Journalism is challenged to listen and answer questions on the media’s disclosure of its own corporate sustainability standards.

Weak disclosure of corporate sustainability standards and initiatives by media outlets have alerted the GRI Media Sector Supplement team and staff facilitators to journalism’s poor track record in easing disclosure of corporate sustainability standards and initiatives by its own media outlets. In reporting on corporate sustainability records and report cards of other industries and sectors, its own idealism and devotion to truth, accountability and transparency has hit a blind spot when the questions are required to be answered by the journalism industry.

What is this blind spot? News organizations increasingly belong to transnational conglomerates, often resulting in a failure to support serious journalism, with conglomerates providing infotainment, which is the cheapest, safest way to grab audiences. Journalists are faced with demands, which have more to do with deep-rooted newsroom practices.

Also, journalism has been dominated by a traditional top down communication model:  “one to many” for too long.  If this example of a blind spot is to teach them anything, it is that the new participatory journalism with emails, twitter and blogs, has taken public opinion seriously.

Rather than simply being spectators of a show being played from Washington, Toronto or Westminster, it means rethinking basic journalistic conventions about covering issues, such as CSR from other perspectives, including its own.