Newsroom democracy ensures journalistic freedom and fosters fair and balanced reporting by opening up the discussion of news selection and coverage. There’s been an increasing awareness of the importance of internal freedom in the news industry, as advertising and investments have come to have an increasing influence on news coverage in addition to influence due to ownership structure. While the newspaper law (Chapter 1, Article 5) indicates that a general daily newspaper may run its newsroom council, it requires neither newsroom council nor editorial guidelines. Some major news media have newsroom councils, often under the labour union, and most have editorial guidelines of their own. Demands for, as well as pushes against, making amendments on the current newspaper law to require’ editorial guidelines and newsroom councils isn’t something new. The 2009 amendment of the media-related laws that legalised cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcasters eliminated articles on promoting newsroom councils and editorial guidelines.
Most recently, in 2019, the National Union of Mediaworkers demanded the amendment of the newspaper law to make the newsroom council mandatory and to require the inclusion of news staff representatives in the council, but no bill has been introduced to the congress yet. The broadcasting law, on the other hand, includes fairly detailed instructions on how to ensure freedom of the press and internal democracy. The broadcasters must assign broadcast programming managers and present their names at least once daily during the broadcasting hours while guaranteeing freedom in programming for them. The law states that the freedom and independence of broadcast news programming shall be guaranteed. The broadcast news companies should institute a covenant on news programming, in consultation with the employees in charge of news, and make a public announcement. Interviews show that the discussions in the newsroom regarding which news to report and kill or which framing the story should take are overall freely conducted. Although the final say goes to the senior desk staff, the opinion of the individual reporter is almost always heard.
When asked about the direct and indirect factors that interfere with the freedom of the press, the editorial executive officers were ranked the second-most influential following the advertisers, more influential than the company owners, whose influence was almost nil. The responses to questions about freedom at different stages of reporting showed that journalists feel they have the greatest freedom in the writing process. Journalists’ freedom in each of the three stages of reporting, selection of the story, article writing, and the final decision to publish the reporting, was scored out of five points and garnered 3.84, 3.95, and 3.71, respectively. There were some differences among the media types, with journalists from Internet media enjoying the greatest freedom, while broadcast journalists had the least freedom in the overall reporting process. The differences seem to stem from the difference in tradition and scale of operation.
Awareness of gender diversity in the newsroom is definitely on the rise, but there has been no instance of explicit internal rules to support and promote female journalists’ careers and their access to managerial positions.
