One important ethical lesson I learned in COMM409 was to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest. It’s not enough to simply avoid actual conflicts of interest, which can include freebies, secondary income, and personal relationships. Even if the public sees an appearance of conflict, a journalist’s credibility is ruined. The football-referee analogy made it very clear. There are times when a team is clearly better, to the point where even fans of one team will admit they’re overmatched. But if the referee acknowledges the “better team,” fans have a right to suspect he/she is making calls to favor one team over the other. This lesson means journalists must be incredibly vigilant in all areas of their life, to ensure they don’t mix opinions with their reporting or give someone a reason to suspect that they aren’t an impartial reporter.
Another important ethical lesson I learned was that utilizing deception, or undercover reporting, is only warranted when the obtainable information is vital to the public interest, and there is no other way to get the story. Also, a journalist has to avoid placing innocent people at risk and gauge that the harm prevented by the deception outweighs the harm caused by the deception. Finally, journalists must never deceive two entities: the audience, and their colleagues.
One case study that made a great impression on me was related to the Blue-White scrimmage demonstrators at Penn State who were arrested for protesting a racist death threat. The Centre Daily Times published the names and addresses of those arrested, and it provides a perfect example of contrasting rule-based and ends-based thinking. On one hand, the CDT always published that information about people who are arrested; it was the expected practice. On the other hand, the protests resulted from a threat made against minority students, and publishing the names and addresses of protestors (presumably at least some of them minority students) could make them targets. The case study was poignant because it happened so close to home, at our university, less than 20 years ago.
I believe the course will have an impact on my life regardless of whether I decide to practice journalism. If I don’t, I will most likely be going to law school and becoming a lawyer. Much of the same ethical standards ring true in both professions, especially regarding the conflicts of interest which I detailed above. Additionally, this course proved that decisions are rarely black and white; they are almost always gray. Codes of ethics and standards are essential in ethical decision making, but different case studies call for different behaviors, and one must always exercise good judgment.
I enjoyed taking this class because it connected concepts to real-world examples through case studies. These made the lessons valuable, and a few of them even challenged my conventional thinking about what is acceptable or unacceptable journalistic behavior. I appreciated Dr. Z’s desire to get to know his students beyond the surface level of a professor-student relationship, and his willingness to adapt the course in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.