There are five separate codes of ethics covering journalism in the UK. All operate at the national level among qualifying or member organizations and cover the vast majority of significant news organizations in broadcast, print and online (with some significant exceptions). An additional code of practice issued by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) covers the ethical conduct of journalists. The codes are as follows:
- The BBC’s editorial guidelines, Royal Charter and agreement (covering all of the BBC’s news output as well as the rest of the Corporation’s programming);
- Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code (covering all holders of broadcasting licences issued by Ofcom);
- The Editor’s Code of Practice (covering all members of the newspaper industry’s regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, or IPSO);
- The IMPRESS Standards Code (covering all members of the independent regulator, the Independent Monitor for the Press);
- The NUJ code of conduct (covering all journalists who are members of the Union).
The BBC’s accountability mechanisms are covered by aspects of the Royal Charter and the Agreement that sits alongside each iteration of the Charter (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016b). Schedule 3 of the Agreement includes the obligation that the BBC produce Editorial Guidelines, the current version of which is a 220-page document with 18 sections of which 15 relate to the production of content. Some apply directly to journalism and news coverage, including sections on accuracy, impartiality and the coverage of politics, public policy and polls (BBC, 2019c). The BBC’s Charter itself includes rules regarding the conduct of the BBC, including setting out the BBC’s five Public Purposes which enshrine the Corporation’s obligation to provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming (see C7 below) (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016a).
While the Charter and Agreement are the main legal documents setting out the BBC’s rules and guidelines, since 2017 regulation of BBC programming has been the responsibility of Ofcom. Ofcom licenses and regulates all other broadcast licence holders and is required by law to create and implement a Broadcasting Code that all broadcasters must adhere to. The Ofcom Broadcasting Code covers ten principles, organized into Sections and a series of rules and clarifications:
- Protecting the Under-Eighteens;
- Harm and Offence;
- Crime, Disorder, Hatred and Abuse;
- Religion;
- Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions;
- Elections and Referendums;
- Fairness;
- Privacy;
- Commercial References in Television Programming; and
- Commercial Communications in Radio Programming (Ofcom, 2019d).
Of these, Sections five and six are of specific importance for news programming. Section Five describes Ofcom’s rules relating to duty of broadcasters “[to] ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality”. Section Five also outlines special impartiality guidelines for news and other programmes, relating to “Matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy”. Section Six is complementary to Section Five and governs news coverage during election campaigns and referendums, including how candidates and constituencies may be covered and restrictions on broadcasting, for example on coverage of opinion polls and campaigning on polling day.
Those newspapers (and their online components, where separate) that are members of IPSO are regulated on the basis of their compliance with the Editors’ Code of Practice – a document created and maintained largely by editors and ultimately the property of a Regulatory Funding Company – the funding body for IPSO controlled by the newspaper industry. While there have been forensic analyses of the extent to which IPSO is able to enforce the Code (Media Standards Trust, 2019), the document itself is relatively uncontroversial, and the contractual agreement between the regulator and its members is predicated on their observance of the guidelines in the Code. The Code includes 16 clauses plus a definition of the public interest that can be invoked under exceptional circumstances if a journalist chooses to disregard the Code in pursuit of a story (Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, 2019). IMPRESS (the Independent Monitor for the Press) is an independent regulator created in order to fulfil the criteria for a new regulatory body set out in the 2012 Leveson Report. In 2016 it was given official recognition as meeting these criteria, one of which is the implementation of a standards code to serve as the basis for a self-regulatory system. The resulting code, the IMPRESS Standards Code, was produced with input from the general public, and covers many of the same broad areas as the Editors’ Code of Practice, with some adjustments (IMPRESS, n.d.). Those journalists that are members of the National Union of Journalists are also obliged to adhere to the code of professional ethics in the NUJ code of conduct. While these relate more to the professional conduct of individual journalists, several of the clauses concern the ways in which news stories can be pursued and produced (National Union of Journalists, n.d.). Finally, three national newspapers – the Guardian, the Independent (digital-only since 2016) and the Financial Times – have chosen not to join either IPSO or IMPRESS, and therefore do not subscribe to a nation-wide code of conduct, though all three maintain their own editorial standards and internal complaints-handling mechanisms.
