Two important ethical issues I learned about in this class this year is the decision on whether or not to include an anonymous source and privacy laws. These two ethical lessons kind of went hand in hand at some points when we discussed them in class but they kept resurfacing when we talked about several case studies. The first ethical dilemma of whether or not to include an anonymous source sparked a large debate in our class especially when we talked about the anonymous source story about Donald Trump in class. We came to the conclusion that journalist should usually not use an anonymous source because the readers are going to have a harder time trusting the journalist if they don’t know where information has come from. On the other hand if the information is extremely important to the public and the journalist can’t get the information anywhere else but the anonymous source than its okay to use it. If the source just wants to be anonymous for no particular reason then the journalist should suspect that what the source is telling them could very well be false and the source is just trying to defame the subject they are giving information on. The second ethical issue we came across was the privacy laws. This ties in with the anonymous source issue because if a story is about someone who has gone through something traumatic then they should remain anonymous in the story about them most of the time. In class we discussed a case where a girl was sexually assaulted at a college party and wanted to remain anonymous for her privacy. Later on the journalist found out some of the information the girl gave her was false. It was morally right for the journalist to hide the identity of the young girl because it was such a traumatic event and if she named her all of the girl privacy would be lost, but the journalist should have dove really deep into the facts to make sure they were true and could be verified by another source.
A case study that stood out to me them most was the Stephen Glass case study where he lied on almost all the stories he wrote. I was surprised because I would never think this is acceptable and I would never think a person would make up all fake people and events to have a good story so that his peers liked him. The most surprising thing was the lengths he went to to try and cover up his false facts. Fake phone numbers, voicemails, websites and emails all to make it seem real when he could’ve been devoting this time to getting real stories to write about.
I think I will carry on lots of these ethical values in my journalism career. Seeing what other journalist have made mistakes on has really put into perspective how much truth matters. It can cost someone their entire journalism career if they mess up once so it is better to be slow producing a story with all truthful facts and reliable source then to get the story out quickly with anything that is false.
