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Codes of journalistic Ethics

The fundamental fallacy of all codes of journalism is quite simple: no one knows the whole truth, and no one tells everything they do know--and half the truth can be a very big lie.
The conceit that journalists under deadline and competitive pressure can and do produce "the first draft of history"--rather than an image of their own human, limited vision--is hubris. Take that conceit out of a journalistic ethics code, and IMHO nothing much is left of value.
We are not entitled to the truth, for nobody is legally obligated to tell us the truth.
We are entitled to our own opinion, and to attend to whoever we decide to listen to and ignore the rest--and to publish our own opinions as we choose, subject to the limitations of our own purses but not subject to government licensing. That's why FreeRepublic.com should be constitutionally protected--but McCain-Feingold in particular, and the FCC in general, should be thrown out root and branch.

Codes of Ethics

In response to the controversy, the director of BBC News is acknowledging the difficulties in reporting the conflict with Iraq accurately.
"Nobody, including the media, has the full picture of what's going on," Richard Sambrook told the BBC's Breakfast program. "Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information. We're all trying to work out this jigsaw and what the overall picture is."
He added that fact verification was especially problematic with live, continuous coverage.

"The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't," he said.

IOW, when you get into "live, continuous coverage" you are essentially down to the level of rumor.
"The fog of war" is just a critical example of the general problem of the fog of current events, and in fact "live, continuous coverage" is a lot like an ink blot test--it tells you as much about what the reporter expects or desires as it does about reality on the ground. As the "live continuous coverage" prediction of GORE WINS FLORIDA illustrates . . .
And as that also illustrates, "live continuous coverage" of an election is illegitimate--it can affect the outcome it claims merely to report, e.g. by suppressing the turnout at the last minute in the Florida panhandle.
And the tendentiousness of the 2000 election coverage was notable in the fast calling of states for Gore compared to the slower calling of states for Bush, when the final margin of victory or defeat was comparable. The solution is not to improve "live continuous coverage" of elections, but to abolish it. Just as electioneering at a polling place was abolished, to create the secret ballot.

Is coverage of war favoring Saddam?

There are two types of codes of ethics: show and go. "Show" codes of "journalistic ethics" can be found here.

The other kind, not for show but for getting along in the real world, is the kind that says never to question the objectivity of a fellow journalist, and never to accept as a journalist anyone who isn't in fact a liberal. Conservatives can be "right-wing commentators," of course--but must be balanced with "moderate" commentators. That's the real code that gets enforced. The public ones are window dressing.