discussion question and 3 student reponses

iMedia Ethics

Issues and Cases

Ninth Edition

Philip Patterson
Oklahoma Christian University

Lee Wilkins
Wayne State University

University of Missouri

Chad Painter
University of Dayton

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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https://www.rowman.com

iii For Linda, David, and Laurel

4

ivBrief Contents

Foreword
Preface

1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making
2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth
3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary?
4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances
5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village
6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise
7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line
8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism
9 Informing a Just Society

v 10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment
11 Becoming a Moral Adult
References
Index

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viContents

Foreword
Preface

1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making
Essay: Cases and moral systems

Deni Elliott
Case 1-A: How to read a case study

Philip Patterson

2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth
Case 2-A: Anonymous or confidential: Unnamed sources in the news

Lee Wilkins
Case 2-B: Death as content: Social responsibility and the documentary filmmaker

Tanner Hawkins
Case 2-C: News and the transparency standard

Lee Wilkins
Case 2-D: Can I quote me on that?

Chad Painter
Case 2-E: NPR, the New York Times, and working conditions in China

Lee Wilkins
vii Case 2-F: When is objective reporting irresponsible reporting?

Theodore L.Glasser
Case 2-G: Is it news yet?

Michelle Peltier
Case 2-H: What’s yours is mine: The ethics of news aggregation

Chad Painter

3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary?
Case 3-A: Weedvertising

Lee Wilkins
Case 3-B: Cleaning up their act: The Chipotle food safety crisis

Kayla McLaughlin and Kelly Vibber
Case 3-C: Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ prescription drug choices

Tara Walker
Case 3-D: Between a (Kid) Rock and a hard place

Molly Shor
Case 3-E: Was that an Apple computer I saw? Product placement in the United States and abroad

Philip Patterson
Case 3-F: Sponsorships, sins, and PR: What are the boundaries?

Lauren Bacon Brengarth
Case 3-G: A charity drops the ball

Philip Patterson

4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances
Case 4-A: Fair or foul? Reporter/player relationships in the sports beat

Lauren A. Waugh
Case 4-B: To watch or to report: What journalists were thinking in the midst of disaster

Lee Wilkins
Case 4-C: Public/on-air journalist vs. private/online life: Can it work?

6

Madison Hagood
Case 4-D: When you are the story: Sexual harassment in the newsroom

Lee Wilkins
Case 4-E: Whose Facebook page is it anyway?

Amy Simons
viii Case 4-F: Where everybody knows your name: Reporting and relationships in a small market

Ginny Whitehouse
Case 4-G: Quit, blow the whistle, or go with the flow?

Robert D. Wakefield
Case 4-H: How one tweet ruined a life

Philip Patterson

5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village
Case 5-A: Drones and the news

Kathleen Bartzen Culver
Case 5-B: Concussion bounty: Is trust ever worth violating?

Lee Wilkins
Case 5-C: Joe Mixon: How do we report on domestic violence in sports?

Brett Deever
Case 5-D: Looking for Richard Simmons

Lee Wilkins
Case 5-E: Children and framing: The use of children’s images in an anti-same-sex marriage ad

Yang Liu
Case 5-F: Mayor Jim West’s computer

Ginny Whitehouse
Case 5-G: Politics and money: What’s private and what’s not

Lee Wilkins

6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise
Case 6-A: Reporting on rumors: When should a news organization debunk?

Lee Wilkins
Case 6-B: Doxxer, Doxxer, give me the news?

Mark Anthony Poepsel
Case 6-C: The truth about the facts: Politifact.com

Lee Wilkins
Case 6-D: WikiLeaks

Lee Wilkins
Case 6-E: Control Room: Do culture and history matter in reporting the news?

Lee Wilkins
ix Case 6-F: Victims and the press

Robert Logan
Case 6-G: For God and Country: The media and national security

Jeremy Littau and Mark Slagle

7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line
Case 7-A: Murdoch’s mess

Lee Wilkins
Case 7-B: Who controls the local news? Sinclair Broadcasting Group and “must-runs”

Keena Neal
Case 7-C: Automated journalism: The rise of robot reporters

Chad Painter
Case 7-D: Contested interests, contested terrain: The New York Times Code of Ethics

Lee Wilkins and Bonnie Brennen
Case 7-E: Transparency in fundraising: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting standard

Lee Wilkins
Case 7-F: News now, facts later

Lee Wilkins

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Case 7-G: Crossing the line? The LA Times and the Staples affair
Philip Patterson and Meredith Bradford

8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism
Case 8-A: Killing a journalist on-air: A means/ends test

Mitchel Allen
Case 8-B: Remember my fame: Digital necromancy and the immortal celebrity

Samantha Most
Case 8-C: Problem photos and public outcry

Jon Roosenraad
Case 8-D: Above the fold: Balancing newsworthy photos with community standards

Jim Godbold and Janelle Hartman
Case 8-E: Horror in Soweto

Sue O’Brien
Case 8-F: Photographing funerals of fallen soldiers

Philip Patterson

x 9 Informing a Just Society
Case 9-A: Spotlight: It takes a village to abuse a child

Lee Wilkins
Case 9-B: 12th and Clairmount: A newspaper’s foray into documenting a pivotal summer

Lee Wilkins
Case 9-C: Cincinnati Enquirer’s heroin beat

Chad Painter
Case 9-D: Feminist fault lines: Political memoirs and Hillary Clinton

Miranda Atkinson
Case 9-E: GoldieBlox: Building a future on theft

Scott Burgess

10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment
Case 10-A: Get Out: When the horror is race

Michael Fuhlhage and Lee Wilkins
Case 10-B: To die for: Making terrorists of gamers in Modern Warfare 2

Philip Patterson
Case 10-C: Daily dose of civic discourse

Chad Painter
Case 10-D: The Onion: Finding humor in mass shootings

Chad Painter
Case 10-E: Hate radio: The outer limits of tasteful broadcasting

Brian Simmons
Case 10-F: Searching for Sugar Man: Rediscovered art

Lee Wilkins

11 Becoming a Moral Adult
References

Index

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xi

9

Foreword
Clifford G. Christians

Research Professor of Communication,
University of Illinois–Urbana

The playful wit and sharp mind of Socrates attracted disciples from all across ancient Greece. They came to
learn and debate in what could be translated as “his thinkery.” By shifting the disputes among Athenians over
earth, air, fire, and water to human virtue, Socrates gave Western philosophy and ethics a new intellectual
center (Cassier 1944).

But sometimes his relentless arguments would go nowhere. On one occasion, he sparred with the
philosopher Hippias about the difference between truth and falsehood. Hippias was worn into submission but
retorted at the end, “I cannot agree with you, Socrates.” And then the master concluded: “Nor I with myself,
Hippias. . . . I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.” Socrates admitted to being so clever
that he had befuddled himself. No wonder he was a favorite target of the comic poets. I. F. Stone likens this
wizardry to “whales of the intellect flailing about in deep seas” (Stone 1988).

With his young friend Meno, Socrates argued whether virtue is teachable. Meno was eager to learn more,
after “holding forth often on the subject in front of large audiences.” But he complained, “You are exercising
magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness.
. . . You are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with
it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are
literally numb.”

Philosophy is not a semantic game, though sometimes its idiosyncrasies feed that response into the popular
mind. Media Ethics: Issues and Cases does not debunk philosophy as the excess of sovereign reason. The
authors of this book will not encourage those who ridicule philosophy as cunning xiirhetoric. The issue at
stake here is actually a somewhat different problem—the Cartesian model of philosophizing.

The founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, preferred to work in solitude. Paris was whirling in the
early 17th century, but for two years even Descartes’s friends could not find him as he squirreled himself away
studying mathematics. One can even guess the motto above his desk: “Happy is he who lives in seclusion.”
Imagine the conditions under which he wrote “Meditations II.” The Thirty Years’ War in Europe brought
social chaos everywhere. The Spanish were ravaging the French provinces and even threatening Paris, but
Descartes was shut away in an apartment in Holland. Tranquility for philosophical speculation mattered so
much to him that upon hearing Galileo had been condemned by the Church, he retracted parallel arguments
of his own on natural science. Pure philosophy as an abstract enterprise needed a cool atmosphere isolated
from everyday events.

Descartes’s magnificent formulations have always had their detractors, of course. David Hume did not think
of philosophy in those terms, believing as he did that sentiment is the foundation of morality. For Søren
Kierkegaard, an abstract system of ethics is only paper currency with nothing to back it up. Karl Marx insisted
that we change the world and not merely explain it. But no one drew the modern philosophical map more
decisively than Descartes, and his mode of rigid inquiry has generally defined the field’s parameters.

This book adopts the historical perspective suggested by Stephen Toulmin:
The philosophy whose legitimacy the critics challenge is always the seventeenth century tradition founded primarily upon René Descartes. .
. . [The] arguments are directed to one particular style of philosophizing—a theory-centered style which poses philosophical problems, and
frames solutions to them, in timeless and universal terms. From 1650, this particular style was taken as defining the very agenda of
philosophy (1988, 338).

The 17th-century philosophers set aside the particular, the timely, the local, and the oral. And that
development left untouched nearly half of the philosophical agenda. Indeed, it is those neglected topics—what
I here call “practical philosophy”—that are showing fresh signs of life today, at the very time when the more
familiar “theory-centered” half of the subject is languishing (Toulmin 1988, 338).

This book collaborates in demolishing the barrier of three centuries between pure and applied philosophy; it
joins in reentering practical concerns as the legitimate domain of philosophy itself. For Toulmin, the primary
focus of ethics has moved from the study to the bedside to criminal courts, engineering labs, the newsroom,
factories, and ethnic street corners. Moral philosophers are not being asked to hand over their duties to

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technical experts xiii in today’s institutions but rather to fashion their agendas within the conditions of
contemporary struggle.

All humans have a theoretical capacity. Critical thinking, the reflective dimension, is our common property.
And this book nurtures that reflection in communication classrooms and by extension into centers of media
practice. If the mind is like a muscle, this volume provides a regimen of exercises for strengthening its powers
of systematic reflection and moral discernment. It does not permit those aimless arguments that result in
quandary ethics. Instead, it operates in the finest traditions of practical philosophy, anchoring the debates in
real-life conundrums but pushing the discussion toward substantive issues and integrating appropriate theory
into the decision-making process. It seeks to empower students to do ethics themselves, under the old adage
that teaching someone to fish lasts a lifetime, and providing fish only saves the day.

Media Ethics: Issues and Cases arrives on the scene at a strategic time in higher education. Since the late 19th
century, ethical questions have been taken from the curriculum as a whole and from the philosophy
department. Recovering practical philosophy has involved a revolution during the last decade in which courses
in professional ethics have reappeared throughout the curriculum. This book advocates the pervasive method
and carries the discussions even further, beyond freestanding courses into communication classrooms across
the board.

In this sense, the book represents a constructive response to the current debates over the mission of higher
education. Professional ethics has long been saddled with the dilemma that the university was given
responsibility for professional training precisely at the point in its history that it turned away from values to
scientific naturalism. Today one sees it as a vast horizontal plain given to technical excellence but barren in
enabling students to articulate a philosophy of life. As the late James Carey concluded,

Higher education has not been performing well of late and, like most American institutions, is suffering from a confusion of purpose, an
excess of ambition that b s on hubris, and an appetite for money that is truly alarming (1989, 48).

The broadside critiques leveled in Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America (1918) and Upton
Sinclair’s The Goose Step (1922) are now too blatantly obvious to ignore. But Media Ethics: Issues and Cases does
not merely demand a better general education or a recommitment to values; it strengthens the
communications curriculum by equipping thoughtful students with a more enlightened moral awareness.
Since Confucius, we have understood that lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness, or, in Mother
Teresa’s version, we feed the world one mouth at a time.

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xivPreface

More than three decades ago, two of us began the quest of delivering a media ethics textbook grounded in
the theory of moral philosophy and using case studies for students to be able to apply the theory learned. In
our planning, the book would begin and end with theory—moral philosophy and moral development,
respectively—and the chapters in between would be topical and cross all mediums. So instead of chapter titles
such as “journalism” or “public relations” you see titles such as “loyalty” and “privacy.”

Despite the passage of decades, our foundational assumption remains that the media and democracy need
one another to survive. If there is a single animating idea in this book, it is that whether your focus is
entertainment, news, or strategic communication, whether your role is that of a professional or a parent, your
“job” is made easier in a functioning democracy. And democracy functions best with a free and independent
mass media that spurs change, reifies culture, and provides opportunity to read and think and explore and
create. We believe that thinking about and understanding ethics makes you better at whatever profession you
choose—and whatever your role when you get home from work. This book remains optimistic about the very
tough times in which we find ourselves.

Let’s begin with what’s been left out and conclude with what you’ll find in the text. First, you’ll find no
media bashing in this book. There’s enough of that already, and besides, it’s too easy to do. This book is not
designed to indict the media; it’s designed to train its future practitioners. If we dwell on ethical lapses from
the past, it is only to learn from them what we can do to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Second,
you’ll find no conclusions in this book—neither at the end of the book nor after each case. No one has xvyet
written the conclusive chapter to the ethical dilemmas of the media, and we don’t suspect that we will be the
first.

All along, the cases were to be the “stars” of the book—mostly real life (as opposed to hypothetical), usually
recent and largely guest-written, especially when we could find someone who lived in close proximity to the
market where the case study happened. We would end each case with pedagogical questions. These began, at
the lowest level, with the actual details of the case and were called “micro issues.” The questions then went out
in ever-widening concentric circles to larger issues and deeper questions and eventually ended at debating
some of the largest issues in society such as justice, race, fairness, truth-telling, media’s role in a democracy,
and many others. We called these “macro issues.” The questions were not answered in the textbook. It was left
to the student and the professor to arrive at an answer that could be justified given the ethical underpinnings
of the text.

This simple idea became popular and subsequent editions added to the depth of the chapters and the recency
of the cases. As the field changed and student majors within the field changed, so did the book. Some
additions, including an “international” chapter and a “new media” chapter, came and went, and the material
was absorbed in other places in the book. Writing about “public relations” became “strategic communications”
with all the nuances that entailed. Social media rocked our industry and changed our economic model, and the
book followed with the obvious ethical issues that citizen journalism brought with it. At every stage, it
remained a true media ethics textbook and not simply a journalism ethics book. Both the current chapters and
current cases bear that out.

This ninth edition brings with it many changes, the major ones being a new publisher, a new co-author, and
a new chapter on social justice. More than half of all cases also are new. But a large amount of the text
remains the same and a significant minority of the cases also remain in the textbook. These decisions mirror
the state of the field of media ethics: some of the problems media professionals face today are new; others are
as old as our professions.

Each of us bears a significant debt of gratitude to families, to teachers and mentors, to colleagues, and to our
new and delightful publisher. We acknowledge their contributions to our intellectual and moral development
in making this textbook possible, and we accept the flaws of this book as our own.xvi

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13

11
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to

• recognize the need for professional ethics in journalism
• work through a model of ethical decision-making
• identify and use the five philosophical principles applicable to mass communication situations

MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS

No matter your professional niche in mass communication, the past few years have been nothing short of an
assault on the business model that supports your organization and pays your salary, on the role you play in a
democratic society, on whether your job might be better—and certainly more cheaply—done by a robot or an
algorithm.

Consider the following ethical decisions that made the news:

• the New York Times choosing to call President Donald J. Trump a liar in its news columns as well as on the
editorial pages. National Public Radio made a different decision, refusing to use the word in its news
coverage;

• Facebook users who, in the last two weeks of the US presidential election, chose to share “news stories”
originating with Russian bots more frequently than they shared news stories from legitimate news
organizations. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg continued to assert that Facebook is not a
media organization;

• 2the Gannett Corporation and Gatehouse Media closed down copy desks at individual newspapers in favor
of a regional copy hub system, thereby ensuring that local news would no longer be edited in individual
media markets;

• H&R Block purchasing “native advertising” that included a photo of a woman “taking a break” after filling
out her name and address on her income tax forms. Native advertising is now found ubiquitously online
and in legacy publications such as the New York Times and the Atlantic. Comedian John Oliver has
skewered the practice in multiple segments, noting, “It’s not trickery. It’s sharing storytelling tools. And
that’s not bullshit. It’s repurposed bovine waste”;

• television journalists and other cable personalities charging their employers, specifically Fox News
management, with systemic sexual harassment;

• films such as Get Out—with its blend of horror and science fiction—that included some subtle and some
in-your-face messages about race—earning critical and box office success. The year before Get Out was
released, the Academy Awards were the focus of furious criticism for a lack of diversity in nominations, the
Oscar-so-white movement;

• and last, but in many ways the most central, President Donald J. Trump, less than six months into his
administration, labeling “the media” as the enemy of the people, a characterization that was greeted with
anger and alarm by some and embraced by others.

In a campaign video released in August 2017, the day after the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia,
killed one and injured many others, African-American journalist April Ryan stated that she and other
journalists had been singled out as an “enemy of the White House.” The video, titled “Let President Trump
do his job” included small images of a dozen journalists while the voiceover described “the media attacking our
president” and referred to “the president’s enemies” who “don’t want him to succeed.” Ryan, a veteran White
House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Networks and a political analyst for CNN, responded
with a tweet castigating the campaign’s “racial hate.”

Each of these instances represent an ethical choice, decisions that most often begin with individuals but are
14

Each of these instances represent an ethical choice, decisions that most often begin with individuals but are
then reinforced by the profit-making organizations for which they work or by the social organizations in
which people willingly participate. Almost all of them include the element of melding roles—am I acting as a
news reporter or as a consumer, as a private citizen or as a professional, as an audience member who
understands that comedians can sometimes speak a certain sort of truth, or as an objective 3 reporter for
whom words that imply or state an opinion are forbidden. As young professionals, you are told to “promote
your own brand” while simultaneously promoting your client, your news organization, or your profession. It’s
a staggering array of requirements and obligations, made more difficult by the very public nature—and the
potential public response—that your decisions will inevitably provoke. A simple Google search of each of the
foregoing ethical choices will open up a world of conflicting opinions.

The Dilemma of Dilemmas
The summaries above are dilemmas—they present an ethical problem with no single (or simple) “right”
answer. Resolving dilemmas is the business of ethics. It’s not an easy process, but ethical dilemmas can be
anticipated and prepared for, and there is a wealth of ethical theory—some of it centuries old—to back up
your final decision. In this chapter and throughout this book, you will be equipped with both the theories and
the tools to help solve the dilemmas that arise in working for the mass media.

In the end, you will have tools, not answers. Answers must come from within you, but your answers should
be informed by what others have written and experienced. Otherwise, you will always be forced to solve each
ethical problem without the benefit of anyone else’s insight. Gaining these tools also will help you to prevent
each dilemma from spiraling into “quandary ethics”—the feeling that no best choice is available and that
everyone’s choice is equally valid (see Deni Elliott’s essay following this chapter).

Will codes of ethics help? Virtually all the media associations have one, but they have limitations. For
instance, the ethics code for the Society of Professional Journalists could be read to allow for revealing or
withholding information, two actions that are polar opposites. That doesn’t make the code useless; it simply
points out a shortfall in depending on codes.

While we don’t dismiss codes, we believe you will find more universally applicable help in the writings of
philosophers, ancient and modern, introduced in this chapter.

This book, or any ethics text, should teach more than a set of rules. It should give you the skills, analytical
models, vocabulary, and insights of others who have faced these choices, to make and justify your ethical
decisions.

Some writers claim that ethics can’t be taught. It’s situational, some claim. Because every message is unique,
there is no real way to learn ethics other than by daily life. Ethics, it is argued, is something you have, not
something you do. But while it’s true that reading about ethics is no guarantee you will perform your job
ethically, thinking about ethics is a skill anyone can acquire.

4While each area of mass communication has its unique ethical issues, thinking about ethics is the same,
whether you make your living writing advertising copy or obituaries. Thinking about ethics won’t necessarily
make tough choices easier, but, with practice, your ethical decision-making can become more consistent. A
consistently ethical approach to your work as a reporter, designer, or copywriter in whatever field of mass
communication you enter can improve that work as well.

Ethics and Morals
Contemporary professional ethics revolves around these questions:

• What duties do I have, and to whom do I owe them?
• What values are reflected by the duties I’ve assumed?

Ethics takes us out of the world of “This is the way I do it” or “This is the way it’s always been done” into
the realm of “This is what I should do” or “This is the action that can be rationally justified.” Ethics in this
sense is “ought talk.” The questions arising from duty and values can be answered a number of ways as long as
they are consistent with each other. For example, a journalist and a public relations professional may see the
truth of a story differently because they see their duties differently and because there are different values at
work in their professions, but each can be acting ethically if they are operating under the imperatives of
“oughtness” for their profession.

It is important here to distinguish between ethics, a rational process founded on certain agreed-on principles,
and morals, which are in the realm of religion. The Ten Commandments are a moral system in the Judeo-
Christian tradition, and Jewish scholars have expanded this study of the laws throughout the Bible’s Old

15

Testament into the Talmud, a 1,000-page religious volume. The Buddhist Eightfold Path provides a similar
moral framework.

But moral systems are not synonymous with ethics. Ethics begins when elements within a moral system conflict.
Ethics is less about the conflict between right and wrong than it is about the conflict between equally
compelling (or equally unattractive) alternatives and the choices that must be made between them. Ethics is
just as often about the choices between good and better or poor and worse than about right and wrong, which
tends to be the domain of morals.

When elements within a moral system conflict, …