Abstract

Ethical scandals involving journalists in English-speaking West African countries have been documented to include conflict of interest, freebies, intellectual theft, deception, carelessness, kowtowing to advertisers and politicians, use of dubious evidence, and outright bias. This study explores how pronounced and clear the rules relating to these breaches are in the codes of these countries and whether the similarities and dissimilarities in wording indicate the influence of individual actors involved in writing them. Relying on thematic and qualitative document analysis methods, the study found that rules in the codes addressing the ethical breaches are pronounced and clear. Although largely similar in content, the codes also feature important differences that are strongly related to the composition of the groups that wrote them. This study discusses why ethical challenges in these countries persist in the midst well-written code of ethics.