All the News That's Fit to Print, But are we Sure?

Kaitlyn Marshall
Km934711@ohio.edu

As journalists and strategic communicators we constantly wonder if what we are doing is ethically right. While we know that we need to make the news as clear, informative, and honest as possible, we always have to think about what is right to us individually. We have to look past the sensational journalism that some people might go for and hope to give our audience the best news we can possibly give them.

The dilemma

With that being said, how do we keep our audience interested without giving up our values as human beings and as journalists? While we can ask ourselves a million times if this is the right thing to do, we have no way of ever really knowing that we are doing the right thing. This is often times a hard thing for journalists and PR people to cope with, however we must remember that other professions have the same set of dilemmas. Doctors have their own ethical and moral codes when it comes to saving lives. Engineers have an ethical code when it comes to what jobs they will take and which ones they won’t.

The difference

So what makes our ethical plight different than the plight of other professions? Journalists see the world differently. We are supposed to be vessels of truth and justice for the average person. We always have to keep this in mind with every decision that we make. We must ask the difficult questions not only to those we interview, but to ourselves as well. In order to ask those questions of other people we must make sure that we are holding ourselves to an equally high standard.

News is a place where workers see the negative day in and day out. The age-old saying of “if it bleeds it leads” is the mantra of many news executives to get more page views, viewers, or clicks online. So how do we as humans and journalists keep our ethical codes intact all while providing interesting news? There may not be an answer to that question. While we can hope that we are right, how can we ever know for sure that somehow we aren’t making a wrong decision? It seems like we are parents, and news is our baby. We can hope that we are always doing the right thing, but in the end we just hope that we don’t screw things up beyond repair.

So how do we as journalism students learn to make the best ethical decisions? We have a duty to our audience, yes. However, we are learning our own ethical standards. What level of ethical standards do we hold ourselves to as we struggle to find our journalistic voices? While we don’t have all of the answers to this question right now, as we learn as journalists we will make our own ethical questions to ask ourselves before every story. We will have certain guidelines that we will hold ourselves to that will be different from each other’s.