At the national level, journalistic deontology refers first to the constitutional provisions (art. 21 of the Italian Constitution) and to rights and duties codified in the professional law 69/1963. These sources of law have been enriched over time in reference to specific areas through the adoption of charters and other tools, for instance the Carta di Treviso[Charter of Treviso] on the protection of minors (FNSI et al., 1990), the Carta di Roma [Charter of Rome] on the rights of migrants (ODG & FNSI, 2008), and the Manifesto di Venezia [Venice Manifesto] on respectful reporting about gender-based violence (FNSI et al., 2017) (see Table 3 for all the codes approved by the Order of Journalists).
A first attempt to harmonise the various deontological documents was made in 1993, with the Carta dei doveri del giornalista [Charter of the journalist’s duties] (ODG & FNSI, 1993). The Charter has since been absorbed in the Testo unico dei doveri del giornalista [Consolidated text of the journalist’s duties], approved in 2016. Both the implementation of charters dedicated to journalistic coverage of sensitive issues and the periodical production of consolidated texts on the journalist’s duties represent updates of the national code of ethics. In some cases, the promoters of a specific document are associations which are also active in monitoring their application. This is the case with the Associazione Carta di Roma, which brings together different subjects belonging to media companies, civil society, and academia and collaborates with the Osservatorio di Pavia to monitor migration issues in television news. Furthermore, the promoters periodically produce guidelines to improve the Charter’s application (Meli, 2012; Meli & Chichi, 2015; Barretta et al., 2018)
The Order of Journalists performs, on a regional basis, the functions related to the discipline of its members, providing different types of disciplinary sanctions (warning, censorship, suspension from the practice of the profession, removal from the Register of Journalists; see ODG, n.d.-b, for the ethical precepts of the Order).
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