Canons of Taste for Journalists

Taste is the sense of what may be done, said, published or broadcast without committing an impropriety or offending the sensibility of the audience or the readers.

Taste is also a set of value judgments in behavior, manners or the arts that is held in common by a group or class of people.

STORIES

1. A general guideline on the use of questionable subject matter of explicit language is that to justify its use the news event must be significant and the questionable material must be essential to the story.

2. The private as well as public actions of public officials and public figures are the proper subject of journalism if they bear on matters of public concern. Public figures are persons of widespread fame or notoriety or people who have injected themselves into the debate of a controversial public issue for the purpose of affecting its outcome.

3. Obscenity, profanity and vulgarity. The general rule is not to use obscene, profane or vulgar terms in a story unless they are part of direct quotations and there is strong, compelling reason to use them.

The general rule:Do not use obscene, profane or vulgar terms in a story unless they are part of direct quotations and there is a strong, compelling reason to use them.

4. Rape and sex crimes. The convention in journalism is to withhold the identification of the rape victims unless the victims are well-known persons or unless they are also slain.

The general rule:Do not report rape and other sex cases in such detail as to appeal to prurient interest of the readers or audience.

Do not identify the victims of incest or of persons charged with or convicted of incest, whether male or female. Any exceptions will have to be discussed with the two highest-ranking editors of the newspaper and the publisher.

5. Suicide, deaths. Newspapers have to compassionate; they have to question the need to report suicides in all cases, particularly when the suicide is not a public official or public figure.

6. Slurs on people.

The general rule:Avoid language that stereotypes and insults women or ignores the changing role of women.

Avoid language that perpetuates racial stereotypes or is offensive to certain races.

Avoid languages that denigrate certain religions.

7. Privacy. Journalists should respect the right of the individual to privacy and human dignity, in conformity with the provisions of international and national laws concerning the protection of the rights and reputation of others, prohibiting libel, calumny, slander and defamation.The general rule:

Public officials. Like everyone else, they are entitled to privacy from the press until their private lives affect their private duties.

Ordinary people. Journalists should take care that they do not hurt people who fall into the news through no action of their own (such as victims of a public accident) and are not seeking publicity.

Juvenile offenders. Withhold the identification of juvenile offenders—people under 18—unless the crime is so serious, such as murder, that the courts would rule that the offender has to be tried as an adult in open court.

PHOTOGRAPHS

1. Nudity. Most editors and most readers don’t think the public is ready for nudity in the newspapers.

2. Photos of human birth. Most readers are not ready, either, for photos of human birth.

3. Suicides, self-immolation. Photos of suicides and self-immolation may be publishes only if they are essential to the telling of the story of a news event. But editors should take care that these photos are not so shocking or gruesome that they will cause readers to lose their breakfast.

4. Deaths. The decision to run photos of dead people should be based on common decency and simple good taste. For instance, it may not be in good taste to run a photo of a stack of flood victims on a truck but it may be all right to publish a long shot of a body or two lying on a street.

References:

Yambot, Isagani and Pantoja-Hidalgo, Cristina (1993). The Philippine Daily Inquirer Stylebook Manila: Philippine Daily Inquirer