Ethics, Media and You: A Guide to Recognizing Your Values

Ross Dickerhoof

rd459511@ohio.edu

Ethics. Just saying that one word instantly provokes thoughts of a sticky, tangled web of ideas on the seemingly simple, hard and fast concepts of “right” and “wrong." Bill Reader and Stephen Knowlton discuss this very loaded term and concept in their piece, “Moral Reasoning For Journalists,” as it pertains to modern media. They come away with a question that’s a bit shocking at first: Are “right” and “wrong” even the proper words to use when discussing ethics? Not really.

It’s certainly true that there are many, many pervasive criticisms of modern journalism and journalists. They’re all in it for the money; they’re all in it for the attention; they’re so biased we can’t even trust them anymore, and so on and so forth. Is that really the problem of the journalists, though? Maybe it isn’t.

The root of ethics (as defined by the Greeks) is avoiding the subjectivity of a matter, as well as not resorting to simple statements of emotions or going off intuition to make judgments. A truly ethical decision is one based on reason and an understanding of a situation, taking all of the facts into account before one arrives at a conclusion. Therefore ethics are a spectrum. They don’t work the same way for everyone, since all people will interpret facts in a different manner. What matters is how you come to your conclusion, not just the conclusion itself.

The best way to demonstrate this is by example, so we’ll look at two different articles on the same subject. For the sake of relevancy, we’ll look at the recent incident at the VMAs where Miley Cyrus performed a highly sexual routine and was roundly slut-shamed for it by pretty much everyone, despite the fact that a) more important things are going on in the world at the moment, b) she’s not the only one who should be held responsible for indecency that evening and c) we should be past this as a society.

Photo from zap2it.com.

This article could reasonably be considered an ethical response to this event. The writer takes into account the political climate surrounding the event (mentioning the Syria conflict as a contrast), and notes that Cyrus is an adult and should be held responsible for her behavior. He also criticizes Robin Thicke, who did equally (if not more so) reprehensible things, yet escaped criticism. From there, he forms a coherent opinion on the topic that is informed by emotion but not ruled by it. Of course, he does sabotage his own point by saying “I’m no feminist,” but that’s more of a personal matter.

This article, on the other hand, is about as far from ethical as you could get. It is incoherent in terms of its ideas of cause and effect (Miley Cyrus twerking somehow led to a rape that happened last year?), insulting in its disregard for the facts of the Steubenville case as well as the writer’s treatment of the victim, and almost entirely rooted in an instantaneous gut reaction to the event that was clearly not edited in any way later. This disregard for basic logic and human decency is surely what people are talking about when they bring up “the decline of ethics in journalism."

So really, whether you agree with the views of the above writers or not, what you should pay close attention to is their train of thought when deciding whether or not their writing is truly “ethical." If you are able to form a coherent opinion on a topic, express it in a manner that is equally so, and stand by it through thick and thin, you can consider your opinions “ethical." It's not as complicated as you’d think, but it's harder than it sounds.