Journalism and Ethics

In journalism, ethics is a huge area that most journalists face however tend to give the least concern about. They are in fact trained to get the story and coverage in rather than thinking twice about whether or not it is morally right. Their acts may violate certain laws, privacy rules, and even commit trespass, but in the long run a journalist's job is to get the news in to the public as best as possible. Regardless if the information is not transparent--that is, accurate, verified, and researched from the bare-bones, they aim to inform the public the particular subject matter in a timely fashion. They will do whatever they can to get the facts. For example, one can expect muckracking masqueraders to conceal their identities and pretend to be another person and clandestine smarties to adroitly put a spin on certain information and publish it for the body politic. It takes guts to become a journalist, it seems, as they face ethical situations and tradeoffs most of the time. But one of my personal code of ethics that I forgot to mention on a paper was the fact that a journalist should minimize their inner feelings.

Let's say you see a woman about to commit suicide by jumping from her terrace while holding her baby. Other people gathered around are yelling at her don't do it and expressing how crazy she is while you are there capturing photos of the whole scene.

Obviously one would, from basic human instinct, try to save her and her baby but after all it is important that the journalist pushes aside the sorrow he feels for the woman and do his job by getting the pictures of her plunging to her death and sending them in. Regardless if it may seem wrong, that is what a journalists does. Getting in the news and the hard evidence.

In other words, when you are in a journalist mode, don't be sorry. Just get the news in.

Now of course there are portrayals of these in popular films such as Pollack's 'Absence of Malice', where a heroine journalist fails to express concern for others and decides to publish false, sensitive information that eventually leads a woman to commit suicide. Her acts not only shone a false light on particular individuals but it also lead to suicide.

It just means that journalists face an inestimable number of moral dilemmas each time they are in the process of covering groundbreaking news, and that can sometimes be the toughest aspect, psychologically, to deal with.