La responsabilité sociale du journaliste comme socle du processus de production de l’information

Abstract

Journalists’ role in democratic societies, which is to inform citizens, generates its own rights and duties. The consequent responsibility derived from this mission takes an important part in any journalist’s work ethics. However, defining this aforementioned “social responsibility” is a task that has been left to the journalists’ appreciation. As a result, they have avoided giving it solid legal boundaries in order to guarantee freedom of information. Therefore, journalists’ responsibility can hardly be put in custody, and there’s nothing to assess the quality and probity of the news they convey. This is why the author chose a specific topic of information, the football referee, as a case study, and led a series of interviews with refereeing and news professionals, with the intention of locating this responsibility in the process of gathering, production and communication of news. Then he checked if there were tools available to enforce responsible behaviour in journalism.