What?

The media toolkit on how to include a fundamental rights angle in reporting, is a web-based capacity building platform. By bringing together factual reporting examples from different media genres, and practical tools such as checklists, it will provide the media with guidance to enhance quality journalism. This platform further aims at providing first hand assistance to media professionals to diversify their points of reference, sources of data and vary their experts’ profiles. The ultimate objective of this toolkit is to provide media professionals with applicable tools to quickly acknowledge the fundamental rights angle during news coverage.

Why?

The Agency’s 2008 “Diversity Toolkit,” developed in close partnership with the European Broadcasting Union, proved to be a relevant tool for public service broadcasters, at showing how often programmes can reinforce stereotypes and repeat misunderstandings about minorities. However, with today’s media convergence and new communications culture, a toolkit is required that takes into account the conditions in which contemporary media work and the pressures that editors and journalists face. The toolkit will acknowledge that nowadays news often breaks online and, therefore, the way in which a journalist receives, processes and publishes news for different genres is constantly changing. Ethical dilemmas such as media’s role when it involves spreading the message of hate propagandists, advocates of intolerance or when covering false political statements will be analysed via recommendations, tips and tools on how to tackle these and other ethical questions from a fundamental rights angle.

How?

Partner media organisations and experts will advise on content, review and analyse the material to build a practical tool for journalists, which will use training modules to facilitate self-learning, as well as face-to-face training in the newsroom. This tool will benefit from the close engagement with relevant media organisations, associations and networks who will select examples to better reflect on the cardinal principles of journalism such as truth and accuracy (ensuring that facts have been checked), fairness and impartiality (stories are balanced and where minorities such as Muslims or Roma are reported on, their points of view are included), humanity (being aware of the impact of our words or images on others), and accountability. The Agency will offer media organisations the tools and means to create an online toolkit written by journalists for journalists to help them make quality journalism easier. The close cooperation with journalists in its development will ensure that the news examples, selected by the media partner organisations, illustrate the dilemmas facing today’s journalists about how to present facts and events.

Outputs

An online toolkit developed by journalists for journalists.