Ethical Gray Areas in "Getting the Story"

by Matt Hook
mh174104@ohio.edu

After reading the articles for class, I came to the conclusion that maybe some of our practices that we use to get our stories isn't so cut and dry. You don't often stop to think about what you do sometimes to get a story, or the information needed to write a story, but we will sometimes lie, perhaps fudge our commitments to people or even delve into the communities of the activities we are trying to report on. We will sometimes abandon our personal views on the matter to get that story that could put us over the top.
The million-dollar question then, is how far is too far? I agree that publications will have different viewpoints and different standards, but where do we draw the line? This is the debate of whether it was too much to bend the ethical code to pose as a firm like Ken Silverstein did, or is it too much to pose as a shopper to uncover a pet store that mistreated its animals, such as this news report showed:



Then the problem becomes, can we be forthright about our intent and our objective in our stories and get the information we covet. It is a bit of a slippery slope, between getting the story and being unethical, but I am convinced that it is a slope that we must walk down. Sometimes to get the information that we need and is our duty to report to the public, we must obtain this by unsavory methods.