Media Ethics

When I sat in an information session for the Medill School of Journalism a few weeks ago, I was impressed by what I was hearing about the variety of courses that would be taken and the extent to which students were immersed in journalism. Particularly, I recall being somewhat surprised at the number of journalism ethics classes to which students were subjected. There is always an issue in journalism of whether or not it is ethical to report a certain story if people are going to be exposed in an undesirable way, if there would be other adverse consequences for the people involved, etc.

I hadn't really thought about this too much until I was reading a blog which covered this very topic, with regard to the recent violence in Afghanistan in response to the burning of the Quran by a Florida pastor who had threatened to carry out his plans in the fall, but was eventually talked down, only to follow through in March. As a result of the coverage of the Quran burning in March, violence broke out in Afghanistan that left at least a dozen people dead. There was allegedly only one person working for a news organization present at the Florida church. He submitted the story that was picked up by Google and Yahoo the next morning, and then a Pakistani source which spread the story to the Middle East, leading to the violence.

Since the very start of this story in the fall, it was clear that action taken by the pastor in Florida would almost necessarily lead to some sort of violent reaction in the Middle East. So when the actual event took place in March, should news sources have avoided it so as to prevent the death of a dozen or more people, which they potentially could have foreseen? Or would they have been shirking their duties as journalists by not giving the event any coverage? Was it a significant enough event that the failure to cover it would have been a major failure on the part of the journalism industry?

It's clear why ethics classes exist for journalism students. Issues like these must come up every day, though perhaps not on the same scale. There doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between what is ethical and what is not. Journalists need to grapple with ethics on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. It can't be easy. I hope when I go to Duke in the fall, I'll be able to take an ethics class or two to see just how professional journalists deal with these issues.