Ecuador: Journalistic Ethics and Freedom of Expression at a crossroads

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_45How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Press; ethics; freedom of expression; democracy

Abstract

This work is a current diagnostic study of journalistic ethics, involving three hundred journalists from Ecuador. They described the environment in which they perform their activities and the ethical difficulties these conditions provoke. Compliance with ethical principles based on their self-regulations was also evaluated, and alternatives for improving journalism quality understood as a key element for democracy, were discussed. Methodologically, a mixed method was used: participant observation, focus groups, content analysis, and interviews. The work concludes with some recommendations that could be implemented by organizations linked to the press, the government, and academia. Violence, low wages, political polarization, and misinformation form the backdrop where Ecuadorian journalists practice their profession. This environment leads to information characterized by immediacy, superficiality, lack of context, and verification. This quality issue, linked to ethics, comes with additional problems such as self-censorship and payments for activities like image promotion for politicians or support for disinformation campaigns.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Saudia Levoyer
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/17
TI  - Ecuador: Journalistic Ethics and Freedom of Expression at a crossroads
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2024 (ICOMTA 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 517
EP  - 526
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_45
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-596-6_45
ID  - Levoyer2024
ER  -