Media Ethics: Applicable in the Real World

When I first registered for this class, I really didn’t expect it to have any real world benefit for me. Being in the advertising sequence, I thought that the class would just be some basic rules to follow and that media ethics was just some abstract idea. Boy was I wrong. After making it through the bulk of the class, I’ve realized that it’s not a matter of if I will encounter ethical dilemmas in advertising; it’s just a matter of when. In every facet of journalism, whether it is print journalism, public relations, advertising or another aspect, you will be put in a situation where you will need to think your way through an ethical dilemma. And when the ethical dilemma does come up, you better be prepared. Media ethics gives you the tools necessary to be prepared for these tough ethical situations.

The following paragraph summarizes a real world example that we learned of in class that represents just one of many ethical dilemmas you might come across as a journalist.

The example talks about an advertising agency who was working with a Native American owned casino in Northern California to establish a new branding strategy for the company. The people representing the the casino insisted that the ad agency produce a cartoon logo depicting a drunken Native American, because they thought that this image would most appeal to their target audience. The people representing the casino said that they wanted the ad agency to create the logo or they didn’t want to remain a client of the agency. This put the ad agency in an ethical dilemma. On one side, the agency did not want to create the cartoon logo, because they felt most other Native American tribes as well as others would find the image offensive and would think that it disrespected and stereotyped the Native American race. On the other hand, the casino was one of the ad agency's biggest accounts, and if they decided to drop the casino as a client, they would be forced to fire a few of their employees due to financial reasons. As the owner of the ad agency, do you authorize your employees to create the cartoon logo so you don’t have to fire a few of them? Or do you tell the casino that you won’t create the image and remove them as a client but then have to fire a few employees that may have done nothing to deserve it?

The previous example shows that these dilemmas aren’t as easy as you might think. There is no obvious solution. This is where media ethics comes in. It helps you break down the situation so that you can work through it and come to a complete, logical and ultimately ethical decision. Ethics are important in the media, because there are no hard, fast rules that you can use every time you find yourself in a bind. You need to be able to adapt to each ethical dilemma by using a variety of ethical guidelines that help you to work through it and solve it.

One of the things I’ve learned in this class is that good ethical decision making is not just telling the truth in every single situation. You might find that telling the truth can’t be your first priority in a situation, because somebody would suffer if the truth was told. Therefore, you have to choose another value that's more important in that specific situation.

The biggest reason I think that media ethics are important is because it isn’t just you that your ethical decision making affects. If nothing else, ethics will make you much more aware of the different groups of people that need to be considered when making an ethical decision. As a journalist, you are a communicator of messages. What you create influences how people perceive the world around them. Taking a Coke can out of an image that you shot as a photojournalist might not seem like a big deal, but in this situation, you have the power to directly alter the way people interpret hard news by what you decide to include or omit from that image. Your decisions have consequences that affect many people, so knowing some ethical guidelines to help you through these tough dilemmas is very useful.

Initially, media ethics might seem like a dry and very abstract concept, but those impressions couldn’t be further from the truth. Ethical dilemmas pop up all of the time across the media, and you will use many ethical guidelines and philosophies to help solve them. Because what you produce in the media is received by so many people, you have a responsibility to thoroughly think through these ethical dilemmas and not just brush them off as unimportant, because in the end, they are.