In Greece, the public debate on the role of media as watchdogs is by no means systematic, nor does it include effective or high-esteem institutionalised mechanisms for scrutinising the performance of the leading news media. The Greek media system, due to its particularities, has not facilitated the development of a truly dynamic and commonly respected body of journalistic ethics. At the same time, it is questionable whether a Greek journalist can stand above ownership influences, since their views can hardly be independent from their media organisation’s “line” – editorial policy.
This lack of independence is not new. It can be seen in the various calls by leading journalists to follow principles of objective or neutral journalism. These were mostly related to the adoption of a media ethics code (Papathanassopoulos, 1999). However, at times there have been cases where journalistic ethics have been explicitly set aside or undermined by a proportion of journalists in what is “churnalism”, or other types of low-quality journalism. Since the emergence of the digital environment, this undermining process has become more frequent, stemming from the relentless competition of journalists on the web to publish news that should serve a rule of immediacy.
