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

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.

The Significance of Contemporary Media Ethics

Ideally, Media Ethics seeks to facilitate the best possible world for humanity by applying a universal moral understanding to complex social situations. In other words, anyone who cares about human beings and journalism's relationship to society will care about media ethics. We must assume that this ideal is as unattainable as any Platonic Form, while acknowledging that it nonetheless remains our duty to use reason and our most universal sense of human morality to come as closely to it as possible.

The first thing I would want people to know about ethical practices in media is that on a fundamental level, they rarely exist. While contemporary thought has a venerable tradition of ethical philosophy stretching back millennia to draw from, these abstractions offer no simple application to social circumstances that largely did not exist when they were conceived. Modern media ethicists develop systems on a similar level of abstraction as these traditions, restricting our understanding to individualistic notions of ethical action that don't properly address the ethics of institutionalized media practices.

The concentration of media ownership, increasing specialization of social structure and its implications for the journalist-reader relationship, and systematic technological advancement are issues that require a less abstract, more critical understanding of journalism's place in society. According to obsolete notions of journalistic objectivity, media institutions have become too enmeshed in the things they are supposed to cover (via subsumption under gigantic corporations with a dominant social influence) to even remotely approximate objectivity. A broken clock has the correct time up to the moment it stops, and so it is with the objectivity-advocacy dichotomy.

We need to question why a given piece of information was created, and what its implications are for whatever individuals and institutions effected. Is it important to everybody and appeal to a common sense of humanity, or a petty trifle usurping the just place of such issues? Has it been interpreted in terms of its ultimate human consequences, their domain and scope? This seems to be the most important ethical consideration in contemporary media.

I see my future career as an ethical issue. How do I eek out a living without contributing to six corporate giants that have swallowed up a vast bulk of media outlets, or advertise for consumer products that hurt humanity in the long run for a short-term profit? I certainly don't know. But where many journalists see disaster in declining newspaper readership and TV ratings, I see an entirely new world opening. Journalists seem to see no quick-fix financial schemes and cry that the sky is falling. I see an opportunity for a renewed, vibrant relationship with an audience alienated by the infobyte-mill modern journalism is turning into. It couldn't possibly be easy, but I don't know of any natural laws against it.

Welcome to Media Ethics Matters

The posts in this blog are written by students enrolled in Media Ethics during fall semester 2005. It will also serve as a starting point for future generations of students in this class.

Journalism, public relations and advertising are powerful forms of communication. With power comes responsibility. This blog is about what we think is worth taking responsibility for as journalists -- the obligations, ideals and consequences of journalistic practices -- and what we think the public should know and care about when it comes to media ethics.

The questions addressed in this blog include:

Why should we care about media ethics?

What do we wish others knew about ethical practices in media?

How do ethics in media matter?

What is most important when considering ethics in media?

What are some examples of ethical dilemmas in media and how are they solved?