Get the culture right and trust in journalism will be restored argues Michael Smith, executive director of the media ethics think-tank The International Communications Forum.

A request from Mike Jempson, Director of MediaWise, for your participation in an online survey about attitudes towards and experience of ‘media accountability’ (ethics/regulatory) systems.

The International Communications Forum (ICF) is committed to media ethics and the freedoms of expression and information. The ICF runs workshops where senior media professionals talk frankly to students about the ethical issues they face in their careers. This programme has been successfully trialled at the Lincoln University School of Journalism, and the ICF now plans to offer this more widely. The intern will help promote the workshops to UK schools of journalism, drawing on the ICF’s 20 years of experience in running conferences and seminars worldwide and its many contacts at a senior level in the media.

Flash back to the fall of 2000 when Sarajevo hosted the ICF's World Media Assembly giving that historic old city's name to a document -- the Sarajevo Commitment -- that was to become known globally with its vision of mass media as a more constructive force in the 21st century than in the 20th.

The danger of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks exposures is that they ‘pull on the string of “what is secret must be true”. This is fantastically pernicious’, warned BBC journalist Kevin Marsh. He was addressing a public audience at Lincoln University on the theme of ‘Leaks and stings: vice or virtue?’ on 28 February. Much of what the WikiLeaks exposures had revealed were opinions rather than facts, Marsh said. ‘We forget the process of journalism in judging what is salient.’

What now, how do we go on, what to do next? For the first time, an ad hoc coalition of foreign correspondents and reporters from across the Dutch media have given voice to people in every corner of the world who are looking for answers to these questions.

The role of the media in world society was prominent during conferences held in Caux, Switzerland in July 2010 organised by Initiatives of Change. Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, highlighted the media’s crucial role in the anti-racism campaign at the opening session of the conference on “Learning to live in a multi-cultural world”.

At the conference on 'Learning to Live in a Multicultural World', held in Caux, Switzerland from 2 to 7 July 2010 participants dealing with the role of the media in creating a multicultural, inclusive community issued a challenging statement urging the media to restore the credibility and dignity of their profession. Click here to read their call to the Media.

A group of Russian media professionals led by ICF Vice President Natalia Skortsova. Professor in the Journalism Department at the University of the Russian Academy of Education. Nizhny Novgorod and former Executive Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists has produced a short documentary in English about the ICF. Click here for more details and a link to the 13 minutes video.

The 10th anniversary of the launching of the Sarajevo Commitment, a statement of best practice for media professionals, was celebrated in a short ceremony in Caux, Switzerland, on 14 August. This statement of intent, signed by participants attending ICF’s Sarajevo World Forum in September 2000, aimed to be a beacon of encouragement to countries freed from communist tyranny and a challenge to the media world-wide. Now in 17 languages, it is still being signed online by media people from around the world.