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UNESCO supported Summer School in China on Media Ethics

27-08-2010 (Paris)

The address by Mogens Schmidt,
Deputy Assistant Director-General
for Communication and Information,
UNESCO

UNESCO has supported a one-week workshop on Media Law & Ethics in Teaching, Research and Practice, jointely hosted by the Chinese Association of Global Communication (CAGC), the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University (PCMLP), the Department of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Foreign Studies University and the School of Journalism and Communication of Tsinghua University. The workshop is taking place from August 23 to 28, 2010 at Tsinghua University, in Beijing.

The workshop brought together a total of 80 Chinese journalists, journalism educators and students from a large number of universities from different regions of Mainland China.

The workshop's lectures and discussions revolve around principles of media ethics: UNESCO’s work in the fields of freedom of expression and freedom of the press; media ethics in practice in both China and internationally; teaching media ethics - curriculum, textbooks and methods; researching media ethics; media law & ethics in the real world and in the classroom; and the impact on media ethics by Internet media and social communication.

Mogens Schmidt, Deputy Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information at UNESCO, opened the Summer School expressing UNESCO's gratitude to Tsinghua University for organizing it. He also delivered a two-hour keynote speech on Principles of Media Ethics. He presented the position of UNESCO with regards to media ethics and law by introducing the Article 19 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights and stressing the importance freedom of expression for cultivating a good journalism.

Mogens Schmidt also met with journalism educators and students at Peking University to discuss issues related to ethical and professional standards and their relationship with media law and freedom of expression. Peking University has been in charge of the translation of the UNESCO reader on Freedom of information: a comparative legal survey, which will be launched officially in China later this year.

Since the 1990s, with the rapid development of media industry and the growing media commercialization and the rise of the new media, Chinese journalism is challenged by the flooding of fake news, misleading advertisements, paid journalism, various sorts of media corruption, and etc. To tackle these challenges, there is a need for fundamental measures including training practising journalists and educating future journalists, to which this training workshop would greatly contribute.