So in class this week, I got to learn about philosophical ethics theories. Sounds boring, right? Well, they are actually really simple to understand! I can relate to all of the theorists points of view and understand why they think the way that they do. Who would have thought?
For my dream job, I want to be a reporter with E! News, which in a round about way, I would consider that to be a journalist. So using the Society of Professional Journalism Code of Ethics, or the SPJ, I will be discussing a case study from Chapter 8 in Media Ethics, Issues & Cases by Phillip Patterson and Lee Wilkins.
To summarize this really quick, for those of you who want to know about the case study, this is a case study about using graphic footage in news casts. For this example, the news outlet was waiting for a kidnapper to be escorted by sherifs from his flight in the Baton Rouge Airport. Things went routinely until a man turned from a bank of telephones and shot the alleged kidnapper. The man was later identified as the father of the boy who was kidnapped. The issue behind this case though, is should that video have been showed on the news? Was it too graphic?
Personally, the media puts a lot of violent stuff on the news these days, but I would rather know fully what is going on in a situation than have no idea just how horrible of an event that we are looking at. For instance, when the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened, nobody knew anything. The news outlets were reporting that there was more than one gunman and that they didn't know anything about survivors. It wasn't until much later that evening that we found out that Adam Lanza acted alone.
In this case study, being evaluated by the SPJ Code of Ethics, minimizing harm is one of their biggest ethical standards. The SPJ Code of Ethics says that to minimize harm, a journalist should be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief. How does this relate to this case study? Well, what if the family of the boy who was kidnapped had no idea that the shooter was planning this attack? They know now from the media running this story with the video clip of the shot and the victim dying that this person is the killer. On the opposite end though, what about the family of the victim? They were expecting him to be coming home to stand trial for what he did, but now they will be planning a funeral instead. However, the morality of the issue is the justification of why the shooter did what he did. Was his son kidnapped? Yes, but does that make it okay to kill?
This Code of Ethics is not helpful when studying this case because it mainly focuses on non-emergency situations. In my opinion, this case study is an emergency situation. I feel that any shooting should be considered an emergency situation, especially these days with how it happens almost every day. However, one of the issues or questions from the case study is the question of even if there is a disclaimer for graphic video, is it ethical to use it? I don't really know how I feel about this, but if it was a big enough incident where mass amounts of people were affected, I guess I could understand the use then.
When thinking about this case study, the ethical perspective of relativism comes through. Relativism is a rule that can be broken or applied in different cases. Relativism is context based. Based off the context of this story, if I were the one in charge of this, I would have found a different story to use, rather than show violent and graphic content as depicted in this story. I feel that the most ethical way to solve this would be based off of Mill's Utility Principle. Mill's focuses on the outcome, where the best outcome would be the ethical decision. I also feel that Bok's Ethical Decision-Making principle would work well for this study too. Bok uses 3 steps, 1 being how does the person feel and their gut reaction? 2 being, trying to find a different option? 3 being, how will the public react? After going through the 3 steps, picking the best outcome is the choice, ethically, that you would use. I think that the SPJ needs to think about how the public will feel when they find out about a particular event or issue.
In this particular case, I feel that Mill's Utility Principle would be the best outcome. How will this affect what we are doing? Will this affect our credibility? Will this affect our future newscasts? If more people thought like Mill's, I feel that our world would be a better place.
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