Abstract
Proposed changes to the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) Code of Ethics are discussed in the context of a broader debate about media ethics and the history of the journalist's code. This paper argues that the proposed Code of Ethics does not resolve the basic ideological conflict between news as information, that the public has a 'right to know', and news as a commercial product of the information/entertainment industry. The author reviews the 1944 and 1984 journalists' codes and puts the revised 1995 version into an historical context. The paper concludes that even good codes of ethics may be difficult to implement when the dominant culture in the newsroom is based on commercial relations of production. The aim is to encourage further debate among media professionals and journalism educators.
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