Questions and Quandaries

Lecture eight explored the ethics of journalism, a topic I found particularly interesting and of course highly relevant to journalism as a practise and a career. Our lecture began with being shown a series of pictures of advertising billboards. We were given a piece of paper with a set of axis on a sort of grid. We had to mark the square we felt best fitted the advert in terms of good or bad taste and being ethical or unethical along a scale of one to five.

The scale we were given

I soon came to realise that ‘taste’ and ‘ethicalness’ were two very different categories, depending on what imagery the add contained, what it was actually promoting and what connotations were in the text. Adds could be highly ethical but bad taste, or vice versa. 

3 paradigms were offered to us as a means of separating the good and bad from the tacky or tastefulness. Amazingly, they are supposed to encapsulate every possible ethical theory ‘on the planet’. The first was deontology, which uses rules and laws to distinguish right from wrong. Second was consequentialism, which is all about the outcome. The final result is all that matters and the path taken to get there is irrelevant. The third was virtue ethics, where goodness comes from virtues which are the ‘golden mean’. 

Example of Aristotle's Golden Mean

I found virtue ethics the most interesting, because it works in the middle ground between two undesirable outcomes to achieve a desirable outcome. The example given was cowardice and rashness, two undesirable qualities, while the middle ground is courage. I feel that this can be applied to a lot of examples today, where balance is important - even things such as your diet, or  running a cross country race where you need to pace yourself. This concept, I feel, can be applied to many aspects of today's life; not simply qualities. 

So there are multiple things to take into account when deciding the ethicalness and the tastefulness of advertisements. Despite these two considerations being separate, I believe they are somewhat linked. Tastefulness can be complimented or somewhat excused if the advertisement is ethical, yet if the advertisement is unethical, it is less justifiable. An example we were given was this anti smoking add. While it is advocating a good cause, it is not done in the best taste. 

Anti smoking add

An interesting example we studied in the tutorials was that of the journalist Kevin Carter and the ethical dilemma he faced in taking the photograph entitled ‘Vulture Stalking a Child’. Though he won the Pulitzer Prize for taking the photo, Carter was faced with the dilemma of whether to help the girl, disobey his orders and interfere, or to sit and watch the Vulture draw nearer, then snap the perfect photo. We had a lengthy discussion on this in the tute, and were asked to say what we think he should have done. Of course in the comfort and safety of the classroom, we would like to think we would do the most ethical thing – whatever that may be – however I think it is difficult to predict what you would actually do in a situation such as that until you are faced with the same dilemma. Despite the fact that Carter chose not to help the girl, this photo most likely raised a lot of awareness and sparked renewed curiosity about the development and conditions in southern Sudan. 

Kevin Carter's famous photograph

As a side note, I remember once reading about the ethical dilemmas faced by Jewish doctors in concentration camps during the holocaust. Many doctors were faced with the dilemma of either giving their patients morphine and killing them painlessly and quickly, or allowing them to be tortured, and possibly experimented on before inevitable death. 

Overall, in ethics usually a dilemma occurs when either outcome is bad, and you have to decide which outcome is 'worse'. Ethics in journalism is of the utmost importance for the sake of journalists themselves, but also those they write about. At the end of the lecture we were shown multiple ethical codes to help us and hopefully begin to learn and implement in our future careers.