One ethical lesson I have learned from the class is the invasion of privacy rule. Before the class I had a very vague understanding of invasion of privacy and what was allowed to be reported and what wasn’t. Before the class, I thought invasion of privacy simply applied to taking photos and journalists trespassing public property. From the class, I learned that there is much more to the ethical lesson. Invasion of privacy has four categories: intrusion, publication, false light and appropriation. Another lesson I learned was on plagiarism and fabrication. I knew all about plagiarism but wasn’t too familiar with fabrication. I learned that fabrication is making things up and passing them on as your own. My favorite part of the class was the focus on Steve Glass and how he fabricated for almost all of his career. Shattered Glass gave an in depth look at the story.
The case study that impressed me the most was also on invasion of privacy. We watched a video on an airport that found out their security was slacking on the job. The news station hid cameras in the airport and recorded the security guards as they took breaks for much longer than they were assigned. Throughout the whole segment, I thought the station was not allowed to hide cameras as that could be considered an invasion of privacy. From the case study I learned that if there is no other way to obtain information and if it serves the public interest, then hiding cameras is allowed. This tactic is used more often than one may think.
This course should have a tremendous impact on the rest of my career. I want to enter the sports industry and the last topic we learned was “Ethics in Sports Reporting.” From that one lecture, I learned more about sports reporting than I had previously learned in my whole life. That was not the only helpful lecture though. Everything we learned will have some sort of impact on my future career and life as long as I stick with Journalism. This course taught the basic guidelines of ethics in reporting and I hope I never forget what I learned in this class.
This course as a whole was very interesting and completely exceeded my expectations. Dr. Z did a fantastic job of making what might be thought of a more boring topic, extremely interesting and engaging. Through the use of videos for the case studies, and different guest speakers for different topics, I was able to stay engaged in each topic. I would recommend this class to anyone interested in learning the basic principles of news media ethics.