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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
World
Jocelyn Noveck

For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot

Media Ethics Code - (Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Walk into a corner of a newsroom somewhere and you can often find it affixed to a bulletin board, perhaps peeking out from behind the coffee pot: the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics. It’s less than a thousand words, fitting neatly on a poster.

But those words — organized around four key journalistic principles — are important enough, asserts Dan Axelrod, that they just might save our democracy.

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