The Paper: Ethical Dilemmas in the Newsroom

Carly Graman

Cg105511@ohio.edu

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110771/

The Paper

The Paper is a 1994 movie that is perfect to study in this class. We spend most classes evaluating situations and cases that deal with ethical dilemma’s journalist face every day. So it is only right to review the Paper, and evaluate the ethical dilemmas presented in this movie.

The Paper shows conflicts the newsroom deals with daily. In the movie, the New York Sun received a story about a murder. The information was easily obtainable and should have been reported. However, the case involved a two white men found dead and two black kid’s seen fleeing the scene. No one ever saw these two kids do anything wrong. However, several inaccurate reports were made against these men. The newspaper had a decision to make. Should they report two men were killed from shot or should they report that these two innocent kid’s kill them. Their on conflicting stories that present a dilemma of what one to report.

Valuable Sources?

The newspaper receives a lot of pressure. One of the reporter’s over hears a police man saying he thinks the two kid’s did it. This shows another ethical dilemma. The source and information were not obtained lawfully. They are going off of information they only over heard. They are reporting on information that could be false. The reporter decides it is going to be a huge story and should run it.

Is it worth it?

The managing editor decides they should run the story they have. The story will be big and it could mean a lot for them putting it out. The whole movie happens in a 24-hour time period. There is hustle and bustle in making decisions quickly. The movie shows us, as up incoming journalist, what it is like to make decisions down to the wire and how trying it can be. However, running such an inaccurate story could harm the paper forever. They would get a bad rep. You, as the reporter, could get a bad reputation. The two men, you falsely accused, you no longer have a life outside of prison. One must always remember the stakeholders involved.

We, as journalist, have to keep our ethics in check and make the right decisions the best we know how. We have to remind ourselves that it is our job to report accurately and fairly. In this movie, they lost touch of that. They were greedy with getting information out, whether it was true or not. The pressure led to a lot of tension and poor decisions being made. This movie shows what we should not do as journalist. We should make more reasonable and sound decisions. We must have accurate sources, and report on non-bias information. We must follow our ethics.