Abstract
This study, as its title implies, focuses on changes in journalistic ethics as part of applied or professional ethics. The first section offers a definition framework that deals with the issue in question. It attempts to answer the following questions: What is journalism? What forms does it take? What phases of development has it gone through? What are the main forms of Internet or online journalism? What are the changes in journal- istic ethics in connection with the emergence of automated journalism or artificial intelligence journalism? Is journalism a vocation, a profession or a semiprofession? A journalist encounters many ethically controversial areas in his pro- fession: privacy intrusion, conflict of interests in journalism, work with sources, bribery, plagiarism, the way journalists report the latest discover- ies in medicine, deception, personal involvement in news or in reporting major events (e.g. terrorist attacks and war conflicts). The study provides a description of these areas in theoretical as well as in practical way, based on case studies sourced from domestic and foreign journalism. The third part centres on the most important forms of self-regulated journalism: from ethical codes, press councils, editorial office and press ombudsmen (the former occasionally called public editors), to a system of continuing vocational education and training. It also deals with individual society values and ethical framework of journalists, a fact that is wrong- ly ignored in some specialist publications. The ideal solution is reached when the individual forms of self-regulated journalism create a functional entity (an element of integrity) and all interactions (an element of dia- logue) and the development of responsible journalism with ethical princi- ples (an element of permanent commitment and responsibility) take place within this entity. The final part of the study concentrates on the changes in journalistic ethics in the Czech Republic post 1989 and divides them into five stages:
1) the period of minimum (or zero) self-regulation of journalism (1989-
1994),
2) the period of first attempts to codify ethical principles (1995-1998),
3) the period of codification of the ethical principles of major national media and the interconnection between the external and internal regulation in the public service media (1999-2003);
4) the period of a formal approach to self-regulation and the enforcement of more strict external regulation of journalism (2004-2009); and
5) the failure of self-regulation during major changes in the ownership of the news media (2010 to date).