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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.
i
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.”
ii
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?
