Since day one, the Stephen Glass story really stood out to me throughout this entire course. I think he was a perfect representation on everything you shouldn’t do and strengthened my value in telling the truth. I think that was the biggest take away from this case study, to always tell the truth and do the ethical thing, because by lying you can dig yourself into a bigger hole and negatively impact your future and potentially hurt your colleagues as well. In my future career, I really want to form great connections with people and if I were to act as Stephen Glass did, those relationships wouldn’t be possible because they would all be based on lies and mistrust. Another important ethical lesson I learned this semester was in our last lecture. We discussed how images and videos could deceive us because of the high tech world we live in. For example, we now have Deepfakes where we can recreate a video of Barack Obama saying anything we want and it will look like a legitimate video. Here I learned to always be open-minded and not everything is exactly how you see it. It just makes me realize that I need to be careful about what/who I trust and figure out how to get the most factual information I can as well as surround myself with trustworthy people. A case study I found most interesting was the one of the woman from Florida who drowned in her vehicle. I just thought it was interesting how every media outlet handled the situation and how some had no empathy/boundaries to withhold information. It just surprises me how much my morals don’t align with most media outlets when it comes to storytelling, which makes me want to make a change in this field.
Coming in this semester, I didn’t realize that I had signed up for two ethics classes. I took a News Media Ethics course and a Communications Ethics course. So my semester has all been about ethics! For me, I have always been an intuitive person that makes decisions based on feeling rather than with my head. I believe that my decision-making process goes along with ethics because I always make my decision on whether or not my gut is telling me it is the right thing. I think that this course specifically has given me different perspectives on how ethics is dealt with and how it should be utilized in the industry, and this is something I plan to use in the future. As a public relations major, I am always told to be telling the truth. This has been a common theme this semester and I plan to use the tools that this course has taught me into the real world.
As a senior now, I can count on one hand how many teachers I have had through my experience here at Penn State who genuinely cared about their students, and not just about lecturing. Dr. Z is one of those teachers. This course taught a lot about ethics through case studies, lectures, etc. and even though we have obtained all this information, I also think that I have gained life lessons from this class. Dr. Z genuinely cared about what was going on in our lives and how we could connect to the things he was talking about. Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone and it’s not because of the material it is because of the professor.