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Journalistic Codes of Ethics in Europe 193

1992. In the Act, the journalism ethics are given their own chapter where it is
stated that media contents and conduct must correspond to ‘sound press ethics’.
A press council was also created together with the new law in order to supervise
ethics (Nissen Kruuse, 1993: 24). Strictly the Danish code should not have
been part of the comparison, since it is a legal code. However, I included it in
the study because it was adopted in cooperation with the Danish Union of
Journalists. Before its adoption the journalists had no code whatsoever, only the
publishers’ association had a set of principles, which dated from 1981 (Juusela,
1991: 14).
When compared to another self-regulatory system, that of press councils, it
seems that the codes of ethics are more often the instruments of the journalists
themselves than are the councils. Among the 20 press councils functioning
in Europe at the moment, six (those of Iceland, the Netherlands, Romania,
Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey) are founded solely by journalists’ associa-
tions, and almost as many are established by the state (the Belgian, Danish,
Greek and Portuguese councils). The rest of the councils are founded by differ-
ent cooperation boards consisting of journalists, editors, publishers and/or the
state (Sonninen and Laitila, 1995: 10–11).

Recent revisions

Most (21) of the codes have been adopted or revised in the 1990s. Six codes (those
of Austria, Belgium, Iceland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Turkey)
date back to the 1980s, the Swiss and Greek codes to the 1970s, and one, that of
the French journalists, to the 1930s.
Many of the codes originally date back further than the last 25 years. Four out
of the 31 codes were adopted before the Second World War. The French code
dates back to 1918, the Swedish one to 1923, the Finnish to 1924 and the
Norwegian to 1936 (Bruun, 1979: 18–19).
The second spate of codes were introduced during the post-war period,
from the late 1940s to 1960. Six codes were adopted during this time. The
British National Union of Journalists established its first code in the late
1940s. The ethical code of Belgium was adopted in 1951, the International
Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) code followed by the Dutch and the Czech
journalists was set up in 1954, the Italian in 1957 and the Turkish in 1960
(Bruun, 1979: 20–2).
The 1970s and early 1980s saw a third boom, when seven more codes were
adopted. The Austrian code was created in 1971, the Swiss in 1972, the German
in 1973, the Greek and the Spanish in 1978, the Portuguese in 1979 and the
Danish code in 1981.
The Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian, Latvian, Slovak, Slovenian, Polish and
Russian codes have all been adopted in the 1990s. The Central and Eastern
European journalists already had codes of ethics, but after the democratization
of their countries they have all established new sets of principles that differ to a