One Way or Another, They're Going to Find You

Bianca Hillier
bh792112@ohio.edu

Slow and steady wins the race... says no one ever.
Due to the bandwidths that house social media and online journalism pieces,  journalists in today's limitless society put out a lot of content. Whether it is a tweet of a fire he or she just arrived to the scene of, promising a the full story at 6:00 p.m. or a 90-second package detailing the war on ISIS, there is always something new for the audience to absorb and contemplate.

Not only does this keep journalists increasingly busy throughout the day, but it also holds them increasingly responsible for what, exactly, they are publishing. Gone are the days when the only piece you had to perfect was your package for the nightly newscast or the article for the next day's paper; if journalists have a piece of information, they have to get it out and they have to get it out before the next guy does. This need-for-speed attitude requires a need-for-speed knowledge base to ensure accurate and respectable product. It requires an unbreakable code of ethics.

Even if a journalist were to deliberately choose stories that kept their distance from controversial topics and interviews, ethics would still come into play in their daily job. One way or another, the struggle of deciding what to post or how to word something is something that every journalist deals with. To mandate these ethics and provide guidance to the millions of journalists out there, organizations created their own ethics codes.

How They Compare
Despite having their unique parts, many professional ethics codes are similar in the broad scheme of things.

• Both the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and the Radio and Television Digital News Association Code of Ethics state that it is important to clearly identify sources as much as possible. The RTDNA Ethics Code details that "confidential sources should be used only when it is clearly in the public interest to gather or convey important information or when a person providing information might be harmed."
• The PRSA Code of Ethics states, on the importance of being honest, that they "adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public." Both the SPJ and the RTDNA Codes of Ethics agree with this statement in their own honesty and truth sections:
• SPJ: Journalists should "remember that neither speed for format excuses inaccuracy."
• RTNDA: Professional electronic journalists should "continuously seek the truth."

How They Differ

These Codes of Ethics are different for reasons, though, as they speak to different jobs in the journalism and communications industry.

• For public relations people: the PRSA Code of Ethics has a section titled Independence that states they "provide objective counsel to those we represent." This statement would not be necessary and is not found in a journalists' ethics code.
• For electronic or broadcast journalists: the RTDNA Code of Ethics states that electronic journalists should not "manipulate images or sounds in any way that is misleading" nor "present images or sounds that are reenacted without informing the public." These statements would not be necessary and are not found in the ethics codes for print journalists, as they tend to use less multimedia. However, I do realize that with the increase in cross-platform journalism, print journalists are almost always doing a sort of multi-media component with their story, leading way for some of the RTDNA ethics to be important for them to work by as well.

So What?

These professional codes of ethics can be daunting when looking at them as a long list of rules that you need to follow or else you shall be crucified. It is important to humanize these ethics by attaching stories to them so that the power held in your hands as a journalist does not go un-noticed. Carl Bernstein does just that in this video, humanizing the importance of ethics so that they are not so much of rules but a way of life.