The First Amendment, Social Media and Reporters

Elizabeth Raber
er198613@ohio.edu

The First Amendment and the freedom of speech gives all Americans a right to share their opinions, thoughts and feelings without being persecuted by a governing body and aims to progress society by allowing its citizens to have differing views.

Social media and the freedom of expressions allows anyone to share their opinions, thoughts and feelings without significant restraint and progresses interconnectivity in the world to share, like and comment on issues that effect a community and the whole world.

United States journalists use the First Amendment as their constitutional guide to giving American, and global, people news they need to keep informed about the world and to give factual information about what's going on.

These three entities, in the 21st century, are interconnected, all working together to produce quality, factual news that helps progress society and creates a bigger, more linked world. Ideally, each would do its job ethically to reach to the goals of each.

There is an evolving problem with the relationship between the First Amendment, social media and reporters—and more specifically, the media company the reporters work for. Where do newspapers, broadcasting companies, radio stations, or another source of media, draw the line between their ethics they hold and what their employees share on social media?

Lee Ann Colacioppo, editor the Denver Post, visited our class last week and shared a story that really made me think about the impact of social media; a place where people are free to share their thoughts an opinions, but also connect their personal and work life, and the ethical problem media companies are running into when their employees are sharing bigotry, racism and extreme bias.

In May of 2017, the Denver Post fired Terri Frei for this tweet. The reporter shared his thoughts about being uncomfortable than an Asian race car driver won the Indy 500 on Memorial Day. The Denver Post took action claiming, "That Tweet doesn't represent what we believe nor what we stand for. We hope you will accept our profound apologies."

In journalism ethics, we spent, and will continue to spend, a lot of time talking about transparency—in our writing, letting our audience know how we formed a story, keeping quotes in context, presenting news in an unbiased way to let people form their own opinions, etc. I think this notion of transparency projects itself onto the media companies themselves and I believe in the case of Terri Frei and the Denver Post, the ethical course of action was taken.

September 11, 2017, Jemele Hill, an ESPN SportsCenter reporter, tweeted about President Trump and the people he surrounds himself with, calling them "white supremacists." She later tweeted an apology and ESPN accepted that apology with no further action taken regarding her employment or repercussions.

The White House later said that her comments are a "fireable offense" in a press conference later that week, but no action has been taken. Jemele Hill is receiving a lot of support for her actions and people are changing their Twitter avi's to a picture of her.

Transparency of ESPN's beliefs are not entirely clear in what ethical standards they expect their employees to hold, but it is somewhat apparent they support Jemele's First Amendment right to free speech and expression. This new relationship between reporter's professional Twitter accounts, affiliated with their news organization, and the right to free speech is a growing problem—when it comes to spreading biased opinions. Read more about reporters getting fired over tweets here.

The New Ethics of Journalism by Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel rewrote the guiding principles for ethical journalism and gave new values to journalism as the 21st century has a new relationship with ethics than it did in the 90's. In their text they say, "The news never belonged to the journalist. It has always belonged to the public." I believe this should reflect how reporters use social media—to propel news to the public, not submit inappropriate thoughts and opinions where their tweet will be there forever.

More importantly, I think these examples of tweets give news organizations an opportunity to be transparent and something to strive for when it comes to setting an environment where being respectful is a necessity. These news outlets can set community standards and good examples of how to use social media in a positive way instead of saying "it's ok" to share negative and hurtful thoughts.