 Hello everyone and welcome to our program on journalism ethics. It's part of our ongoing commemoration of World Press Freedom Day. Over the next hour we will discuss the field of journalism ethics, its evolution in the digital age, and practical solutions to the ethical dilemmas that journalists face today. We invite our audiences in Bangladesh and around the world to join us in this discussion. So please share your comments, insights, and questions in the online chat space and on Twitter. Please be advised that the opinions expressed during today's program are solely those of the experts and do not represent the official position of the U.S. government. I'm Sharon Machavi, I'm a Vice President at the International Center for Journalists. Joining me from Florida is Kelly McBride, a leading voice on media ethics and the future of journalism in the United States. Kelly leads the Pointer Institute's efforts in providing workshops on journalism ethics to media professionals around the world. A link to Kelly's free pamphlet, a practical approach to journalism ethics, is below this video. Thanks for being with us today, Kelly. And additionally, my colleague Luis Pateo from the International Center for Journalists will engage with you in our chat roll. You can find that on the right hand side of your screen. Please submit your comments and questions in the chat roll, or you can add to the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag NewEthics. We look forward to hearing from you throughout the hour. So let's start with questions from our audience at the Edward M. Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It's great to have you all with us today. Please go ahead with your questions. Great. Thank you. So for our first question, question number one, I'm going to hand the microphone over. Thank you. Hello. Hi, how's it going? Yep, we're here. Hello. Can you can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, thank you. And as an analyst on the my question is, can I use any Facebook startups or for for my new studio without permission? Is it ideal? The horse did this to where to use someone's personal Facebook or blog for my new story? Yeah, so I want to make sure that I heard your question right. You were asking about using photos from social media or from blogs for your news story. Is that accurate? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you know, so so there's two areas of consideration here. One is the ethical area and one is the legal area. And the legal area, the answer to this question is going to change depending on what jurisdiction you're in. But for instance, in the United States, we have a copyright law. And it basically says that everybody who publishes something, there, there, somebody owns that photo, somebody owns that piece of information. And you have to pay attention to that and you have to seek copyright permission. So in the legal area, you really do have to seek permission. Now there is a carve out in the legal area for for news events. And that gives journalists a pretty wide latitude. But still, I think it's really important to seek permission when you're using information for a couple of reasons. One is, it's really hard when you see a photo on social media, to understand the context of that photo. And so when you seek permission, you're also doing additional reporting. You're asking people who took this photo. Where was it taken? Does it it? Am I interpreting it accurately? And so while there may be occasions where when news is breaking very fast, you're pulling in information from the social media stream, like Twitter, or Facebook, or other social media streams. I think it's important to bring as much context to that information as possible. And then to share that context with your audience. So you want to be telling people, you know, who took this photo when it was taken, what the additional circumstances were. And when you can't get that information, but you still feel like the photo is critically important. I think then you need to tell your audience that you haven't been able to get any more information about this photo, that you haven't verified it, you haven't vetted the claims that are made in the captions, and that you really... And so when you're in that situation, you really want the news value of the photo to be extremely high. You know, so the more vetting you do, the lower I think the threshold is for the news value of the photo. But when you cannot vet, you want the news value of the photo to be very high and you want to be very transparent with your audience. Transparency is super important when you're taking information in from the social media stream. You want to tell them what you do know. And you also want to tell them what you can't establish, what you haven't been able to report out. And that instinct is difficult for a lot of journalists. You know, we're very comfortable saying what we do know and what we think we know. We're not as comfortable telling people what we don't know. Great. How about another question? Please go ahead. My name is Shajib and my question is, what's your opinion on rapidly spreading news without confirming it on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, among other social networking sites? Is it an ethical practice to break the news on the web without being 100% confirmed about it? Won't the journalist, media or other outlets follow this practice? Who follow this practice practically fall behind as other media outlets might as well post it on the web and be the first to break the news? I mean, yeah, how do how does one journalist has to deal with it? Well, this is the reality that we all face today. So I think what you want to do is to think about, first of all, it doesn't pay. It doesn't it doesn't do anything for your credibility to be first if you're wrong. So you want to make sure that whatever organization you're working for that you have really, really strong standards for verifying information. And in this environment, this hyper competitive environment where everybody wants to get information first when news is breaking, you are going to use those standards to help you decide, yes, we're going with this piece of information, or no, we're not ready to go with this piece of information. So the first thing is is outside of a critical or crisis event, you want to establish what your standards are. And you want to have conversations with everybody in your news organization to figure out when you're in a really competitive environment, what standards are you going to use? And then in addition to that, I think you have to assume that your audience is getting information from lots and lots of different streams. So you're not the only organization that's giving your audience information in a breaking news setting, they're seeing all of your competitors. And so when your competitors break news, and you can't confirm it, you have to acknowledge it and let them know that you haven't confirmed it. Because otherwise you look irrelevant, you look like you don't know what's going on or what other people are talking about. So you really do, you really are in this situation where in addition to breaking news, you're acknowledging what your competitors are reporting, which means that you're you're saying their names. You know, you might be saying CNN is reporting this or this blog is reporting this. And then you're saying, we have heard that information, but we haven't confirmed it. So we're not reporting it as confirmed. Or you're saying, you know, our independent sources have confirmed this information. But but all of that is step two, right? Because step one is, here are the standards that we're going to use. If we see something on Twitter, we'll report it. Maybe that's your standards. I wouldn't recommend that. I think that that would be irresponsible. And and you're contributing to a really noisy environment when you have really low standards. But some organizations do have really low standards. I think that whatever you establish your standards as, and one of them might be, you know, we have only sources that are named, you know, so we'll only we'll only break news with a named source. That would be a really high standard. You might say, we'll only break news, we'll only report new facts with two anonymous sources. So two sources that aren't named. You know, that's that's about the average standard, I think for most news organizations around the world is two anonymous sources, or one named source. But but but if you're going to, once you've established that standard, then you have to have the the discipline or the strength in a breaking news environment to stick to it. And I've seen so many situations where journalists haven't been able to do that. They have really good standards. But when they get in a competitive environment and their their competitors are breaking information left and right without sourcing it, they tend to do the same thing. And so you want to be able to you want to be able to stick to your standards in that competitive environment. And then also, you want to be able to say, because we have these standards, we're not reporting this other information, we know it's out there, but we're not reporting it, we're not reporting it is verified because we haven't verified it ourselves. And that allows you to be in the conversation, it allows you to to give your audience what appears to be the latest news, but you can be completely transparent about it. And you can say, you know, we don't know if this is actually true. So that that's a that's sort of a a way to to participate in this this very noisy environment without lowering your standards. Great, Kelly. Thanks. That was a that was a good answer to a complicated question and a complicated issue. Let me ask you, in your pamphlet, you talk about the process for making ethical choices. How journalists kind of how can journalists apply that process to gathering the news from, you know, basically from places like Twitter and Facebook? And is this process the same for traditional news sources? You know, what is different now in this internet age? Yeah, so I mean, what's different is we're just operating so fast. We're going so quickly that it seems like our old processes don't work. In fact, they they work very well. But you have to recognize that it's a process rather than a set of rules. So many journalists are just accustomed to to having a set of rules, you know, don't name sexual assault victims, don't don't criticize political figures without putting a name to it. I mean, you can you can have dozens and dozens of rules. And the problem is, is the rules don't keep up to the environment that we're living in because things change so quickly. We have so much pressure from social media. And so what you really need is a process and a process is where you identify what your core values are. And you can do this as an individual or you can do this as an organization. I would suggest both. You have to do both and you have to make sure that there's no conflicts. But but when you do it as an organization, you sit down and you say, OK, here are our most important values. You know, and I and I recommend three really important values or guiding principles. Seek the truth, act transparently, serve your community. So if you if you apply those three values, then what you'll find is there's two different kinds of ethical quandaries that you find yourself in. One ethical quandary is where you have a good value versus a bad value. So seek the truth versus making money. That might be a good value versus a bad value. Making money isn't inherently a bad value, but it's a bad value when it undermines one of your core values. And then the other type of quandary that you'll find yourself in is where you where you find a conflict between two good values like seeking the truth and serving the community. Sometimes you might be telling the community a truth that they don't necessarily want to hear or that's particularly difficult to hear. In both cases, when you have when you have when you have a good value versus a bad value or when you have a good value versus a good value, you want to find alternatives. And that's what the process is. That's where you're sitting down with your colleagues and you're asking questions. And this doesn't have to be a long, laborious process. I've seen people do this in five minutes or 10 minutes. And you just want to be able to say, OK, our journalistic goal here is and then finish the sentence. It might be to hold very powerful people accountable or it might be to educate the community about a really difficult topic, say sexual assault or the abuse of children, something like that. That's your journalistic purpose. And then you figure out the best way to do that. You look for alternatives. So it might be to tell a narrative story or it might be to it might be to do it in a photo essay, but you try and you try and name as many alternatives as you can. And then you find the alternatives that serve your journalistic process and uphold your values and minimize the harm that you might find from those negative values like making money or keeping the government from harassing you too much or something like that because those negative values are still there. But it really is a process. And so if you think of it as a set of rules, you're going to find yourself in a situation where the rules just don't hold up. They just don't do their job anymore. And that's because journalism is no longer this industrial process where we're following a script that's the same every single day. Journalism now is this this wild and woolly crazy act where you could never predict what the next day is going to bring. And that's why the process is so important. So the process really is identify your values, identify your journalistic purpose, identify the conflicts and whether it's a good value versus a bad value or two good values competing with each other and then identify the alternatives and then select the best alternative that serves your journalistic process. That makes sense. And as you say, it doesn't have to be a laborious process. It's something that can be done in, you know, a few minutes. Yeah, but it's the kind of thing that you have to practice it, right? Like if you're in a news organization that isn't accustomed to doing this, it's going to take longer. It's sort of like exercise. If you run a lot, you're going to be in shape for the race. But if you don't run a lot and suddenly suddenly you find yourself having to run really far, you're not going to be in shape for it. It's the same thing with ethics. Because it makes sense. OK, now we're going to take some questions for you from our virtual audience. And first up is Tomas from Poland. And he asks, do you consider bloggers or self reporters to be full journalists? Yeah, I really have given up on trying to figure out who's a journalist and who isn't. And that's because so many people who don't set out to be journalists end up committing acts of journalism. And on the reverse side of that, so many journalists, I think, get distracted by acts of entertainment or salaciousness or sensationalism. And so so I really have given up trying to figure out who a journalist is. I can tell you what journalism is. Journalism is a piece of information that allows citizens to do two things and it can be one of two things or it can be both of these things. One is understand your community better or understand the world better. And the second is fulfill your civic duties, fulfill your democratic obligations. So if information does either one of those two things, it could be considered an act of journalism. And the number of people committing acts of journalism is as wide as it could possibly be these days. Great, thank you. OK, now we've got a question from a viewer at the American Center in Aravon who asks, how does the United States deal with offensive comments that are made online? And is it punishable by law? Yeah, in the United States, it's really interesting. It's very, very, very there's a very small amount of speech that's punishable by law. It's almost negligible. And in online dialogues, you find people saying the most offensive things ever. I mean, crazy offensive things constantly, almost almost always behind the veil of anonymity. I think so. So if it's not punishable criminally, which which it rarely is, sometimes you can punish people civilly. So if somebody if somebody says something about you that that is that is false and it harms your reputation or it causes you some sort of of harm, you can sue them in civil court in the United States. And when we frequently find that happening, but still of all the stuff that people say online, very rarely does anybody pursue civil action against that stuff. So I counsel the the journalists and the moderators of these sites where these comments happen. I counsel them to take a very proactive role to try and make the conversation as healthy as possible to minimize the level of horrible things that people are saying to minimize the volume of horrible things. And you do that by doing a couple of things. One is is editors and journalists have to participate in these these conversations. You participate in the comments beneath your stories or or on your blog. You participate in the comments on Twitter and you do it in a way that your role modeling to other people. This is what a healthy conversation looks like. You also when it's your own site, when it's your own news site, you establish standards and you enforce those standards. If you don't want people to call people names and you don't want people to say things that are untrue, you have to ask people first to take those comments down. And then secondly, you have to you have to ban those people from your site by their IP address. So you have to be really proactive on your own site if you want a healthy space for dialogue. And then in addition to that, you don't always have to have comments. You can not allow comments. And if you don't have the resources to monitor them or to make sure that it's a healthy dialogue, then then you really shouldn't be having comments. One of the best organizations to look at for how they're monitoring comments is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They have done a great job. They've increased their engagement. And in addition to doing those best practices that I've just mentioned, they also only leave their comments open for a defined amount of time. It might be a day or two days or a week. And they do that based on the resources that they have and and and the the interest in commenting. But they don't leave comments open for forever and ever because nobody could monitor them. So in addition to looking at punishing people, either criminally or civilly, who say things that are harmful to the community, which in the United States happens rarely, I think the better solution to that problem is for the journalism organizations to take full responsibility for their commenting space. Great. Thanks, Kelly. We've got some great questions so far from our live and virtual audiences. A reminder to check out the links toward the bottom of the page to access more information on journalism ethics in the digital age. We're going to go back now to our viewers in DACA for their questions. DACA, over to you. Hello, I am Rimi, student of journalism. If I want to report about a murderer, but the murderer may threaten to kill me if I do or give or give me money if I don't journalism. Ethics teaches us to be fearless and always tell the truth. But how far will being fearless work when it's about my and my families and my self safety? What should a journalist do in such a situation? Yeah, that's a really, really tough scenario. When your personal safety is threatened, we have all read stories about really fabulous, courageous journalists who have who have reported the truth in spite of great threat to their personal safety. But this is where journalism organizations and government organizations come into play. This is why, you know, if you're working with a journalism organization, your newsroom has an obligation to help keep you safe. And journalists face such great threat all around the world. I mean, in Mexico, journalists who are covering the drug wars are being murdered left and right and and and in in in other countries as well. And and it is the journalism organizations that need to create the scenarios where their reporters can feel safe. Sometimes that means hiring bodyguards. Sometimes that means sometimes that means not publishing their bylines because it's too dangerous or publishing stories without any bylines. Now, that doesn't mean that you should put fake bylines on it. You don't want to deceive your audience. But journalism organizations have to step in and create a safe environment for their journalists. And and and that said, you know, the other side of that scenario where you suggested, you know, so if he gives me some money, I don't have to report that story at all. That's completely within your personal ability to do the right thing. You know, you can you can refuse the bribe. And I know that that, you know, the converse of that is that we need healthy journalism organizations that can pay journalists enough money so that they don't that they aren't susceptible to bribes. And we're still trying to figure out how to do that in so many economies. But but that's part of it, too. Some of this comes down to charity. Many charitable organizations are figuring out a way to pay journalists healthy salaries and struggling economies so that they're not susceptible to bribes. And and I and I think you may you know. So what I'm getting at is this is a system problem. This isn't just on you as an individual as an individual. I mean, if I felt like my life was threatened or might the lives of my family were threatened, I would have a hard time doing good journalism. I would need to be part of a system that made me feel safe and made me feel secure. And so I really do put that on the system. And if you're working in an environment where that system doesn't exist, then you need some we need public policy to help create that system. And it might be it might be NGOs and it might be government organizations, but you need to create that system so that the journalists can feel safe because journalism is critical to democracy. And that's why those organizations would be motivated to create that system. Hi Kelly, how are you? Hey, I'm good. Thank you. Nice to meet you here. My question is what is your suggestions to become important as a professional journalist? Can you say a little bit more? What do you mean by to become important? Yeah, in fact, you know, professional journalist, as I have seen in my professional in as a professional journalist in my professional, I've seen that who are really professional who who used to work as a professional, they're actually not empowered in work. They have no right to work there with their freedom. And, you know, if they want to work, honestly, and professionally, it is very, very difficult in the team. Actually, as some of our team leaders and maybe somehow, some of our media owners also that involved with any criminal team or somehow they are maybe maybe motivated or they they used to convinced like this, and in in that case, and as an individual, professional journalists are not actually empowered in, I think, in third world country or any other countries like this. So I want to know from you as a professional journalist, if anyone want to work as an individual, or maybe if if she or he want to work with power, she or he should be empowered somehow. If he or she doesn't get any support from team. Oh, OK. I have to be empowered. OK. Thank you. You know, thank you. So, yeah. So so some of this has to do with your own personal sense of who you are. Some journalists, some journalists are totally driven by their egos, right? And I don't think that's the best way to be empowered. But some people, their own personal ego, you know, seeing that byline or getting in front of that camera as that's their empowerment, right? Because they because it reinforces who they are personally. I find that the best journalists are empowered by their ability to inform the community to tell a story that wasn't previously told and to shine a light on an area where it was it was previously dark. And and so these are these are sort of vague things, right? But but but the best journalist find power in in telling the truth to an audience that wasn't able to access that truth. Now, how do you do that? Some people do that just by blogging. But some people do that and the most effective journalists do that within an organization that has a really wide audience. And and and you really have to just keep coming back to the audience and what is the audience getting from your work? But that's so hard to do as a journalist because as a journalist, you see your colleagues and your peers. You see your sources all the time, but you don't see your audience every day. So one of the things I think I think the most important thing that a journalist can do to to keep that sense of empowerment true and stable is to find ways to connect with the audience. And you can do that virtually in a digital environment through social media or you can just get out and talk to the people who are consuming your stories and find out from them what's important, what's working, what isn't working. Because if you can stay in touch with your audience, you will stay true to your values and you'll find a way to be empowered. But if but if you're only if you're only listening to your colleagues and you're listening to your sources, you risk the you run the risk of having a distorted view of who you are and what you're doing. Does that does that work? Does that make sense? OK, great. OK, Kelly, I've got another question for you, which is do journalists, the world over, use the same process or adhere to the same set of ethics? Is there is there a universal standard or is this relative to your culture, your situation, your region of the world? What do you think? Well, so journalists, the world over, have the same standard for trying to establish what's true. And that is that they go out and they do two things. They observe and they talk to sources and they look at government documents and they use those three those three categories, observations, sources and documents for establishing a narrative of what's what's true. Now, the reality is, is that as you move from region to region and country to country, there are very different laws governing journalists. In many countries, there is no licensing and, you know, there is no there's no government control over journalists at all. And that tends to create one type of journalism. And then in countries where you have certain government influence over journalists, either through licensing or through restrictive restrictive speech laws, then you find journalists having to get a little more creative in how they tell the truth. So so really the the sort of the foundational work of what journalists what journalists do and how they do it. In those cases, I think whenever I talk to journalists from no from wherever they are, they they agree on those those foundational methods. But if you go to Britain and you're covering a crime, you are allowed to mention the criminal suspect in a very restrictive way until he's been convicted. Whereas if you're in the United States, you can mention his name and he might be able to sue you in civil court, but there's no criminal impositions. You know, that's just one example of how the government changes the way you do journalism. But it doesn't change what journalism is. So you know, that said, that said, there are a lot of bad journalists out there. There are a lot of journalists who do who have no ethics who do really crappy work. And in those cases, they sort of taint the rest of us with their with their bad habits. A question I already asked. Yeah, sorry. And so so so really, you know, the sort of the short answer to your question is that there are no universal standards. But we generally all have a common connection when we talk about what journalism is and how we do it. Okay, great. Thanks. We've got a question now from our chat roll. We've got Nazakot from Bangladesh, who is asking, What's the definition of press freedom? What is the definition? You know, I think it's tied to free speech because I think that you can't you I don't I don't want to live in a society where the press has a special set of freedoms. I want to live in a society where citizens have those freedoms and that the press is just one one expression of being a citizen. So in most cases, I think I think it really gets down to free speech. And I think that that press freedom, press freedom should mirror your society's freedom of speech and free speech should be should be very wide. I mean, in a democratic society, you should be able to to express views that are that are critical of the government that are critical of the very powerful, whether that be powerful corporations or powerful organizations or powerful religions. You should be able to say things that aren't popular. And there shouldn't be there shouldn't be repercussions for you just for speech. Speech doesn't generally harm people. And so so that's I guess that's how I would define it. Okay, well, leads well into our next question, which is a question from Pakistan. And that question is, if a certain journalist from a certain country writes a statement that harms US media policy, what would be the US reaction in this regard? That harms US media policy? Yeah. Do you can you elucidate on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not I'm not 100% sure what they what the focus is. I mean media. I think maybe media interests might be a better, a better way of looking at it. And maybe also US policy. So maybe kind of answer it from both the lens of the media had the media would react to something that sort of attack them and maybe how how the media would react to something that attacks US policy. So I think what this gets to is this concept of the marketplace of ideas. And that there's this idea that if you know, so somebody might say something that's harmful to an individual, but that individual or that organization has the ability to also put put ideas into the marketplace of ideas and those become competing interests, right? And so then you have this audience that that has to that that that looks at these competing ideas and has to decide which one is true. You know, so somebody might say idea X, you know, and somebody else might say idea Y and these ideas are in opposition to each other. And then a bunch of organizations or individuals add things to idea X, you know, they add context and they add information and other people add things to idea Y. And and and at a certain point, the audience starts to figure out that, oh, you know, this information seems to be more true. There's more facts here. There's more sources here. This information seems to be more true. And so the consumers, it really puts a great emphasis on the consumers and their ability to to discern good information for bad from bad information. And so somebody might a journalist might report something that's harmful to a to a government's interests. And it might be true. It might be good that it's harming that government's interest because the information is true and that government should be held accountable or it might be false. And and that the information could be bad and could be wrongfully accusing this government of doing something either way, both of those ideas should be able to get into the marketplace of ideas. And then through additional reporting through through adding information that the consumers should be able to figure out that, oh, this is true or this is true. And and that's that's really how democracy works is you have to be able to you have to be willing to risk bad information as well as good information. OK, thanks. We've got a question now from a journalist in Afghanistan asking how can we make freedom of the press more important in our society? What's your response to that? Well, first of all, you have to make your society. You have to you have to you have to make equality important because the more that the more that everyone in your society has equal equal rights, men, women, people of different ethnicities, different races, the more that they have equal rights, the more that they value a free press. When you have when you have a diss when when when when you have one group that that has access to rights and you have lots of other groups that don't have access to rights, that group is not necessarily going to advocate for free press because the free press would then advocate for all these different ideas of equality. And so so it really goes hand in hand with with equality in your society and having having equality be a goal in your society. So I think that's sort of where you start. I think you also I mean with the tools of technology now people get a taste of free press, even if they don't necessarily have complete access to it. When you get into an atmosphere like a social media atmosphere where anybody can post something, suddenly you see what it looks like in a world where everybody is sharing their own ideas. And that's really refreshing. And once you get the ball rolling, I'm not going to suggest that this is easy. I mean, most countries that have that have equality and that have a free press have a very bloody history of getting to that moment. So there's a political there's a political struggle that comes with it. And you can look at recent places like South Africa where that political struggle has happened recently or you can look at the United States where that political struggle happened more than a hundred years ago. But it's always a political struggle to get there. And that's because the people who do hold power don't necessarily want to share that power with everybody and free speech, free press and equality certainly certainly lead to that that that that general equality of an environment. And so that's I mean, I don't want to pretend that it's easy that you can get there in a few a few easy steps. But it really is tied of free press is tied to free speech. Free speech is tied to an equal society. So it is freedom of the press a universal then is it is it again a standard that ultimately is would be the same everywhere. Well, it would be the same in an open democracy. It's not it's not completely the same because even in even in very well established democracies, you see different laws that apply to the press in different ways. But but but but if you consider it like a continuum, the closer you get to free press, the closer you have to an open democracy with vigorous participation. Great. Thanks. OK, we're going to go back to DACA for a couple of more questions. DACA. Thank you. This is Rusty. And my question is, how can I bring accuracy and meet the standards of factual and factual and substantial reporting? Thank you. So are you talking about in your own organization for yourself or for a group of different in general in general like a group of people? Yeah. So professional organizations are really important in these cases because within within one newsroom, within one organization, it's easy to have really good leadership and create a set of standards. But what you want to do is you want to have representatives from all these different media organizations getting together in a professional organization and you want to have those professional organizations be able to apply peer pressure, if you will. So when they might see when they might see one newsroom that doesn't have very good standards, they could they could at least call them out and say, you know, we don't agree with them. So when you have a when you have professional organizations, those tend to be very helpful. In addition to that, I think the organizations that educate journalists, the universities can be very helpful in agreeing on what those standards look like so they can all come together. And once you start having those conversations, you start to agree on a set of principles that translate from one organization to another. But but the you know, the shorter answer, the short answer is you all have to be talking to each other. You have to gather on a regular basis and have these conversations. And then you have to share what you've agreed upon with other people either by publishing it or by well, yeah, by publishing it. I mean, I guess that's the easiest way to do is to have, you know, if you have a professional organization that has a yearly publication or a quarterly publication, that's a great way to create standards that everyone can agree upon or to at least have the conversation. Great. And we've got another question in DACA. Hi, I'm Marina. Hi, Kelly. How are you? Hey, I'm good. How are you, Marina? OK, OK. Thank you. My question is, how can we create awareness about following ethics in practicing journalism in Bangladesh and other countries around the world? I missed one word in your question. How can we create awareness? Awareness, awareness. Yes. OK. You know, again, this gets back to the professional organizations. If you have a group of editors from every news organization and they get together and they have a conversation and there's a record of that conversation, that creates awareness. The other thing that you can be doing is sharing these conversations with the public. A lot of the times when we talk about journalism, we talk about it like, like, like making sausage. You know, it's not a very pretty picture and the public just sees the end product. But if but now that we have all these tools of transparency, we should be letting the public see how we do things. We should be going behind the scenes and showing them and that creates another level of awareness. And that actually helps your cause because as you get more and more citizen journalists, just average citizens who are committing acts of journalism, they start to understand what the standards are. So you really do have to put some effort into not just publishing the newspaper or your your daily broadcast every day, you've got to put some effort into coming together as a community of journalists and talking about what it is that you do. Oh, I lost. There you are. Can you hear me? Yep. Now I can. Great. OK, we've got another chat roll question. This one's coming from viewers at the American Corner Bishkek. And they want to know what how do journalists stay objective? Wow. I mean, so there's a huge argument right now about whether you can even stay objective. And there's that the definition of what objective even means is changing. But so let me start with I recognize that some people believe that you can't even be objective anymore. However, I think that you can I think that you can be fair. And sometimes I think we confuse objectivity with fairness. But there's two ways to go about it. And one way is to reveal what your biases are. And so in a sense to be subjective, but to be dedicated to fairness and accuracy. So even though I might have a certain viewpoint or a belief about an issue, I'm going to tell my audience what that viewpoint or belief is. And I'm going to be committed to seeking out a wide variety of sources and other viewpoints and determining what the truth is. And that's one approach that's that's becoming more and more popular. The other more traditional approach is to not reveal what your personal viewpoints are at all or your biases. So so to be removed or distant from from the subject at hand but to but to but but to be but to be very inclusive to seek a wide variety of viewpoints. And so so you notice that diversity is important in both of those approaches because in both of them you have to bring in conflicting viewpoints and you have to help the audience sort out what the truth is. In one approach you set you you state your biases from the beginning. In the other approach you don't state your biases and I think both work. They work for different audiences and it really depends on which type of audience you're serving and what the economic model of your news organization is as to which approach you're going to take. But objectivity is really connected to accuracy. And if you can be committed to accuracy you're you're you're de facto committed to objectivity. Great thanks. That sort of leads I think a bit into the next question which comes from a local reporter in Kandahar who asks what are the major ethical responsibilities for journalists to consider when reporting. So I guess if you had to pick your top one or two responsibilities ethically speaking what would those be. So I think I think the biggest one is to scrutinize the powerful people whoever they are. It might be your government. It might be it might be powerful corporations. It might be religious leaders but but your your your biggest ethical imperative as a journalist is to scrutinize power and to to challenge authority to make sure that people aren't abusing their power. I think in addition to that I think you have I think the second imperative is to be committed to diverse voices. It's very easy to not listen to minority viewpoints and and and so so I think that the second imperative is is is to seek a wide range of viewpoints on whatever issue. And then I want to add one more and that is to talk about the things that people don't want to talk about in many countries around the world that sexual assault. People don't want to talk about sexual assault and how it affects children. How it affects women. How it how it affects the vulnerable. There are other issues of rights. That's just one that I bring up as an example. But so those three things hold the powerful accountable seek diversity in your work and talk about the things that people don't want to talk about. Great. That's a good list. OK. We've got a question now from an online viewer who asks if a government does not allow for freedom of the press. How can journalists perform their duty. So what do you do in environments that are obviously less than less than perfect. Right. So so two things. One is you you you do it on the down low right. You do it you do it covertly and you see that all the time. People doing journalism in spite of oppressive governments that don't allow or protect press freedoms. So you figure out ways to do it. But then you also have to be working with organizations in the that have influence in the international community that can try and pressure that government to bring freedoms into that country. And that's that's really tricky. But that's where the international community comes in is is if you believe democracy and freedom is good for your country you must believe that it's good for for citizens the world over. And you can you can use economic sanctions. You can use political pressure. But that's where international organizations come in come into play and and G.O.'s that work with those international organizations. Again that's a long political process. We've got a question now from a viewer in Bishkek who asks how do government and journalism interact. And that's probably a how should they act. How did they interact. Obviously in different in different environments. But maybe talk a little bit about how how what the reality is and maybe what the ideal should be. Sure. Sure. So so the reality is that that that journalists and governments have our our our intention with each other. And that's a healthy reality. You want them to be in tension with each other. It's an interdependent relationship in addition to in addition to in addition to holding governments accountable. Journalists have a have a significant role in just letting citizens know what's going on in the government. And so you want to be able to do that. But you don't want to be a PR or a mouth piece for the government. So you really want to do that in a way that serves the citizens. Interestingly enough both when it's working well governments and journalists both serve the same group. They serve the citizens of a community or of a of a society. But they have different loyalties to those citizens. And so so you've just got to remember what your promise is to your audience. And and so so there are times when you're going to be in tension or in opposition with the government because you feel like you're reporting on an abuse of power like they're not doing their jobs well. And then it's going to be very tense. But but but the reality is is most of the time you're just letting citizens know what's going on so that they can participate in their government. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be completely oppositional but it shouldn't be all cozy either. You shouldn't be like you shouldn't be best buddies with government officials. You should be professional and cordial. And that's really how that relationship should look is is one of professionalism. But but I recognize that there's a wide range in there. And that sometimes it's very that there's a lot of clashing between government. And sometimes it's way too cozy. Great. Thanks. We've got another question from Aravon which is basically how do how does the U.S. keep journalists safe. Well in the U.S. we have the luxury of having an economy that can pay journalists not as much as it used to be able to because journalism organizations have declined. But we keep journalists safe the same way we keep all of our citizens safe. You know we prosecute crimes when people attack journalists they are prosecuted. It's you know it would be rare for an assault against the journalist to go unprosecuted. We pay them salaries so that they're not susceptible to bribes. We pay them healthy enough salaries that you can live a middle class existence as a journalist. And so so within the United States it's fairly easy as journalists go abroad and as they try and report in in situations where journalists aren't as safe. Journalism organizations spend a lot of money to keep their journalists safe. They hire bodyguards. They pay for special training and the journalism organizations that are committed to doing journalism in in places where journalists aren't safe. They they they spend a lot of money basically to keep their journalists safe. Great thanks. OK we're going to go back to DACA before we go and see if there are any final questions for Kelly DACA. Hi it's me again. Hey. My other question is how do I keep my source secret and at the same time make my story believable. Oh that's a great question. So first of all you only tell your editor who your sources and you try not to have a digital trail of your sourcing and there there are all these best practices about keeping sources safe and keeping their identities confidential when it's really important. In addition to that you only do that for the most important stories. Right. You don't grant all your sources anonymity. You only do it for the most important stories and for where your sources would lose their job or face physical risk. Something like that in order for you to report a story that's really important. But finally if you want to maintain your credibility with your audience you've got to tell them something about your source. Right. So maybe you don't tell them their name but you tell them why you believe them. You know you tell them what their experience is. You know if your source is a government official you tell them which branch of the government they work in and why they're familiar with this issue. So you try and give your audience as much information as you can about the source without saying the name so that they know the source is credible. And then in addition to that you check out the information. So you don't rely just on your one source but you make sure that that information is true because if the information is accurate and you've used an anonymous source your audience will generally have a lot of faith in you. But if when you screw up when you quote an anonymous source and you and you have bad information that that tends to erode the audience confidence in your ability to get it right. And so the next time they're going to look at you with with a little more doubt than they did than they did originally. So those three things. Great. Thanks Kelly and thank you to our audience in DACA and to our global viewers for all of your questions. Kelly is there anything you want to say in closing. Yeah you know I just want to say I hope that if you're not familiar with the pointer institute that you'll turn to our work. We have a daily website that reports on journalism around the world pointer dot org that's P O Y and T E R dot org. And we also have online courses. Many of them are free that are available to journalists the world over. And that's at news university dot org. And there's an abbreviation for it. It's news N E W S U dot org. And we have we have we have we have like 250 maybe even more than that courses that are free to journalists the world over. So please avail yourself of those those opportunities. And the pointer institute is doing a lot of work internationally. We've done work in Bangladesh. We've done work in India. We've done work in in Africa. And so if you have an interest in pointer working with an organization in your country please track us down. Contact us and we will do that work for you. Great. And just another resource real quick to is something my organization puts out called I J net dot org I J N E T dot org. And that's in seven languages and also has great resources for journalists. So check that out as well. Well thank you Kelly and we are grateful for everyone who joined us today from around the world to Luis Pateo over in the chat space. And Kelly again thanks so much for sharing your knowledge to learn more about journalism ethics and world press Freedom Day visit the links at the bottom of the page. You can also continue this great conversation and ask further questions on the Democracy Challenge Facebook page. This program will replay momentarily right here if you missed any of it and it'll be available on demand by the end of the day. Thanks so much for watching. This program has been brought to you by connects.