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Context: Ethical values in advertising.
What are the guiding principles for publishing advertisements in the newspaper?
- Principles: The code of business values has eight governing principles: honesty and integrity, respect, humility, excellence, consumer focus, transparency and fairness, neither favour nor discrimination, and finally, commitment to social good.
- A fair balance: If journalism is about maintaining a fair balance between what is in public interest and what the public is interested in, the ethical business practice for a news organisation in its pursuit of a sustainable revenue model is to refrain from interfering with editorial practices.
- The code of editorial values: There is no wall but there is a firm line between the business operations of the company and editorial operations and content.
- It is necessary to create a professionalism in the editorial functioning independent of shareholder interference so as to maintain an impartiality, fairness, and objectivity in editorial and journalistic functioning.
- The advertising team is guided by a triad: the laws governing the sector, the code adopted by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), and the in-house code of the newspapers.
