The Director of TVE Asia Pacific has called for more ethnical conduct by television journalists and networks in news gathering in the developing world.

“If the products of child labour and blood diamonds are no longer internationally acceptable, neither should the world tolerate moving images whose origins are ethically suspect,” Nalaka Gunawardene says in an op ed article recently published by two international media websites.

He made this plea in assessing challenges for the new global news channel Al Jazeera International (AJI), which started its global satellite broadcasts on 15 November 2006.

The new channel has set out to ‘balance the information flow from (global) South to North, providing accurate, impartial and objective news for a global audience from a grass roots level, giving voice to different perspectives from under-reported regions around the world.’

“To usher in real change, AJI needs to transform not just how television news is presented and analysed, but also how it is gathered at source,” Nalaka Gunawardene argues in his essay, two versions of which have been published by the US-based MediaChannel.org and the UK-based MediaHelpingMedia

Click here to read full op ed appearing in MediaChannel.org

Click here to read full op ed published in MediaHelpingMedia

Gunawardene refers to a disturbing belief and practice in international news and current affairs journalism, especially on TV: that the end justifies the means.

He takes the example of how the global news channels covered the Asian Tsunami of December 2004.

“The ‘media tsunami’ that soon followed turned the plight of affected people into a global circus. The right to privacy and dignity of thousands of affected people was repeatedly violated. The visual media had no qualms showing the dead, injured and orphaned,” he says.

He refers to discussions at an international media conference in New Delhi, India, involving film makers, TV journalists, media researchers and activists, where concerns were raised about the conduct of western film/TV crews who roam the South, looking for images of poverty, decay and suffering for news channels or documentaries. There was evidence of foreign film crews bribing officials to obtain filming permits and access restricted areas such as wildlife sanctuaries and heritage sites.

He adds: “Such journalists’ only operating principle seems to be: get the story, no matter what -- or who gets hurt in that process."

AJI is the English service of the Arabic news and current affairs channel Al Jazeera, which has been broadcasting from Doha, Qatar, since 1996. Although reliable audience figures are hard to come by, its global satellite transmission in Arabic has at least 50 million viewers, according to the Wikipedia.

The published set of brief ethical guidelines of AJI does not specifically refer to communications rights or exploitation of developing country suffering. But it pledges to “observe transparency in dealing with news and news sources while adhering to internationally established practices concerning the rights of these sources.”

Science writer and development communicator Nalaka Gunawardene counts 20 years in journalism and development communication. He co-founded TVE Asia Pacific in 1996 and heads the regional media foundation based in Sri Lanka with Asia-wide coverage.