So what are the UK's most disrespected professions?

IT was almost 10 years ago when BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme asked listeners to name their most respected and least professions in the UK. This was in May 2002 when 6,722 people voted.

The top five most respected professions were:

1 Doctor
2 Nurse
3 Teacher
4 Fireman
5 Paramedic

Whenever I give talks about the media to business groups or schools, I use this survey as an audience icebreaker asking them for suggestions. Naturally, the discussion gets very interesting when we get round to the least respected professions which, from the Radio 4 survey were:

1 Member of Parliament
2 Estate agent
3 Government Minister
4 Lawyer
5 Journalist

Interestingly, a footballer was listed at number 6 and a bank manager checked in at number 13, just one ahead of a traffic warden. I wonder what the survey would say today in 2012? Would those positions change very much now and what new categories would come to the fore?

More recently, a ComRes poll for ITV News at Ten found that 80 per cent of people no longer trust the media.

At the heart of all this is ethics and journalism practices; how news is reported accurately, fairly, with both balance and integrity, and also within the law.

It’s not an easy science and yet I believe it is wholly wrong to tar the media with the same rotten brush. Those who do so are uninformed and unable to distinguish between good and bad practice. They don’t pretend to understand the realities of newsrooms with what is being produced every day across a whole raft of media.

What we have right now is a watershed moment for British journalism which could see the demise, or at the very least, a major overhaul of the Press Complaints Commission

Let’s hope what emerges is a new-look PCC which is respected across the industry and by the public in general. One which has the necessary bite, while balancing the rights of privacy, genuine investigation into wrong-doing and freedom of speech.

Last week, The Sun and the Daily Mirror were fined for contempt of court for stories published about a suspect arrested on suspicion of murdering landscape architect, Joanna Yeates. Christopher Jefferies also received substantial libel damages from eight newspapers for stories published over his arrest. Mr Jefferies was later released after his arrest last December and another man, Vincent Tabak, is due to face trial in Bristol this October.

Sadly, some newspapers step over the line when it comes to contempt of court. The defence of “time and distance” is frequently used by editors – in other words, from the time of arrest and the distance to a future trial (or even its location), no right-minded juror would remember the facts published in a newspaper eight or nine months earlier. The internet has changed all that. I believe this is as important an issue as phone hacking.

Journalists’ reputations have plummeted to an all-time low and the debacle over phone hacking threatens to pollute the reputation of journalism as a whole. Yet I’d rather have our national media than not.

A year ago it was the Daily Telegraph’s stealth-like investigation into MPs’ expenses which brought Parliament to its knees, saw MPs jailed, and brought into focus a rotten culture which had existed for many years in the Palace of Westminster.

There are loads of great examples of superb investigative journalism – including the News of the World who, a year ago, prompted a police investigation into match fixing involving the Pakistan cricket team (albeit that is now being investigated as part of the phone hacking saga).

Go back further to the Sunday Times in 1968 and to the thalidomide scandal when hundreds of babies were born with defects because of the drug, which was eventually withdrawn.

Newspapers at a national level, or a regional level where I have worked, play a critically important role. Regional and local newspapers in particular play a very important community role, informing, challenging and entertaining readers. They investigate and ask those difficult questions.

Newspapers  are constantly made aware of the community they live in by their readership. They may not always make themselves popular with some of the stories they cover or even the angle of the story taken, but I believe they always strive to be fair, accurate and balanced.