Can We Make Digital Media Ethical?

By: Adrienne Green 
ag881210@ohio.edu

Photo Credit: Google.com

Journalism is one of many professions where ethical behavior is of utmost importance.  And with the introduction of social and digital media over the last decade, any and basically everyone is a content producer or has the opportunity to engage in citizen journalism.

Gone are the days when accuracy and ethics were contained within the hierarchies of legacy media production (reporters being diligent, editors being scrutinizing, fact checkers being a final say). The rise of online media and citizen journalism provides audiences a diversity of opinions, ideas and narratives. But that diversity also brings about major discussion—do we need to be as inclusive when it comes to ethical opinions and how we enforce these principals? Do classic ethical journalists still serve the same purpose?

The many different professional journalistic organizations (ex. SPJ, RTDNA, ONA, PRSSA, ASME) that seem to think that ethics as they have always been are essential to maintaining the values of journalism. In almost every single code of ethics written by an organization, the document expressed that journalists have the responsibility to be trustees of the public, which means reporting things truthfully, fairly, and independently.

What does this mean for new media?

What may be more interesting though is how they have adapted those values to include codes of ethics that include the digital world. The speed of social media, the expectation of video and photography compliments to text, and the overall access provided by the internet has changed the way that people consume news, and this how we as journalists produce it. Not only is there a code that surrounds being ethical about the content, but there is personal credibility at stake online. (Photo Credit: RTDNA.org)

The Society of Professional Journalists, which includes members from print and digital outlets, 

has many recommendations that can be applicable to social and online mediums. They say:

• Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy
• Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story. 
• Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story. 

Even the American Society of Magazine Editors has included an adapted code specific to websites, tablets, smartphones, and social media that specifies that their advertising content should be clearly differentiated form editorial contents as it pertains to maintaining audience trust. The organizations that serve strictly digital audiences (RTDNA and ONAA) provide and interesting dichotomy in their codes between free access to information and expression and complete transparency and accountability. 

Enforcement

In the Frequently Asked Questions Section of the SPJ website they provide a fully fleshed out answer on why they do not have a governing body to enforce their code of ethics. They say:

American citizens’ constitutional rights to free speech and a free press are vulnerable, and they are placed in jeopardy whenever we allow them to be confused with or limited by the professional responsibility to act ethically. Instead, we encourage the exposure of unethical journalism as a means for rooting it out;

They chose to protect the collective rights to freedom of expression and in independent press, and in the next sentence suggest that the best defense against the press using free speech in an unethical way is the production of more speech. And while that may be effective in traditional media settings, what is to be done with outlets like twitter where more speech can be overwhelming and broadly concentrated on different topics (all of which can invoke different ethical issues)?

This a difficult debate, especially for outlets like social media and blogs which were created as a forum for free individual expression but have now been appropriated by the media as a means to communication. Is it even possible to hold a tweet to the same ethical standard as an article that appears in Time magazine or the Boston Globe?

NPR is one organization that is tackling this fission head on by coming up with an entire social media and online handbook so that anyone that works for them or frequents their website is well versed in ethics that come along with the murky waters of online journalism. 

Individual posters are now in a position where they need to be as educated about ethics as much as professionals, and I think as media organizations and outlets develop what their personal values and ethics are they need to reach out to their audiences and share them. We are in a time where it is not longer effective to keep ethics in-house when people may be using the ethical content produced by professionals in unethical ways.