1) Identify the case you & partner wish to do.
2) Describe what you see as the major ethical issue or issues in the case.
3) Discuss which ethical model you plan to apply to the ethical issue or issues & why.
The response of each group (not each person, but each group) is due by 4 p.m., Monday, Oct. 8. No exceptions.
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
14 comments:
Maria and I will be working together and focusing on the ethical issues of retouching photos and publishing them as news. The major ethical issue that arises is falsifying the truth. Once you edit a photograph, it is no longer in it’s original state, making readers believe something that it’s not. For example, if a fashion magazine photographs a model with a 32 inch waist and they Photoshop her picture down to a 28 inch waist, the photo no longer portrays the truth. In that particular industry, retouching photos can result in members of society trying to attain a false goal. Seventeen Magazine is trying to erase this problem by publishing unedited images of models.
We will refer to the Bok Model to justify our ethical reasoning. We will address the following questions: How do you feel about the contemplated act?, Is there another way to achieve your goals without raising ethical issues?, How will my actions affect others?
We will use this model because we feel it addresses all the aspects of retouching photos. This model reflects on the issues of empathy , which is an underlying problem when retouching photos.
Hobei and I will be doing the project on the Poynter Institute article about Journatic's overseas outsourcing of American news stories. The major ethical issues surrounding this case are misrepresentation, inauthenticity, dishonesty, and a lack of accountability. American newspapers like The Houston Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times and The San Francisco Chronicle contracted with Journatic to produce news items outsourced to low-paid workers mostly in the Philippines. Aliases, fake bylines, were used by the workers to cover up the outsourcing, the pay to the workers basically constituted wage theft for being so low, and this outsourcing can lead to a loss of already scare American journalism jobs. There is an overall lack of accountability. We would like to apply the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, the Poynter Institute's ethical guidelines and values, and run the case through the Potter Box in order to reach our conclusion of whether or not this is ethical misconduct. The SPJ ethics cite honesty and accountability as important. We also believe this violates the Poynter Institute's values of fairness, professional responsibility and transparency.
Eri and I will be working together on the Hunger Games articles about promoting the violence and death of children by the hands of other children. The major ethical issue that these articles deal with is glorifying child violence and making a profit off it. Lionsgate, as well as everyone who took a part in making the movie all made a huge profit off of selling the idea of child violence for entertainment.
We will use the Potter Box to justify our ethical reasoning. We have chosen to use this model, because it is very straight forward. We feel that by using the Potter Box, we will have to carefully think about family values and loyalties more so then if we were to use any other model.
elizabeth & eri -
are you sure the issue isn't how the ad campaign was put together? its stealthiness & lack of transparency?
Alana and I will be focusing on the New York Time’s newest policy, forbidding news sources and press offices to approve quotes after the fact. The practice is an ongoing ritual with newspapers. For example, the New York Times revealed President Obama’s headquarters’ method of quote approval. The press team has veto power over which statements can be quoted and attributed by name. This is undeniably an ethical issue. By press teams having the power to veto quotes, the method compromises one’s integrity as a journalist. Quotes, in a sense, are less authentic when using this “filtering method.” It creates the notion that journalists are lapdogs rather than watchdogs of the politicians in power. As journalists we are to seek the truth and report it, not seek the truth and watch it be filtered by politicians. We have decided to use Immanuel Kant’s method of the Categorical Imperative. The New York Times is attempting to develop universal law in which journalists act on the maxim of universal happiness. If administrations and other sources are given the power to review quotes, the public’s knowledge is distorted and journalists are surrendering their ethics.
alana & ricky -
you certainly can use Kant, but place the principle within a decision-making model: Potter or Bok.
My group will be analyzing the NYT decision to publish the photo gallery of the dead ambassador. In the article the editors say that they carefully considered if they should print it or not and I think that it absolutely should be printed. This is just my initial thoughts prior to our use of the potter box, though. I think that this is too big of a moment to say, "ya know maybe the public doesn't want to see this." But if they dont want to see it, don't stare at it. No one is making you look at this photo, but i think the press isn't doing their job if they are attempting to baby the public. This is what happened. A Man lost his life over a conflict that arose from an insensitive video that he had no part in. If the biggest and most tramautizing events are watered down by the press than the people of our country may not realize the severity of this situation.
I think by going through the quadrants of the otter box and analyzing each individual attribute, a paper like the Times has to print this photo. It is their job.
Tanique and i will be dealing with the case of Anita Sarkeesian and the harassment she endured after making a video about female stereotypes in videogames. The issue that she addressed has many ethical issues embedded in it. Among the major ones are what gender roles we choose to support, exploitation of women and overall reinforcing sexism. The reaction to her video also stirred up even more ethiical issues. For one, when is it ok to "troll", what is harmful and what is harmless, and where to draw the line. Also what lengths should you be able to go to to prevent someone from supporting a cause you don't believe in and how people hide behind the internet and keep stereotypes and prejudice in circulation. We think a good way to analyze the situation would be the Rawls model, because it forces people to image themselves in someone else's situation, in this case a woman on the internet.
Laura and I are doing our project on the Gawker article Freedom of Anonymity. The article touches on issues surrounding protection of anonymous sources. Gawker takes the concept a step further by introducing a system in which anyone can submit information completely anonymous. Their logic is that by opening a discussion, people with ill intentions will be weeded out and those with legitimate information will have a forum to reveal said information. The ethical issue with this practice is, by removing a reporter to verify the source could open the floodgates to anyone with an agenda or a desire to incite controversy. We have seen this all over the Internet. A fundamental question is how far does protection of sources go? We will use the Potter box to examine the issues. The Potter box seems like the best model to use for this case, which crosses the different realms of integrity, journalistic professionalism, individual moral value, and others.
Roberto and I are using the NYT article about PR firms being hired to advance the images of world leaders to be shown as they desire to be portrayed. Specifically, the Syrian president and his wife and the implications that journalists and publishers take part in this.
I believe we will be using the potter box method for analysis. It is straightforward and specifically discusses principles and loyalties.
The ethical issues most relevant to our project are: practices of allowing some journalists access and denying others, actors seeking to portray themselves as compatible with western values and deflect attention away from their regime, hiring PR firms to represent or misrepresent them to promote flattering images and publishing biased accounts, conflicts of interest between getting the interviews and returning favors as well as the american journalist's responsibility to not just publish or promote people who will sell magazines (such as attractive, educated, English-speaking dictators).
Francesca and I will be working together on the issue of the newspaper in North Dakota denying a gay couple to have their wedding announcement in the newspaper. This is a major issue because it is an infringement on their right to free speech and it is discrimination against their sexual orientation. Gay couples should have every right to announce their wedding in a newspaper just like straight couples do.
We plan to use the Potter Box to showcase the ethical issues because we can easily separate and show the loyalty of the readers to the newspaper from the newspaper's right to choose what to publish, and the gay couple's right to freedom of speech.
(Sorry about that deletion--forgot to say Roger's working with me!)
Roger's and my ethical issue is the violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires that parents give consent for their children to provide information on the internet. Some popular websites found a workaround by having children provide their friend's information and not theirs, which doesn't require parental consent from the friend's parents. These websites claimed they were not in violation of the law because the law made an exception for a one-time use of a friend's email address. The marketers are definitely the ones at fault here; not only do they try to put responsibility on the children by claiming they've done nothing and it was the child's choice to give a friend's email, there are also behind sites that track children's web usage and ask them to upload their photographs. A child does not necessarily know the methods to make ethical decisions about whether or not to provide their or a friend's information; the marketers do and take advantage.
We will be examining COPPA and arguments for or against it using the Potter Box. There are definitely some knotty questions of loyalties, values, and principles to be dissected here. We will also likely be employing the right/need/want to know dynamic in our case study: since these are marketing executives, you could argue they've got a need to know this information to do their business (but at the same time, they could find out this information in a more honest, straightforward way, even if it takes longer).
Mike and I will be working on the ethical question of whether or not it is acceptable to convey war and violence as entertainment in the form of a game show. In a recent example, NBC aired a show titled “Stares Earn Stripes” in which celebrities are matched up with military and law enforcement officers and asked to participate in a war simulation game show. This particular gameshow is a violation of many of the ethical theories we have learned about in class. Because the very concept of war can be seen as unethical to many people and many ethical theories, turning these socially acceptable acts of violence in to something that people watch for amusement puts it in an entirely different category. We would use the Immanuel Kant’s theories of Judeo-Christian ethic to back our claims as well as the potter box. According to the Judeo-Christian ethic, every person should love their neighbor as they love themselves which would eliminate the very concept of war all together. The article suggests that our society has come to value violence and has accepted it as being a part of every day life. The question of whether or not the media reflects society or visa versa is important to consider here as we look into whether or not this really is a new phenomenon.
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