ETHICS AS A CHALLENGE OF B&H MEDIA

Abstract

The function of a journalist who should and must be a critic of society has been lost, which is why it is inevitable to see how much ethical principles are respected in journalism. Ethical standards are adopted by media houses and journalists’ associations through codes of conduct, and the extent to which the codes are respected depends on the journalists themselves, editors and media owners, as well as the environment in which they operate. Journalism is also a profession, based on ethical principles understood as the duty of journalists to serve the truth. Since journalism is not just a job, its essence also consists of what the public thinks about it. The subject of research in this paper is journalistic ethics in the Bosnian media. The analysis was done descriptively with statistics and samples were collected electronically. In BiH, politics has influenced and shaped the media to a much greater extent than the media has managed to shape politics. It is clear that the journalistic profession is in crisis and that journalists have lost the trust of citizens. We can state that it is necessary to improve the working conditions of journalists and their economic position, to ensure their freedom of speech and access to information, and in that way the work of journalists would be improved and the quality of reporting would be improved. The aim of the paper is to present the situation in the media when it comes to ethics and compare journalistic practice that has overcome the requirements of quality ethical journalism. The political reality of every society is full of contradictions based on the struggle for power and privileges. That is why the media are the ones who have to offer a scale of possible solutions, channeling attitudes, opinions and behaviors in the desired direction.Observing the role of the media in developed societies, we can state that their task is to be observers, analysts and controllers of socio-political events. The role of the media is to inform, analyze, investigate, warn, and educate viewers, citizens, and the government, i.e. politicians. We found that the media in BiH are very far from the above. The conclusion is self-evident, the media are influenced by politics and are not self-sustaining, that is, they are economically dependent.We can characterize the activities of journalists as passive processing of information taken out of context if it corresponds to the policy that governs a particular media. A condition for ethical journalism is free media, and we have seen that Bosnia and Herzegovina is not high on the scale of media freedom.