A Matter of Conscience

Abstract

For years many senior journalists who were supposed to be helping to train newcomers filed the juniors' stories under their own names and kept the lineage money; small-town editors gave the late jobs to the newest member of staff and then refused to reimburse the bus fare. These people were too powerful in their tin-pot way for us to challenge from our positions of weakness. And their tyranny still survives in the demands of editorial executives who are prepared to order members of staff into jobs which they may find ethically repugnant. But tucked away in a little-noticed paragraph in the privacy report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is a faint hope of some protection. The paragraph supports the proposal that journalists should, as a contractual right, be able to refuse to an assignment on the grounds of conscience.