On March 22, Journalist Marty Barron told the story of a time when the Chief White House Strategist had a few words to share about the media. According to Barron, the Chief White House Strategist said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and just shut their mouths and listen for once.” There are a few strong ethical challenges that come to mind while reading over that quote. As a journalist, you have an ethical responsibility to report the news to the people and advocate for those who feel as though their voices aren’t being heard.
Journalists are single handedly responsible for ensuring that the people are up-to-date with the news and what is going on around them. According to Ron Smith in Ethics of Journalism, “Journalists give communities an opportunity to see themselves. [They] point out the problems in society and show its successes. [They] are playing a role in America’s experiment in self-government by informing voters about their government. If we lose sight of the important role the news media play in American society, our society will be the worse for it.” By suggesting that the media should just shut their mouths and listen for once, the Chief White House Strategist is basically asking Journalists to ignore their most basic responsibility to report to the people. Especially now with all that has been going on since the election and the separation that it has caused between the citizens of America, now is the time for journalists to speak up, not shut up.
However, I do think that there is a valid point in saying that the media could use to listen. With the media constantly changing, and especially in its fast-paced state, Journalists are in a race to get their story out there first. With this comes the fact that the communication is often one sided. Journalists are feeding information to the public, but they aren’t listening to what the public has to say in response. As described by Professors Clara F. Muscatello and Paolo Scudellari of the University of Italy in Ethics and Listening: Hermeneutic Problems of the Psychiatric Listening, “Listening must have the characteristic of preserving the “text”, someone else’s word, leaving place to its difficulty of being expressed, and safeguarding its circuitous “truth”.” Especially after the election, when a large portion of Americans felt as though they were not heard, and as though the media failed to explore the grievance and hurt in America. Now is a very good time for Journalists to take a step back from all of the chaos and allow time for the people to be heard.
I learned quite a bit from attending the lecture; and I think that Marty Barron had a lot of good points to share. What I got out of the lecture most was that really, the media should be a result of the communication between the people, the government, and those prepared to report those conversations unbiasedly. Journalists are not only responsible for reporting but also for hearing all sides of a story, and ensuring that what is being printed is truthful and lacks opinion in any party’s favor.
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References
Muscatello, Clara F., and Paolo Scudellari. “Ethics and Listening.” (2003).
Smith, Ron. Ethics in Journalism. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Print.