Almost every day
in the news we see news articles about any subject from celebrities, to
athletes, to musicians, to murder stories and sex scandals. We hear about politicians lying on the resume,
or sexting their interns. We hear about
cheating celebrities and drug abuse. We
are constantly bombarded with everything that is going on with the people we
look up to and they are written by journalists who have to put out this very
personal information. There is a hard
line to draw though between media ethics in the celebrity world and the world
in which we live our day to day lives.
Nowadays
we are getting more and more used to citizen journalism and being able to receive
news almost as soon as it happens. There
comes an issue though with false information or anonymous sources. We could get completely wrong information about
something that has happened in the news which can sometimes be very ethically
wrong. When I first heard about the West
fertilizer plant explosion, I read articles that were saying over 100 people
were dead. Shocked at the amount of
people affected I assumed that this would have a very severe impact on our
history. And while it will still always
hold an impact, there were significantly less people that were actually found
dead. It is a disrespect of the friends
and family of the ones they lost, and jumps the gun on something that really no
one has information about.
An
article from Professor Stephen J.A. Ward at the University of Wisconsin talks
about the images and videos we see today, and how we are seeing news more
explicitly recently. He calls it the “ethics of images,” and talks about how
people can shoot videos or take photos from a completely biased perspective and
can even alter the photo. That photo or video we see may be the first
thing we see about a news story, and can be very misleading. Taking it back to the West explosion, there
were videos of the explosion from peoples car that were rather disturbing, but
were posted almost instantly online for everyone to see. It’s the same with the Boston Marathon bombing. The videos and photos taken are something that
not everyone should have to see, especially when it comes to the people
affected.
Since
what I want to do with my career is work with celebrities, I like to talk about
the issues that arise with the privacy of celebrity lives. In the book Controversies in Media Ethics, it
discusses that news and entertainment media cannot be the sole judges of the
privacy boundary between appropriate and excessive coverage. Celebrities are held at a higher standard for
what they do in their lives, because they have chosen that type of lifestyle. That is why media ethics is important for this
matter; you are dealing with peoples personal lives even though they may be
famous. There comes a time when a
journalist must ask whether it is right to take that nude picture of that
celebrity in their house, or was it is right to picture their family while they
are in their house in their backyard. In
some cases it is not legally right, but the more important question to ask is
if it is ethically correct. Some stories
about celebrities have been fabricated in magazines such as the National Enquirer and it is not
ethically correct to have false information about a celebrity, or a non
celebrity for that matter.
An
example to think about is if you were randomly photographed on the street and
that picture was then used for an advertisement for getting tested for sexually
transmitted diseases. That is not
ethically correct to put that person’s picture there, because it is against
their consent, and that person most likely does not have an STD. You would be pretty embarrassed. It is similar, not the same, but similar to what
celebrities deal with. You essentially
have to not make mistakes because the media is constantly watching what you do.
These
are all examples of why media ethics is important for our society. We are more affected by what we see in the
media than ever before mainly because of our constant want for the most
breaking news. We are addicted to our
Twitter, Facebook, News stories, and other forms of social media, that we
sometimes forge the stories we read are about actual people. The death and
tragedies we read about, the drug problems with celebrities, the sex scandals
with political figures are still all people.
It is important to realize the ethics in what we are putting out there,
especially if we put ourselves in their same positions.
