The ethics of being nice

Late on Sunday, a bus crashed in the Hunter Valley. The next day, horrific details began to emerge. The circumstances were particularly heart-wrenching. Fifteen minutes before the crash, these people had been saying goodbyes at an idyllic wedding in wine country. But who were the victims?

On Monday at 9.11am, police released a short statement: ‘Police are still working to identify the crash victims and contact their next of kin.’ Formal identification was expected to take days or weeks. That same day, however, news outlets began publishing names. Some outlets were restrained, but others splashed photos and details, mostly sourced from social media, of the 10 people who had died.

This raises an ethical issue. Should journalists publish the names and details of victims before police have released their identities? Simply, no. Clause 11 of the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics prescribes, ‘Respect private grief and personal privacy.’ This is followed by a Guidance Clause prescribing that the code’s standards should only be overridden if there is 'substantial advancement of the public interest or risk of substantial harm to people’. Neither of those apply here. There’s no public interest in revealing those details prematurely; there’s only the potential to do harm. It’s not right if someone learns about the death of a loved one through a news flash.

This leads to a second issue. Are news outlets justified in publishing anything and everything they find on social media, including about people who have died? The general approach to privacy prescriptions, as the MEAA code shows, is to balance privacy interests against the public interest. Last month the ACMA used an analogous balancing test to find that A Current Affair had breached the Commercial TV Industry Code of Practice. But how does this work with scraping social media? After all, social media inhabits a confusing and fluid zone: sometimes private; sometimes public; sometimes in the middle. In 2016, ACMA published Privacy Guidelines for Broadcasters that included a summary of a 2011 decision about the use of material taken from Facebook (Case Study 9). While no breach was found, ACMA said this does ‘not mean that licensees are free to broadcast any material available on the internet without risk of breaching the code. Not all material on the internet will cease to be personal or private merely because it has been made publicly available through the absence of privacy settings or otherwise.’ The ABC’s Editorial Policies also include guidance on ‘Use in news reports of pictures from social networking sites’. Overall, guidance for journalists is inconsistent and unclear.

Meanwhile, the issue of journalists invading privacy also arose this week with the publication of private text messages between Brittany Higgins and her boyfriend. Does the public interest in this case justify this invasion of privacy? At least one Federal MP is arguing these leaks show journalists need to be regulated more effectively. At the CMT, we’ve written previously about the need for a coherent news media standards scheme, rather than the confusing and inadequate mess of standards we have now.

In so many ways, journalism needs to do better. Three days after the horrific crash in the Hunter, the 2023 Australian Digital News Report was published. It showed news avoidance has increased to 69 per cent, with only 43 per cent of those surveyed saying they trust news media. Australian news outlets have a clear choice. They can be exploitative and unethical, or they can be respectful and trustworthy. Only the latter can help build the sort of society that’s worth having.

Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer, UTS Law

This article is from our fortnightly newsletter published on 16 June 2023. 

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