News Councils

Development

The decision to establish a news council sometimes derives from the wish to enforce an accepted code of ethics. Yet relatively few news councils have been created voluntarily. Legislators first had to make threatening noises about establishing a council by law, usually under pressure from the public outraged by one or more media transgressions.

Sweden initiated the concept in 1916, though the idea took at least half a century to take off. A major step was the creation in Britain of the General Council of the Press in 1953 as a self-regulation body containing only journalists and publishers. Although it had little impact, it was copied in Germany and a decade later evolved into the Press Council which included nonmedia members. That initiated a first great wave of interest in news councils, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Press Institute, the Council of Europe, and various foundations organized symposiums and experiments. Reports, articles, and books on the topic started pouring out.

A second surge occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s: almost 60 percent of existing councils have been set up since 1990, 35 percent since 2000. In 2006, for example, the Knight Foundation funded the launching of two new regional news councils in the United States. News councils have become more feasible and useful, as more nations turned democratic and restored press freedom, notably by terminating state monopolies in broadcasting. In addition, as media have grown more commercial and have alienated a large part of the public, they fear their freedom might be restricted if they do not prove accountable.

A Typology

A news council is always a nongovernmental organization (NGO). It is normally made up of journalists, media owners, and members of the public but lacks owners or journalists, provided it includes nonmedia members. Only rarely are news councils made up only of media owners and journalists, as is the case in Germany.

News councils can be created on four different levels. A local council consists of community leaders meeting with representatives of the town's media, to let them know what the public likes and dislikes. About a dozen such local news councils have become known, most of them in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many others have functioned under a variety of names.

The typical news council, however, operates on a national level, established by an association of publishers and one or more unions of journalists, primarily to adjudicate complaints from the public, and guided by a code of ethics. News councils always cover print media and about 60 percent (the more recent ones) cover broadcasting as well. They usually adopt simplified court-like procedures of open hearings and final decisions.

...