iMedia Ethics
Issues and Cases
Ninth Edition
Philip Patterson Oklahoma Christian University
Lee Wilkins Wayne State University
University of Missouri
Chad Painter University of Dayton
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
2
iiExecutive Editor: Elizabeth Swayze Assistant Editor: Megan Manzano Senior Marketing Manager: Kim Lyons
Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-5381-1258-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5381-1259-5 (ebook)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
3
https://www.rowman.com
iii For Linda, David, and Laurel
4
ivBrief Contents
Foreword Preface
1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth 3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary? 4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances 5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village 6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise 7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line 8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism 9 Informing a Just Society
v 10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment 11 Becoming a Moral Adult References Index
5
viContents
Foreword Preface
1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making Essay: Cases and moral systems
Deni Elliott Case 1-A: How to read a case study
Philip Patterson
2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth Case 2-A: Anonymous or confidential: Unnamed sources in the news
Lee Wilkins Case 2-B: Death as content: Social responsibility and the documentary filmmaker
Tanner Hawkins Case 2-C: News and the transparency standard
Lee Wilkins Case 2-D: Can I quote me on that?
Chad Painter Case 2-E: NPR, the New York Times, and working conditions in China
Lee Wilkins vii Case 2-F: When is objective reporting irresponsible reporting?
Theodore L.Glasser Case 2-G: Is it news yet?
Michelle Peltier Case 2-H: What’s yours is mine: The ethics of news aggregation
Chad Painter
3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary? Case 3-A: Weedvertising
Lee Wilkins Case 3-B: Cleaning up their act: The Chipotle food safety crisis
Kayla McLaughlin and Kelly Vibber Case 3-C: Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ prescription drug choices
Tara Walker Case 3-D: Between a (Kid) Rock and a hard place
Molly Shor Case 3-E: Was that an Apple computer I saw? Product placement in the United States and abroad
Philip Patterson Case 3-F: Sponsorships, sins, and PR: What are the boundaries?
Lauren Bacon Brengarth Case 3-G: A charity drops the ball
Philip Patterson
4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances Case 4-A: Fair or foul? Reporter/player relationships in the sports beat
Lauren A. Waugh Case 4-B: To watch or to report: What journalists were thinking in the midst of disaster
Lee Wilkins Case 4-C: Public/on-air journalist vs. private/online life: Can it work?
6
Madison Hagood Case 4-D: When you are the story: Sexual harassment in the newsroom
Lee Wilkins Case 4-E: Whose Facebook page is it anyway?
Amy Simons viii Case 4-F: Where everybody knows your name: Reporting and relationships in a small market
Ginny Whitehouse Case 4-G: Quit, blow the whistle, or go with the flow?
Robert D. Wakefield Case 4-H: How one tweet ruined a life
Philip Patterson
5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village Case 5-A: Drones and the news
Kathleen Bartzen Culver Case 5-B: Concussion bounty: Is trust ever worth violating?
Lee Wilkins Case 5-C: Joe Mixon: How do we report on domestic violence in sports?
Brett Deever Case 5-D: Looking for Richard Simmons
Lee Wilkins Case 5-E: Children and framing: The use of children’s images in an anti-same-sex marriage ad
Yang Liu Case 5-F: Mayor Jim West’s computer
Ginny Whitehouse Case 5-G: Politics and money: What’s private and what’s not
Lee Wilkins
6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise Case 6-A: Reporting on rumors: When should a news organization debunk?
Lee Wilkins Case 6-B: Doxxer, Doxxer, give me the news?
Mark Anthony Poepsel Case 6-C: The truth about the facts: Politifact.com
Lee Wilkins Case 6-D: WikiLeaks
Lee Wilkins Case 6-E: Control Room: Do culture and history matter in reporting the news?
Lee Wilkins ix Case 6-F: Victims and the press
Robert Logan Case 6-G: For God and Country: The media and national security
Jeremy Littau and Mark Slagle
7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line Case 7-A: Murdoch’s mess
Lee Wilkins Case 7-B: Who controls the local news? Sinclair Broadcasting Group and “must-runs”
Keena Neal Case 7-C: Automated journalism: The rise of robot reporters
Chad Painter Case 7-D: Contested interests, contested terrain: The New York Times Code of Ethics
Lee Wilkins and Bonnie Brennen Case 7-E: Transparency in fundraising: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting standard
Lee Wilkins Case 7-F: News now, facts later
Lee Wilkins
7
Case 7-G: Crossing the line? The LA Times and the Staples affair Philip Patterson and Meredith Bradford
8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism Case 8-A: Killing a journalist on-air: A means/ends test
Mitchel Allen Case 8-B: Remember my fame: Digital necromancy and the immortal celebrity
Samantha Most Case 8-C: Problem photos and public outcry
Jon Roosenraad Case 8-D: Above the fold: Balancing newsworthy photos with community standards
Jim Godbold and Janelle Hartman Case 8-E: Horror in Soweto
Sue O’Brien Case 8-F: Photographing funerals of fallen soldiers
Philip Patterson
x 9 Informing a Just Society Case 9-A: Spotlight: It takes a village to abuse a child
Lee Wilkins Case 9-B: 12th and Clairmount: A newspaper’s foray into documenting a pivotal summer
Lee Wilkins Case 9-C: Cincinnati Enquirer’s heroin beat
Chad Painter Case 9-D: Feminist fault lines: Political memoirs and Hillary Clinton
Miranda Atkinson Case 9-E: GoldieBlox: Building a future on theft
Scott Burgess
10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment Case 10-A: Get Out: When the horror is race
Michael Fuhlhage and Lee Wilkins Case 10-B: To die for: Making terrorists of gamers in Modern Warfare 2
Philip Patterson Case 10-C: Daily dose of civic discourse
Chad Painter Case 10-D: The Onion: Finding humor in mass shootings
Chad Painter Case 10-E: Hate radio: The outer limits of tasteful broadcasting
Brian Simmons Case 10-F: Searching for Sugar Man: Rediscovered art
Lee Wilkins
11 Becoming a Moral Adult References
Index
8
xi
9
Foreword Clifford G. Christians
Research Professor of Communication, University of Illinois–Urbana
The playful wit and sharp mind of Socrates attracted disciples from all across ancient Greece. They came to learn and debate in what could be translated as “his thinkery.” By shifting the disputes among Athenians over earth, air, fire, and water to human virtue, Socrates gave Western philosophy and ethics a new intellectual center (Cassier 1944).
But sometimes his relentless arguments would go nowhere. On one occasion, he sparred with the philosopher Hippias about the difference between truth and falsehood. Hippias was worn into submission but retorted at the end, “I cannot agree with you, Socrates.” And then the master concluded: “Nor I with myself, Hippias. . . . I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.” Socrates admitted to being so clever that he had befuddled himself. No wonder he was a favorite target of the comic poets. I. F. Stone likens this wizardry to “whales of the intellect flailing about in deep seas” (Stone 1988).
With his young friend Meno, Socrates argued whether virtue is teachable. Meno was eager to learn more, after “holding forth often on the subject in front of large audiences.” But he complained, “You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. . . . You are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb.”
Philosophy is not a semantic game, though sometimes its idiosyncrasies feed that response into the popular mind. Media Ethics: Issues and Cases does not debunk philosophy as the excess of sovereign reason. The authors of this book will not encourage those who ridicule philosophy as cunning xiirhetoric. The issue at stake here is actually a somewhat different problem—the Cartesian model of philosophizing.
The founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, preferred to work in solitude. Paris was whirling in the early 17th century, but for two years even Descartes’s friends could not find him as he squirreled himself away studying mathematics. One can even guess the motto above his desk: “Happy is he who lives in seclusion.” Imagine the conditions under which he wrote “Meditations II.” The Thirty Years’ War in Europe brought social chaos everywhere. The Spanish were ravaging the French provinces and even threatening Paris, but Descartes was shut away in an apartment in Holland. Tranquility for philosophical speculation mattered so much to him that upon hearing Galileo had been condemned by the Church, he retracted parallel arguments of his own on natural science. Pure philosophy as an abstract enterprise needed a cool atmosphere isolated from everyday events.
Descartes’s magnificent formulations have always had their detractors, of course. David Hume did not think of philosophy in those terms, believing as he did that sentiment is the foundation of morality. For Søren Kierkegaard, an abstract system of ethics is only paper currency with nothing to back it up. Karl Marx insisted that we change the world and not merely explain it. But no one drew the modern philosophical map more decisively than Descartes, and his mode of rigid inquiry has generally defined the field’s parameters.
This book adopts the historical perspective suggested by Stephen Toulmin: The philosophy whose legitimacy the critics challenge is always the seventeenth century tradition founded primarily upon René Descartes. . . . [The] arguments are directed to one particular style of philosophizing—a theory-centered style which poses philosophical problems, and frames solutions to them, in timeless and universal terms. From 1650, this particular style was taken as defining the very agenda of philosophy (1988, 338).
The 17th-century philosophers set aside the particular, the timely, the local, and the oral. And that development left untouched nearly half of the philosophical agenda. Indeed, it is those neglected topics—what I here call “practical philosophy”—that are showing fresh signs of life today, at the very time when the more familiar “theory-centered” half of the subject is languishing (Toulmin 1988, 338).
This book collaborates in demolishing the barrier of three centuries between pure and applied philosophy; it joins in reentering practical concerns as the legitimate domain of philosophy itself. For Toulmin, the primary focus of ethics has moved from the study to the bedside to criminal courts, engineering labs, the newsroom, factories, and ethnic street corners. Moral philosophers are not being asked to hand over their duties to
10
technical experts xiii in today’s institutions but rather to fashion their agendas within the conditions of contemporary struggle.
All humans have a theoretical capacity. Critical thinking, the reflective dimension, is our common property. And this book nurtures that reflection in communication classrooms and by extension into centers of media practice. If the mind is like a muscle, this volume provides a regimen of exercises for strengthening its powers of systematic reflection and moral discernment. It does not permit those aimless arguments that result in quandary ethics. Instead, it operates in the finest traditions of practical philosophy, anchoring the debates in real-life conundrums but pushing the discussion toward substantive issues and integrating appropriate theory into the decision-making process. It seeks to empower students to do ethics themselves, under the old adage that teaching someone to fish lasts a lifetime, and providing fish only saves the day.