Written by Erda Khursyiah Basir
Competing interest or sometimes refer as conflict of interest always take place in media. People would define competing interest is more likely about positive and negative matter whereby media need to determine for example to report or not to report certain issue due to some circumstances. Those circumstances which also can be referring as media considerations often relates to media report, either it bring advantages or bad implications especially towards their organizations. Most media are subject to the control of political institutions or even individuals as well as the advertisers which most of the time closely related to the commercialism issue. Due to the ownership control, media need to follow the policy even bound to certain limitation to conduct their task as free-media. This control however had led to the issue of media ethics since media need to weight between ownership and ethics. Therefore, competing interest most of the time becomes a dilemma for media practitioners especially to make a best decision on certain issue. In order to cope with it, media should know about any competing interests they might have as it would help them in balancing those elements and to conduct their tasks appropriately.
