Week 9: Moral Minefields: Legal and Ethical Dilemma

(Sherry, 2008)

The seminar presentation on this week’s topic started another round of debate over whether journalist should write on issues of genuine public interest or on matters that are interesting to the public. This is an issue of journalistic ethics, yet clearly not the only moral and ethical issue facing journalists.

Many ethical codes provided internally by media outlets, or even the official Journalist's Code of Ethics, merely consist of brief guidelines guiding general behaviours and conducts of journalists (Breit,, 2007), although ideally these codes should have been invincible manuals to aid journalists in dealing with ethical dilemmas.

Journalist may have the rights to information access and freedom to publish, yet, on occasions when these rights conflict with the ethical and moral codes, which side should a journalist take? Taking the case of Singapore, since there is no common law protection for torts of privacy in Singapore, journalists are legally allowed take photograph of anything and anyone so long as the pictures are taken from public places. Journalists may have the rights to report on almost whatever they find newsworthy, but is it right for them to report without any constrain all the time? Apparently not. So, how far should they go?

Keeble (2009) mentioned that ‘public interest’ should be the key guiding principle of whether or not a story should be reported. Especially in situations where harm, physically or an invasion to his or her privacy, may be inflicted to the reported individual, journalist should weigh up the consequences of their action and decide on whether their action are justified ethically and morally.

I guess it may be easy to identify what is ethical and what is not, yet in the real media world out there, where sticking to ethical boundary is clearly not the only concern of journalists, where would ethics stand in the long list of concerns deemed important?

Reference

Breit, R. (2007). Law & Ethics For Professional Communicators, LexisNexis Butterworths, Chatswood, New South Wales.

Keeble, R. (2009). Ethics for Journalists. Routledge, New York.

Sherry, M. 2008. Journalism. [Image] Available from: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTEOsTZWH2kov_H3NRAdsCBP_LDCZ7P6GmG2xw9LdgQcS6idCDMp_nr28m-lyXVLnTHCEcQzj4_2ommSI87FR2csUYl946yvzCY5k_z886dGJ9GdtsKQs0zS_WV7zD_AqeErUTOhcPu_XD/s400/journalism.gif [Accessed 30 June 2011].