Social Justice statement talks about when it speaks of the “search for truth”.
“Because if we do not apply those ethics and standards to all of the communication that we’re producing, regardless of whether you call yourself a journalist or a blogger or a communicator or a speechwriter or whatever, if we do not adhere to those fundamental ethics and principles, then what we are doing is adding to the noise and not to the truth.”
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Reporting in a hostile world (By Jenny Brinkworth, The Southern Cross)
