Journal of Emerging Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies: Home

Abstract:
The mass media industry can be likened to manufacturing outfits; the only difference is in the product. Media product is news and information and its consumer is the media audience. Media industry will flourish to the extent of public trust in the quality of its product. Media industry should therefore do everything within its power to put in place trust building mechanism. Maintenance of ethical values and standards are found to be so effective in winning audience trust. It is therefore of significant importance to focus research attention on media ethics with the belief that by so doing all the stakeholders in the media industry would strengthen the struggle against unethical behaviour in media profession. This study examined audience assessment of the level of journalists' compliance with profession's code of ethics in disseminating value-lading news and information. The survey method was adopted and three out of the six states in the western Nigeria were randomly selected for the study. It was discovered that overwhelming majority of the sampled population thought that news and information disseminated by the media was credible and reliable and that activities of the journalists were guided by journalists' professional code of ethics. However, majority of the audience covered by the study were also of the opinion that journalists are largely corrupt as they freely accept bribes and other forms of gratification and that most media outfits lacked editorial independence. It can therefore be deduced that there exist in Nigerian media industry serious ethical problem. There is therefore an urgent need to address the problem. All the stakeholders in the media profession need to come together to address the problem of unethical behaviour in the media.

Keywords: codes of ethics, journalism ethics, unethical practices, media audience, news and information, news integrity, ethical behaviour.

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