A Letter to my Peers

A Letter to my friends:
I am writing to you in regards to everything that surrounds you. You are surrounded and bombarded constantly by journalism. Television, magazines, internet, radio. Everything you read, watch and hear has some part to do with journalism. The stories you hear about on MTV News, or on John Stewart, the advertisements you are bombarded with when you read Cosmo, or even the web links you decide to click on are influenced by porfessionals in the journalism field. Behind all those funny commercials, appealing websites and interesting news stories there are people constantly making decisions of what you are going to see and hear. These people are forced to make ethical decisions such as if what they are sharing is correct information, or how they’re sharing it is ethical, or better yet, if what they are doing is right or wrong.
For example, the advertisements you see on television. In a Campbell’s soup commercial, that soup looks absolutely appealing with the vegetables floating in a perfectly colored broth, steaming from a spoon. What would you think if I were to tell you that in order to give that bowl of soup a more appeasing look, Campbell’s advertisers added shards of glass to the soup to make the vegetables float? That what you pour out of that can will never look like that steaming bowl of soup you saw on the commercial?
Or in news stories, people make the decisions of what stories are most interesting and the audience will appreciate the most. Like the story of the man committing a protest on a freeway in California, eventually killing himself. The news anchors found that story most important and interrupted after school programming to bring you a man prancing nude on a freeway, instead of reporting that a student received straight A’s, or a hero saved a life.
The one thing I’ve learned in this class I’m taking based on media ethics is that you should never take anything for what it is. After being asked if, offered the opportunity, would I join an advertising campaign for a cigarette company, I realized that the journalism profession offers many ethical dilemmas that had never crossed my mind. I simply believed that you would take any job offered to you as long as it paid well. If it is on television, it must be ok. Since it’s drapped across a billboard, someone must have approved it, so it’s ok. I could have never been so wrong. Question everything. When you see that billboard on the side of the road saying “Get Off Here” with a little implication that they mean the freeway exit, question it. Is that ethically correct?
Another lesson I am taking with me from this class is what you may think as ethically correct, others may not. Everyone, and I mean everyone has an opinion. Listen. They may be the very thing that had never crossed your mind in making your decision. You are not always correct, although we all like to imagine that we are, we are not and sometimes we need to hear that.
These are the very things you stare at everyday. We spend more time watching television and surfing the internet than practically sleeping. You should be aware that these are people’s jobs, and they heavily influence who you are by influencing what you read, hear and watch.
Lauren Wright