Valuing Transparency in Government and Media

Birkinshaw, Patrick

doi:10.5040/9780755694716.ch-004

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Without the commitment of an independent media the operation of the principle of open justice would be irremediably diminished. (Quoted in Birkinshaw, 2014: 65ff)…”

Section: Journalism Criminal Justice and The Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Between a ‘media circus’ and ‘seeing justice being done’: Metajournalistic discourse and the transparency of justice in the debate on filming trials in British newspapers

Garcia-Blanco

Bennett

2018

Journalism

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Public trust in the criminal justice system in England and Wales has been low since the 1990s, and accusations that the system is arcane, lacking transparency, soft on criminals and removed from the society it serves are common. The government, together with many lawyers, journalists and experts, believes that lifting the ban on televising trials may enhance the transparency of the judicial system, and eventually lead to higher levels of public trust. Drawing on the most systematic content analysis of the coverage of this debate between 1984 and 2016, we analyse how this issue was debated in British national newspapers. In addition to examining how newspapers presented this policy debate, we also explore how the coverage discussed the impact that filming trials could have upon journalistic practice. Our analysis shows how metajournalistic discourse resorts to high-profile and celebrity cases when examining journalistic practice. Newspapers constructed this issue as a quandary between increasing the transparency of the judicial system, and the risk that justice would become sensationalised, ignoring key elements in the debate, and the role that journalists themselves may play in that process.

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“…Without the commitment of an independent media the operation of the principle of open justice would be irremediably diminished. (Quoted in Birkinshaw, 2014: 65ff)…”

Section: Journalism Criminal Justice and The Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Between a ‘media circus’ and ‘seeing justice being done’: Metajournalistic discourse and the transparency of justice in the debate on filming trials in British newspapers

Garcia-Blanco

Bennett

2018

Journalism

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“…In the UK this was done tentatively at first, with the New Labour administration appointing two cross-department advisers in 2009 to increase the availability of government data. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, elected in 2010, went further in promoting transparency, albeit by pursuing non-statutory measures (Birkinshaw, 2014: 52–53). During their first year in office they oversaw the creation of a Public Sector Transparency Board and the launch of data.gov.uk, a data-hub publishing public sector datasets on health, education, transport and crime and justice (Cabinet Office, 2012).…”

Section: The Origin and Meaning Of Institutional Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite this, many public sector data remain unpublished. Indeed, one of the common criticisms of institutional transparency is that government agencies fail to comply with top–down requests to publish data (Birkinshaw, 2014; Cohen, 2014; Koelkebeck, 2010; Peled, 2011). This body of literature tends to approach transparency as an unfinished project.…”

Section: The Origin and Meaning Of Institutional Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Sociology of Institutional Transparency: Openness, Deception and the Problem of Public Trust

Moore

2017

Sociology

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Transparency has become the watchword of 21st-century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of opening up the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel’s work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of what Ezrahi calls ‘instrumental politics’, reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a ‘domain of plain public facts’. The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies.

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“…In government, transparency was historically thought to improve decision making, impede corruption, enhance accountability, and lead to a more informed citizenry; yet, evidence reveals that increased transparency can overwhelm citizens, leading to confusion and undermining government legitimacy and trustworthiness . In business, corporate transparency has increased in response to prominent corporate scandals, although this may have led to a paradoxical effect of causing “information overload,” second-guessing of senior executives’ decisions, and reducing creativity . Do these parallel phenomena mirror how Open Payments possibly contributed to information overload for patients or undermined the trustworthiness of physicians?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Truth, Trust, and Transparency—The Highly Complex Nature of Patients’ Perceptions of Conflicts of Interest in Medicine

Tringale

Hattangadi‐Gluth

2019

JAMA Netw Open

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Half of all US physicians receive payments from the biomedical industry, totaling $2.4 billion in 2015. 1 While this phenomenon reflects critical physician-industry collaboration, we cannot ignore the conflicts of interest (COIs) that these financial relationships introduce into medical practice. Motivated by the notion that patients should have access to this payment information to make more informed medical decisions, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act was implemented in 2013. Under

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Valuing Transparency in Government and Media

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Between a ‘media circus’ and ‘seeing justice being done’: Metajournalistic discourse and the transparency of justice in the debate on filming trials in British newspapers

Between a ‘media circus’ and ‘seeing justice being done’: Metajournalistic discourse and the transparency of justice in the debate on filming trials in British newspapers

Towards a Sociology of Institutional Transparency: Openness, Deception and the Problem of Public Trust

Truth, Trust, and Transparency—The Highly Complex Nature of Patients’ Perceptions of Conflicts of Interest in Medicine

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