This semester in COMM 409: Media Ethics the two ethical issues that I learned that were important were a conflict of interest and the publishing of explicit content. The first lesson with conflict of interest we learned that journalist is not allowed to accept gifts for their writing. Also, we went over a list of things that could be considered a conflict of interest such as cheering in the press box or receiving money for a story or being paid by a company to write a story. The second lesson was using explicit content for a story the video we watched in class was the girl who stripped naked during her graduation and ran with her diploma, and we learned how the media should handle a story like that one. The majority of the class thought that showing the image would be okay as long as the explicit part was blurred out.
I believe that one case study that surprised me the most was the one about Janet Cooke that talked about fabrication. I thought that one I read in the book was the most interesting to me because I wouldn’t imagine what would make someone make up a whole story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. If the story were real, then it would be amazing and the Pulitzer she won would have been well deserved. I think I was the most impressed by this because she had a history of lying that no one caught up with that too late. Which relates to the movie we watched about Steve were her blatantly made up his stories too.
The course will have a good impact on me and my future career because we have learned a lot of valuable lessons when dealing with the media. Even though we didn’t do much ethics in public relations, I still feel like this will be useful as they follow the same codes or well they should follow the same decision making and systems. I think reading and in-class lesson have helped me see the process of making an ethical decision which is of particular importance in our media world as of now.
I believe that this course was excellent and it should still be a mandatory course for communications majors as we all need to learn ethical decision making as we are the people who chose what the public gets to see. I believe that this course helped me learned more than the basic of media ethics.