The Parliamentary Labour Party is to consider a proposal to establish a voluntary press council similar to that in Britain.
The idea will be contained in a paper prepared by Senator Kathleen O'Meara which will be put to the party shortly.
Ms O'Meara, a former RTE journalist, told a conference on racism and the media in Dublin yesterday that her proposal was being made against the background of growing concern about the changing relationship between the media and the public they are supposed to serve.
RTE's director of radio, Ms Helen Shaw, said the role of the media, especially the public service media, was to report accurately on society, to explore the issues behind the news and to present both a real and a provocative picture of the society around us.
The Irish Secretary of the National Union of Journalists, Mr Eoin Ronayne, said the union's code of conduct contained a clear principle which should be the bedrock of members' attitude to race reporting.
"We must constantly guard against the careless phrase, glib heading and ill-considered sentence which could ignite racial hate," he said.
Ms Dada Natelilic, a Bosnian Croat living in Ireland, said that when she first arrived in the early 1990 people were curious about her. Today there was hostility. The media were careless with terms such as refugee. The Irish Times Development Correspondent, Mr Paul Cullen, said the media had been lazy in their use of language, writing as if refugee, asylum-seeker and immigrant were the same. The conference was organised by the National Union of Journalists.