Opinion | Islands of integrity in Asian media show why World Press Freedom Day still matters
Several exemplary news organisations are bucking the trend of media corporations that prioritise profits over professional standards
Every year on May 3, World Press Freedom Day serves to remind people of the perils faced by journalists around the world. That message, though, probably falls flat among those who have lost faith in journalism as a force for good. In recent years, authoritarian populist politicians have cultivated this cynicism, attacking the credibility of the press to make their own tenuous relationship with truth appear no worse.
The media haven’t helped their own case. In Asia, conflicts of interest are endemic, between the profession’s democratic mission and its paymasters’ commercial goals. There are media that underplay bad news about their big advertisers. Others skew their news coverage to align with their owners’ non-media investments or their political ambitions.
Malaysiakini, Rappler: attacked just as they are needed most
And even more respectable media outlets are courting advertisers with native advertising, content marketing, sponsored features, and quid pro quo editorial coverage – euphemisms for deals that take journalism’s carefully nurtured relationship of trust with its audience and pimp it out to paying customers. The short-term financial benefits of compromising professional ethics in these and other ways are hard to resist at a time when journalism’s business model is under severe strain.
But it’s vital that we don’t let media that’s middling, mediocre and misguided blind us to the continued existence of more principled journalism. There are still news organisations working hard to protect the professional ethos of journalism as an enterprise dedicated to the public interest, independent from the political and economic forces that it covers.
We need to highlight their existence if journalism is to win public support and attract a new generation of principled practitioners. That’s why, supported by a grant from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee, I’ve been travelling around Asia to study some of the region’s exemplary news organisations. The media outlets in my study – a dozen so far – wouldn’t qualify for sainthood, but they are recognised as standard bearers for professional values.
