A New Era of Media Ethics on the Rise

Molly Zunski
mz668015@ohio.edu

Photo courtesy of Linkedin, retrieved from https://thewellesleynews.com/2015/11/18/everyone-is-a-journalist-the-truth-of-social-media/

In recent years, the rise of social media and digital journalism have brought us back a few steps in the media world.  Technology makes the spread of information as easy as the click of a button from any computer with access to the internet.  However, because anyone can share any information they want, news consumers no longer trust professional media outlets as reputable sources without ample evidence that they are in fact producing trustworthy content.

Media outlets and publications begin to lose the respect of readers when they do not provide the information that the community wants.  In order to build up and maintain their reputation, such publications must be transparent by providing all the details and admitting what they do not know.

Although various ethical codes exist as guides for journalists to follow, many aspects of these codes have had to be revised in the past 20 years to adhere to the new era of journalism on the rise.

In the midst of the struggle to find truth in the increasing amount of fake news circulating on social media, ethical journalists still acknowledge that their number one goal is to seek truth and report it.  Professional journalists today also have a better collective understanding about the role of community in journalism, and why transparency is essential in the relationship between journalists and the communities they represent.

In previous years, communication has been constrained and only flowed out to the public from the media, making true transparency nearly impossible.  As more and more people get involved in the production of information, the public has more opportunity to interact with content and the people behind it.  Because of this, it becomes increasingly more imperative for the parties involved in content production to be transparent with the topics they choose to report.

As Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel discuss in their book, "The New Ethics of Journalism," it is important that "all those who produce news should aim high and strive hard to live up to their public responsibility," whether they are professionally trained in the field of journalism or gifted with social media.  It is not difficult to open up your laptop and start typing, but it is a challenge in this day and age to be met with a reaction other than immediate doubt and criticism for your work.

Although such an outcome is common in this new era of media ethics, this gives journalists even more of a reason to make moral decisions and be as transparent as possible with their audience.  Today's journalists are able to collaborate with others and reach a wider variety of consumers than ever before.

In such a time of change, one thing that has remained constant about the world of journalism is that it captures our attention by telling us what is new and important, but it does not tell us what to think.  If journalists can achieve their number one goal of seeking and reporting the truth in a transparent way, the new era of media ethics will not be as difficult to handle from a journalistic perspective as expected.