SECTOR 4 4.7 Journalists and media have integrity and are not corrupt. Analysis: There is corruption in Ugandan newsrooms, and some media houses acknowledge as much. Daily Monitor and New Vision have recently been placing notices in their papers warning the public and providing telephone hotlines and email addresses through which to report any offending journalist. On 12 February 2010, Daily Monitor put out a full-page notice titled “Protecting the Integrity of Our Journalism”. It said in part: Widespread corruption within some newsrooms appears to be a major aspect of the perceived erosion of journalistic integrity … We would like to emphasise, in particular, that our editors, reporters/correspondents and photographers are expressly barred from soliciting, accepting money or any form of payment or inducement for publication of news, opinion, or feature in any of our media. Such content is free of charge and is publishedpurely on merit. While corruption takes many forms, the most obvious is of journalists asking someone they are writing about for money to kill the story, especially if the story does not cast the subject in a good light. There are also journalists who routinely ask for facilitation fees from organisations, especially civil society organisations, whose events and functions they go to cover. Civil society groups have obliged and in the process may have contributed to institutionalising this form of corruption. Big media houses do provide cars or money for transport to their journalists, so there is no justification for any ‘facilitation fees’. Smaller media outlets, however, rarely offer that support, leaving their reporters open to temptation. Staff turnovers have not helped. When such bad habits are dropped as people mature in the profession, they leave for other things and then a new lot comes in and continues with the same old bad behaviour. UTV (now UBC TV) started the practice of asking different government departments to pay for coverage costs because the station had for long had funding problems. But what started as a government department-to-government department practice quickly became standard operating procedure for other (private) media houses as well. There have also been cases of people who masquerade as journalists to cheat the public and thus give the media a bad name. In early February 2010, New Vision publicly exposed three such imposters. Also, some members of the public make false accusations against journalists as a way to kill unfavourable stories. 66 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER UGANDA 2010