978-1544332345 Chapter 14

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Chapter 14: Media Ethics: Truthfulness, Fairness, and Standards of Decency

Summary and Learning Objectives

Media ethics are a complex topic because they deal with an institution that must do things that

ordinary people in ordinary circumstances would not do. Media ethics draw on a range of

philosophical principles, including basic Judeo-Christian values, Aristotle’s ideas about virtue and

balanced behaviors (the golden mean), Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s principle of utility,

Rawls’s veil of ignorance, and the Hutchins Commission’s social responsibility ethics. One way

contemporary journalists can resolve their ethical problems is by using the Bok model for ethical

decision-making.

Reporters face a range of ethical issues on a regular basis. Those issues include the following:

• Truthfulness—Journalists need to make a commitment to tell the truth. This includes not

giving false or made-up reports and telling truthful stories that are not intended to deceive

the audience. This may require reporters to provide not only the facts, but also the context

The advertising industry became concerned with protecting its image during World War II. Among

the major ethical issues in advertising are the following:

• Truthfulness—How important is it that claims such as “Tastes great” or “It’s the best” are

demonstrably true?

• Taste—Is it appropriate for ads to attract attention by shocking audiences?

• Media control—Do advertisers have a right to control the editorial material that surrounds

their advertisements?

In the public relations industry, practitioners need to work at balancing their clients’ interests

against those of the public at large. This can become problematic when a client is attempting to

influence the public to support an issue, such as going to war.

In online media, there is an ongoing problem of women who attempt to work in traditionally male

areas getting harassed and receiving rape and death threats.

After studying this chapter, you should be able to

1. Define five major ethical principles affecting journalism,

2. Explain the Bok model for ethical decision-making,

3. Explain the kinds of difficulties journalists and media writers have encountered in attempting

to be truthful,

4. Discuss the ethical issues related to sensationalism in the news,

5. Explain how journalists can get into trouble trying to report on rapidly breaking stories,

6. Explain how and why advertisers attempt to control the media in which they place their ads,

and

7. Discuss the ethical conflict in public relations between serving the client and serving the

public.

Review Questions

1. How do newspapers and other news outlets make decisions about when to run vulgar or

offensive language from politicians such as the president or vice president?

2. How can two competing ethical principles lead us to making different ethical decisions?

3. Do reporters have an obligation to stay to report on protests and violence when police are

telling them to leave the area? Why or why not? What factors might affect how you answer

the question?

4. Should advertisers be able to shape the content of media they advertise in? Should they be

able to veto ad placement next to certain types of content? Why or why not?

5. What was the #gamergate hashtag supposedly about and how was it actually used?

6. Why does representation of women and people of color matter in entertainment media?

Media Literacy Exercises

Using the Bok Model

Use the Bok model for ethical decision-making to analyze a newspaper editor’s decision about

whether to run President Trump’s profanity relating to immigrants. Respond to each of the three

steps: Consult your conscience, seek alternatives, and hold an imagined ethical dialogue with

everyone involved. What did you decide to do? Explain why you made that decision.

Notes: The biggest challenge with this assignment is for students to conduct the dialogue. They

generally only want to argue their own point of view. The strongest way to do this assignment is to

find sources where editors talk about why they did or did not run the president’s language. But

students should be able to develop arguments from each of the groups/people in the case. You can

find some helpful material here:

https://www.ralphehanson.com/tag/s-hole/

Suggested Readings

• Stauber, J. C. & Rampton, S. (1995). Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public

Relations Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Stauber and Rampton take a highly

critical view of the public relations industry. If you take into account that the authors

themselves are engaging in the very techniques they are criticizing, this is a fascinating look at

one side of public relations ethics.

• Bok, S. (1978). Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Bok

has written a comprehensive look at the ethics surrounding lying and what it means to tell the

truth.

• Baird, R. M., Loges, W. E., & Rosenbaum, S. E. (Eds.). (1999). The Media and Morality. Amherst,

NY: Prometheus Books. A wide-ranging anthology that looks at media ethics from a variety of

points of view.

• All of the Chapter 14 links posted to my RalphEHanson.com blog at

http://www.ralphehanson.com/category/chapter-14/

Lecture Builders

Photo Manipulation

For more on the ethics of manipulating digital images, read the linked article by John Long on the

National Press Photographers Association website:

www.nppa.org/professional_development/self-

training_resources/eadp_report/digital_manipulation.html

Notes: This is a growing issue as digital photo editing becomes the industry standard. It is

impossible for photo editors to say that they will do no digital manipulation, because every photo is

cropped and adjusted digitally. So the question then becomes how much is acceptable and under

what circumstances. Here are a couple of case studies you may find interesting:

• A Los Angeles Times photographer was fired for digitally combining two photos he took

during the 2003 war in Iraq: www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=28082

• Sports Illustrated digitally altered a dramatic sports photo in order to make it fit on the

cover: www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=15422

• A Toledo Blade photographer resigned after he had digitally altered a page-one photo:

www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2007/04/toledo03.html

• A pair of Reuters photographs of columns of smoke rising over Beirut were found to have

been edited to show more smoke:

www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2006/08/reuters.html

There is a great archive of controversial digitally (and conventionally) altered photos assembled by

Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth. The archive is located at

• http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

Should News Outlets Show Photos of Terrorists?

Another fascinating piece from Time magazine’s Light Box feature. Fred Ritchin, Dean of the

School at the International Center of Photography, looks at the questions of what our news media

ought to do with photos of terrorists. On the one hand, their photos are emphatically news. On

the other hand, in many cases what these terrorists want is attention for themselves—and when

the news media run their photos, they are giving the terrorists what they want. An in-depth and

thoughtful analysis.

• http://time.com/4438929/terror-attack-photos/

Media Activities

Classroom Discussion—Cookie Monsters: Online privacy and data gathering

We all know (or at least we ought to know) that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. That means

that when we get media that we don’t pay for, such as broadcast television, we know that we’re

paying for it by being exposed to advertising messages. Now, however, when we go online, we pay

in a second, related currency—information. Who are we? Where do we shop? Where do we go?

What kind of phone do we use? And the list goes on.

The difficulty is that it isn’t always obvious to consumers what kind of information is being

collected about us. Think about Facebook. Yes, the social network giant shares its privacy policy,

but that policy runs 9,000 words and is read by virtually no one. Geoffrey A. Fowler, writing for the

Wall Street Journal, notes that Facebook not only tracks what you do on Facebook; it also looks at

the cookies (small data files) left behind by other Web sites you’ve visited and the activity of the

apps you use. The thing to remember is that although you don’t pay money for accessing Facebook,

you do pay with access to your information. And that information, according to the Wall Street

Journal, is worth about $7 a year per person.

If you know where to look, you actually can see what

Facebook thinks you are interested in. There’s a small icon in the upper right-hand corner of each

ad that will eventually take you to a list of all the things that it categorizes you by, and you then

have the opportunity to turn off any of the categories you don’t want connected to you. For

example, my file includes, among many other things, interest in the movie Blade Runner, a

comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars, and minimalist music (among several hundred other

things).

With consumers spending increasing amounts of their online time using mobile devices, advertisers

have moved from wanting to target the right demographic for their product. They now want their

carefully targeted ads to reach the “right person, at the right time, in the right place, with the right

message.”

Mobile devices are perfect for this because in addition to the rest of the data they hold

about you, they generally know where you are. French carmaker Renault wanted to target adults

who are interested in electric cars, so when a targeted consumer is within five miles of a dealership

that carries the car, ads start appearing on the shopper’s screen. Facebook has even developed

technology to target ads based on the particular mode of phone people are using. So through

Facebook, advertisers can target users of an iPhone 5s or a Samsung Galaxy S5.

iii

DO you ever read the privacy policies of the websites or social media sites you use? Have you ever

quit using one because of its privacy policy?

ARE you ever troubled by the ads that start showing up on your browser after you’ve looked at a

particular topic online?

DOES it worry you that through mobile technology marketers know not only what you are

interested in, but where you’ve been?

DO marketers do a good job of letting you know what kind of information they are collecting about

you? What can you do if you don’t like their policies?

Classroom Discussion—Reporting and Truthfulness

In your textbook, we discuss the issues of reporters and truthfulness in a variety of contexts.

Here are some links that go with these readings:

• Pulitzer Prize winning story coauthored by Jose Antonio Vargas on the Virginia Tech

massacre

• Profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker by Vargas

• Vargas outing himself as an undocumented immigrant in a first-person article for the New

York Times Magazine

In it, he tells the story of how he came to the United States as a 12-year-old boy to live with

his grandparents in Silicon Valley. He did not know that he had entered the country on

forged papers until he took his supposed green card to the DMV at age 16 to get his drivers

permit, and was told that his card was fake and that he should not come back again.

• In an interview with Vargas on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Vargas explains he was

supposed to work in shadow economy jobs until he could find an American citizen to marry

and get a permanent residency permit that way. Only one problem: When Vargas was in

high school, he came out publicly as being gay. So while he was out of the closet as a gay

male, he remained secretive about his immigration status.

• The story of Vargas and his outing of himself has caused a fair amount of controversy in

journalistic circles because Vargas has been lying about his immigration status for his entire

adult life. (This link is to an audio story that also has a transcript. Listen if you can.) And

lying is rather looked down on by journalists. Phil Bronstein, who had hired Vargas to write

for the Chronicle, writes that he felt duped by Vargas, especially since Vargas wrote about

the experiences of undocumented workers without mentioning that he was one himself.

• Read about the punking of Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and then Arizona Senator Jan

Brewer by alternative journalists. It contains links to the original source materials for your

media literacy box.

• James O’Keefe and Political Activism Through Deception

All of this leaves us with this central ethical conflict: A journalist lying about his or her identity is

always troubling for any reason. But if Vargas had not lied about who he was, he could not have

been a reporter. (If you go to my blog, you will see some strong thoughts on the deception Vargas

practiced from UNO journalism professor Chris Allen.) This is, at its core, the definition of an ethical

problem. Because ethics are all about what you do when no answer seems right, when all answers

are problematic, when telling the whole truth stands in the way of telling any truth.

So, after you have read this material, and Chapters 13 and 14, here are your discussion

questions:

• Was Vargas wrong to work as a journalist while concealing his immigration status? Could he

have spoken out if he had revealed his status? What would we lose if we didn’t have Vargas

working as a reporter? What would we gain? Does the fact that he lied about his

immigration status invalidate the work he did? What would you have done if you found

yourself in his situation?

• Was it appropriate for Murphy and Koen to lie about who they were to create their satirical

stories? Would it have been OK if they had been creating serious stories? How did the

actions of Murphy and Koen differ from those of the ABC producers investigating Food

Lion?

• Do journalists ever have the right to lie or be deceptive in their work? Support with

examples from your readings or real-life. (You are welcome to use examples other than

those I provided.) I don’t want pretend examples. Why or why not? When would it be

acceptable?

Keep in mind this is a discussion about journalistic ethics and legality, not about what America’s

immigration policy should be. Obviously immigration policy comes into this discussion, but the

journalistic behavior is at the core of this discussion. This is going to be a touchy topic that people

will disagree on rather strongly. As long as we stay civil, this should be fine.

Classroom Debate: Manipulating public opinion

Public relations pioneers Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays both said that the goal of public relations

should be manipulating public opinion in favor of their clients. As long as PR practitioners tell the

truth, are there any ethical problems with attempting to manipulate public opinion? Why?

Notes: The effort to persuade the public demands that PR professionals walk a fine line between

serving their client and serving the public. How far can PR people go with this without breaking the

boundaries? Clearly, the PR firm should not write false materials for their clients. But must a PR

professional stop a client from telling lies, even though the PR firm has nothing to do with the lies

the client is telling? Must the PR firm verify the claims their clients are making?

Video Hint: The BBC documentary, Counterfeit Coverage (The Cinema Guild in association with

New Decade Productions, 1992), tells the story of Hill and Knowlton’s work for Citizens for a Free

Kuwait. The documentary takes a fairly evenhanded approach, and it would appear that the news

media that used Hill and Knowlton’s materials is every bit as accountable for the deceptions as was

Hill and Knowlton itself.

Discussion—What Do You Publish?

Read the Test Your Media Literacy box in your textbook about the Unabomber’s Manifesto on page

371. You should then read the blog post that I put up on the topic, along with several of the links

contained in the post:

• Looking back at the Unabomber and the Washington Post

http://www.ralphehanson.com/2015/09/29/unabomber_wapo/

Now, imagine that you are an editor working at the Washington Post back in 1995, and you are

trying to decide what you should do with this manifesto you have been sent by the Unabomber.

Remember as you work on your discussion, you don’t get to know in advance how this will turn

out—you don’t know if good things or bad things will happen if you do or do not publish the

manifesto.

Think back to the ethical principles described at the beginning of this chapter. Explain one that

would give you a compelling justification for running the manifesto. Explain one that would give

you a compelling justification for not running. Support with evidence from the readings. After

considering your options—What would you do and why? Do you think there is a good answer to this

problem? How do you make a decision when you don’t like any of your options?