Tom Hopkinson: The Role Of Truth In Journalism

Tom Hopkinson is not the first and certainly not the last journalist to face a difficult choice regarding the truth. The phrase ‘The first casualty when war comes is truth’ presumably was coined by the US senator Hiram W Johnson more than two decades before World War 2 (The Guardian, 2011). The larger the magnitude of conflict the more truth suffers. When national survival is at stake truth is no more than an impractical idealistic concept. Admittedly, there were many cases in which truth was perceived as dangerous, one of them being the case with Hopkinson and the choice he made. However, in the long term, adherence to truth pays dividends to the media and to the profession of journalism in general. This is the first argument for the thesis …show more content…
And so did most journalism practitioners throughout history. International Federation of Journalists’ list of principles consists of 9 items, the first of which says: ‘Respect for truth and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.’ (International Federation of Journalists, 2016) Most other codes of ethics developed by other professional organizations also put truth above all the other principles. For the most of its history though, truth in journalism had one significant flaw. Journalism served national audiences and therefore national interests. Truth, therefore, was limited to ‘our’ truth. The truth for Russell and his editor was the truth of British soldiers and their hardships, not the truth of the enemy’s side, and not even some ‘middle’ truth. That approach was good enough for the time, and it was good enough for more than a century. Russell himself brought down a government with his reporting and many others after him contributed to the cause of open society simply by telling the truth of the ordinary people.