2016 Jakarta World Forum on Media Development

Covering migration has been one of the biggest challenges for news media over the last three years and will be for some time come. But how are journalists coping and what can be done to strengthen efforts to cover the story in an accurate and ethical way?

This interactive session will launch the Ethical Journalism Network’s new guide to migration reporting, which covers issues of bias, legal knowledge, showing humanity and balance, as well as allowing participants to trial the new guidelines and develop more bespoke guidelines for the environments they work in.

The session will also look at ways journalists can define, identify and respond to hate speech, against migrants, as well as those who argue for and against migration at national and local levels.

The Ethical Journalism Network’s Moving Stories report finds that despite many examples of excellent coverage journalists often fail to tell the full story and routinely drift into sensationalism and fall into propaganda traps laid by politicians. The report which cover 14 countries, as well as the European Union, highlights:

• Missed Opportunities: How journalists and media in Europe failed to raise the alarm about an imminent influx of refugees fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, even though the story was there to be told a year before the crisis broke in 2015;

• Hate-Speech: How outrageous anti-migrant or anti-Muslim statements by politicians like Donald Trump in the United States and some European leaders fuelled increasing public concern and hijacked media coverage;

• Falling Standards: How media fail to provide detailed and reliable information about the refugee crisis because of a lack of editorial resources or the presence of well-informed journalists able to provide in-depth and sensitive reporting;

• Sensationalism: How much journalism is driven by hyperbole, intolerance and distortion with media in confusion over what are the correct terms to use to describe migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.