Growing risks, media manipulation and changing news priorities have led to a decline in the standard of reporting on wars and disasters, a conference on media ethics has been told.
Maggie O'Kane of the Guardian newspaper, a veteran of wars and other emergencies over the past decade, said conflicts had become increasingly difficult to cover and probably more dangerous. Journalists were increasingly seen as targets: more than 30 died in the war in Bosnia, for example, compared to 12 during the Vietnam war.
Because of the growing risk, large news corporations were taking fewer chances with staff and equipment, Ms O'Kane said.
They had grown "cowardly" and had no sense of moral obligation to deliver the news.
She was speaking at a conference, "Media in Ireland: ethical issues in broadcasting", organised at the weekend by the Opus Dei-run Cleraun Study Centre in Dublin.
Ms O'Kane described the "mass exodus" of Western journalists from East Timor last year after Indonesian militia attacked a BBC reporter. Only three women reporters remained behind with the East Timorese under attack. It was their eyewitness reporting that helped change the course of events and led to Western intervention.
In Chechnya, however, no accredited journalists were on hand to witness the largest-scale bombing of a city since the second World War. Ms O'Kane recently spent five days in Chechnya, an experience she admitted she found "terrifying".
Foreign correspondents were like "firemen", she said - when the going got tough, they had to stick to the job. "If you're a fireman, you can't look out the window and say: `That's a really nasty fire, I don't think I can go'. "
A second reason for the decline in standards was the "pool" system increasingly operated by Western armies and international aid organisations in emergency situations. In a pool, journalists' places are rationed and visits controlled. Ms O'Kane described the pool as "an extraordinarily clever mechanism of control", which got journalists "squabbling among themselves" for places.
The escalating volume of media output was another problem. "We're turning out so much stuff every hour, on the hour, that you have to ask yourself, where's the journalism?" The principle of international intervention reached its low point in Somalia, but since then things had improved, said Ms O'Kane, who described the Western intervention in Kosovo as "controversial, but a success. I still believe that journalists can make a difference. I just think that we have to pull up our socks a little."
Dr Thierry Garcin, a French academic and radio journalist, criticised the media for exaggerating the casualty figures in many conflicts and catastrophes. It was "technically impossible" that one million people were killed during the Rwandan genocide. The same exaggeration had been made during the overthrow of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, he said, when the French press wrongly claimed that 60,000 people had been killed. Journalists should not use "inflated figures" to "predict" the importance of an event.
Other speakers and members of the audience disputed Dr Garcin's claim that the death toll in the genocide had been exaggerated for political ends.
Breda O'Brien, a teacher and columnist with the Sunday Business Post, called for an EU-wide ban on television advertising to children, to be implemented next year.
Ursula Halligan, TV3's political correspondent, predicted that the traditional role of public service broadcasting would soon be obsolete if current trends continued. RTE and other public broadcasters were reinventing themselves as a "confused hybrid straddling commercial public service and commercial broadcasting . . . and failing".
