Truth...

Truth can mean many different things to many different people. A common meaning of the word truth extends from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular.

Australian Journalists Association section of the MEAA Code of Ethics opens with: ‘Respect for truth and the publics right to information are fundamental principles of journalism’.

It is stated that journalists ‘describing society to itself’ so therefore journalists face the task of truthfully representing in words, numbers, sound, and pictures, events that have occurred at a particular time and in a particular place.


The Green Man blog states:
Freedom of the press is one of the sacred cows of modern democracies. We expect that the press will report on world events “without fear or favour”. Of late this has come into question with the demonstrated bias of certain media outlets over the war in Iraq, such as Fox News for example.

The press have always practiced self-censorship however. One of the criteria that editors use to make self-censorship decisions is the current state of public sensibilities. These change over time. Images and content that, 50 years ago, would have been completely unacceptable are now regularly printed with little or no complaint. There are still important news images that go beyond the limits of current acceptance and the media now have the ability via digital technology to modify these images to utilise them without causing widespread offence.

(http://thegreenman.net.au/mt/archives/000728.html)

I think to achieve truth in journalism, it requires fairness. Journalists have to be able to see reality wholly and truly with the purpose of informing, educating and possibly entertaining the publics.

Time constrains make this difficult on journalists who sometimes just want to copy a media release, which more often than not has a purpose of reflecting well on the company it was released from or on behalf of. Funding cuts, along with media convergence and digitilisation also all apply pressure to journalists.

In the set text, Tickle offers some advice I think all future journalists should listen to...
- Don't believe anything you read or hear untill it is verified by the most authoritative source possible
- There are as many sides to a story as there are people willing to tell it
- There will always be someone who knows more about a subject than you do (2008, Chapter 6; 100).
Tickle concludes by stating that practice above else helps a journalist develop the ability to decipher and reproduce the truth.