The Paper: Ethical Dilemmas

Kaitlyn Marshall
km934711@ohio.edu

The movie The Paper provides a lot more than just pure entertainment value for journalists. It's a pretty accurate display of the issues and problems that journalists must deal with everyday in order to make sure the stories that they are putting on the air, online, or even in print, are the best for their audience. Professional ethical dilemmas are at the forefront of everything journalists do. Anything that a journalist decides comes with some form of consequence and how they deal with those consequences shapes the art that is journalism for everything.

Obviously one of the most, if not the most, notable parts of the movie is when Hackett gets the scoop from the police officer basically saying that the two black boys they have claimed killed the men in the parking lot are innocent. Every other paper in town is running the headline that says these two boys are guilty. While we as the viewer know the boys are innocent, Hackett knows he has to run the story. His boss Alicia on the other hand wants to run the story they have and worry about editing tomorrow. This is a huge professional ethical dilemma. Choosing to knowingly run a story that you know is not right completely goes against a journalist's ethical code to do little harm to the public.

After the Boston Bombings when The New York Post all but convicted two suspects who later on we found out had nothing to do with the incident they faced backlash for weeks, and people still talk about how poor of a job they did reporting. The best quote I ever read about that mistake came from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine saying "This is slapping on the front page of a newspaper with a wide circulation something not confirmed at all and it harms people's lives". Granted the New York Post had no idea what they were printing was wrong, but the same sentiment is still there. As journalists we have a responsibility to check and recheck and then check again to make sure the story we are bringing to the public is correct and to knowingly run a wrong story and to wait until tomorrow to change it is not the way for us to go. 

Another huge ethical dilemma that Hackett faces is when he steals the notes on the murder from the editor's desk at the Sentinel and brings that to the Sun. This wrong for a lot of reasons, mainly the fact that he stole information from one news source and then went so far as to bring it to the competition. As journalists, and kind of as people, we can't do this. If the story is going to come from us then it needs to have been researched and investigated by us. In order for the Sun to be able to put their name on that they needed to have done the leg work themselves. Later on in the movie they are able to get the scoop however when Hackett steals the notes from the editor's desk he loses a lot of credit as a journalist.