oa De effectiviteit van journalistieke gedragscodes: een literatuurstudie

The effectiveness of journalistic codes of conduct: a review of the literature

Journalistic codes of conduct are regularly mentioned as instrument to secure journalistic quality. But do they really work? To answer this question, we reviewed all academic studies on journalistic codes that are mentioned in the Social Science Citation Index or in EBSCO’s Communication & Mass Media Complete database. Our findings show that codes of conduct chiefly perform an – important – symbolic function. Primarily, they address individual journalists. But because the margin for individual moral decision-making is small, the actual impact of codes depends strongly on the ethical culture of the news desk. That is why we propose, in the final discussion, to focus on ethical guidelines for editorial organizations and the profession.