We may tell yarns about their ill treatment of us when we go to the pub (those of us who still go to the pub, or have a pub to go to) and we may even brag about how we defied them and gave them their comeuppance. We are probably lying. They were too powerful in their tin-pot way for us to challenge from our positions of weakness. And their tyranny survives in the demands of editorial executives who are prepared to order members of staff into jobs which they may find ethically repugnant.

But tucked away in a little-noticed paragraph in the privacy report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is a faint hope of some protection. The paragraph supports the proposal, put forward by the National Union of Journalists, among others, that journalists should, as a contractual right, be able to refuse to undertake an assignment on the grounds of conscience.

The NUJ's General Secretary Jeremy Dear welcoming the select committee's endorsement in Tribune, cites a journalist who walked out of a job because of a paper's “pro-Israeli” coverage, while another quit a national newspaper over its coverage of the war on Iraq. NUJ members at a regional newspaper wrote a letter of protest to their own paper and demanded it be published to distance themselves from its sensationalist reporting on asylum seekers and refugees. Members at a national newspaper threatened to ballot for strike action if an individual was forced to continue writing what amounted to racist front-page stories.

Understandably, given his position as a trade union leader and the nature of the magazine that carried the column, Mr Dear chose examples with a social and political significance. But the moral problems that confront most journalists on a daily basis are on a more personal scale. For most people at the reporting sharp end, the difficulties begin with the ambitions of the men and women who control their professional lives – news editors, back benches, editors and even proprietors. They have one thing in common: they are never normally likely to be obliged to report a news event or to interview a member of the public. Yet they feel free to make demands on their reporting and photographic staff that might be greeted with horror if they were asked to carry them out themselves.

The squandering of resources and manpower involved in round-theclock doorstepping of celebrities or people temporarily raised to notoriety by circumstances – usually tragic ones – is only the most obvious aspect of purposeless waste. Even when a media scrum has not developed, reporters are routinely humiliated by being sent on stories in which the only public interest is a prurient one. Some news editors have a particular obsession with famous people whom they have been told are seriously ill, preferably dying. Other targets include grieving families, many of whom are not going to face the legitimate question “What happened?” but the futile “How do you feel?” – as if they were at all likely to reply: “Over the moon.”

Reporters and photographers dispatched on these sorts of pointless and shameful assignments have little defence against the rogue bosses who send them out. Even when the NUJ had a high level of membership its energies were concentrated on pay and conditions rather than on what might be termed professional or ethical issues.

So the introduction of a conscience clause into the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct would be a welcome improvement, not only to reporters' working lives but also to the standards of newspapers in general. It would be a useful task for the PCC, which seems to be undergoing a period of confusion in these times of widespread hostility towards the media in general and newspapers in particular. Its apparently contradictory judgements on The Guardian and News of the World over payments to criminals is the most glaring example of this, although the PCC's director is insistent that the NoW ruling, to be published in full in the autumn, may look “very different” from early reports based on a leaked draft ruling. However that is resolved, there will also be the matter of the Daily Mirror and Tony Martin.

The divisions that this series of controversial arrangements between newspapers and prisoners have exposed within the industry come at an unfortunate time for the PCC. Its chairman Sir Christopher Meyer is being obliged to delay his planned journey around the regions to raise public consciousness of the PCC because of having to recover from a heart operation. Its director, Guy Black, seems to be aggrieved that “squabbling” among the national titles has been the reward he and the PCC have earned after a perilous period of successfully defending self-regulation from a number of threats. The former Lord Chancellor's intention to outlaw payments to witnesses was avoided through a tightening of the editors' code; the courts have not created a privacy law in spite of high-profile complainants; the Communications Bill did not pull the PCC under the umbrella of the new super-regulator, Ofcom.

The Select Committee, too, has endorsed the self-regulatory system. Adopting its recommendation of a conscience clause would demonstrate that the PCC represents the industry as a whole, not merely owners and editors, and is ready to stake out a moral advance by protecting not only the public but the professionals.