There is a Code of Ethics for journalists, prepared under the responsibility of the national Journalists’ Union – the only national association of journalists in the country. Within the Journalists’ Union, there is also an Ethics Council.
The Code is well known, but the fact that it was created in the context of the Journalists’ Union, along with the fact that Portuguese journalists are not obliged to join the Union (only ca. one-third of them joined it), raises frequent questions about its reach and jurisdiction. In 2007, this situation changed by the initiative of the government. Apart from the Union – where an Ethics Council continues to exist – there is now a national commission presided over by a judge that has the responsibility to grant journalists’ professional credentials. No one can work as a journalist in Portugal if they do not have the professional card (Carteira Profissional de Jornalista), which must be renewed every two years and which depends on some legal conditions. Since 2007, this Commission also has disciplinary powers regarding journalists’ ethical duties. This means that, under the new law, a journalist, regardless of whether they belong to the Union, can suffer sanctions if he or she proves to have disrespected the Code of Ethics.
Although this Commission is composed entirely of journalists, half of them are elected by the professional group and the other half are appointed by the media companies. The new system still raises strong debates among Portuguese journalists. Most of them would prefer ethical questions to be treated by the journalists themselves, on an autonomous, self-regulatory basis, and not by a Commission imposed by law – a model of what some scholars call “regulated self-regulation” (Schulz & Held, 2004). On its behalf, the government argued that this measure was taken simply because the journalists’ professional group did not prove, over time, to be capable of dealing with this problem autonomously.
There is no Press Council in the country. Anyone that wants to complain about media ethical abuses must address either the Media Regulatory Entity (ERC) or the Commission of the Journalists’ Professional Chart (CCPJ).
All the professionals we interviewed for this report, both editors and journalists, agreed that the Code of Ethics is generally well known and a relevant reference in newsroom debates. In some cases, media outlets developed their own Codes of Conduct, which reference the norms of the national Code of Ethics but go into more detail to regulate journalists’ practices and routines, calling attention to more concrete issues (see Indicator E8 – Level of self-regulation). This is the case for the daily Público, the weekly Expresso, the newsmagazine Visão, or the news agencyLusa.
