Coverage of problematic issues about children in the media: ethical and legal norms

Abstract

The paper explores the peculiarities of reporting on the issues related to children's audience in journalistic materials. The work is devoted to the theoretical elaboration of legislative and ethical documents governing the media coverage of controversial and problematic issues related to children's audiences. The basic concepts, terms, names (child, teenager, minor, minor, crime, criminal and others) are given in the text. The basic laws the paper is based on are the Law of Ukraine «On Childhood Protection», Family Code of Ukraine, Criminal Code of Ukraine, Law of Ukraine «On Television and Radio Broadcasting», Law of Ukraine «On Print Media (Press) in Ukraine», Law Of Ukraine «On the Protection of Public Morality», the Constitution of Ukraine and others. The following ethical documents have been studied, in particular, the Ethical Code of the Ukrainian Journalist, the Code of Broadcasting, and the Editorial Statute of broadcasting companies, the BBC Editorial Guidelines and others. The representative material is based on examples taken from the sites of Ukrainian national and regional news portals. The paper deals with information about journalistic misconduct (or certain violations) by persons under 18 years of age. The issues of forming public opinion about such persons and the ethic side of journalistic articles are explored. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the presence of evaluative judgments, the personal attitude of the author, words, phrases and legal terms used by the journalist in the text. Emphasis is placed directly on the title, the accompanying photo and image, the main presentation and their overall ratio.