Journalists are the line of information for the people of the United States. The freedom of press allows for the press to take views and provide information that cannot even be censored on subjects of national security. This creates a topic full of questioning and debate about how much people should be able to talk about when pertaining to wars and conflicts. Rules that have limited freedom of speech only passed because the freedom of press was not attacked. This freedom of journalism brings about the issue of safety for the press. Every year journalists are under fire from areas they report from. Journalists travel out across the world into combat zones and areas of prejudice. They brave going into countries even using disguises, and still, there are journalists dying from acts of these foreign countries. They can end up like the TV show Locked-up Abroad or even dead. They also deal with the experience of losing members of the team they go with. Through their desire to publish events of the world, journalists face death and capture in addition to psychological issues from reporting on war. To protect themselves, journalists should go through non-government militaristic training to preserve their lives as well as freedom of the press. These issues involve American citizens and are of the highest importance as well as controversy.
Journalists can be thought of as the defenders of public knowledge. No matter what the issue, they always appear to be there on scene reporting on the action. This is dangerous work and can lead to death. Over the past twenty-five years, two hundred and seventy-six journalists have been killed in just five conflicts considered to be the most deadliest (IMAGE). That number represents ordinary citizens ju...
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...ow for journalists to be better equipped to deal with the terrain. It also may be able to help with the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder to some extent. These courses allow for the journalist to be able to know the best way to respond to situations so that they do not feel helpless. It is programs like this that can help protect not only the journalists but also their freedoms of press.
Through research about war journalists, it is apparent the traumatic experiences that they deal with to get the information to the public. Their encounters with death and capture as well as psychological stress are issues that they deal with, and non-government training will allow for some assistance with this stress as well as the preservation of the freedom of press. This is the best scenario to keep the United States well informed as well as maintaining the safety for its citizens.
Self-motivation and determination are two of the main ideals of being journalist. If a journalist does not have the desire to find and report a story, he has no career. A journalist depends on finding the facts, getting to the bottom of the story and reporting to the public, whether it’s positive or negative. Janet Malcom states in the book The Journalist and the Murderer, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” (Malcolm, 3) Her starting words speak volumes about “the Journalist and the Murderer” and the lessons that can be learned.
Firstly, the journalists are reporting from two vastly different locations. One is reporting from the comfort of an office and familiar surroundings, while the other is reporting from a war stricken foreign land. Although, there is a common tie, they both involved and had the ability to effect the government and they were all in danger. All of the journalists had the opportunity to report on the truth, even if it were to have political and even personal repercussions. Thus, due to the political nature, all of the journalists were putting their lives at risk and were aware of this. They also had the ability of putting other lives in danger. Woodward and Bernstein discovered how the information they were gathering had to be used strategically in order to not harm their sources, and Flynn and Henderson had the ability to create further conflict and terror for the country they were reporting about. Thus, all of the journalists had to learn how to use precautions while investigating, writing, and reporting on their given
The Cindy Herbig case revolves around the distinguished Herbig family from Missoula, Montana. The Herbig’s daughter Cindy, who did well enough in high school to obtain a scholarship to Radcliffe College, was killed in Washington D.C. while working as a prostitute. The controversy of this case comes from the way that the Missoulian and the Post reported on this story. Both newspapers were aware of the family’s status and the damage that this story would do to the family’s name. Also they were asked by the family’s lawyer to not publish the story out of respect for Cindy and her grieving family. Despite this formal request both papers published the story. The Post published this story because they believed that it would both bring attention to the problem of prostitution in the D.C. area and their primary business concerns. The Missoulian published a heavily toned down version of this story because of the journalism community. The main editor of this paper stated that journalists will always have to release stories when they are newsworthy even if they are negative stories. These facts of the Cindy Herbig case will allow us to review the ethics of this case for both news sources.
According to the U.S. constitution and thereunder the first amendment, the press is said to be free, and the government cannot legally prohibit this freedom. Overall, the press holds an enormous responsibility. It is the watchdog of the community, the guarder of the government and the public. They provide an unofficial form of checks and balances on the government by informing the public on what the government is doing. Through this, they can persuade the public to view things in from one perspective or another. They have been given the constitutional right to do this.
It is not uncommon to hear people complaining about what they hear on the news. Everyone knows it and the media themselves knows it as well. Some of the most renowned journalists have even covered the the media’s issues in detail. Biased news outlets have flooded everyday news. We find that journalism’s greatest problems lie in the media’s inability for unbiased reporting, the tendency to use the ignorance of their audience to create a story, and their struggles to maintain relevance.
They are alongside the soldiers, sailors, and marines. In some cases, these reporters may need to drop their camera or pen and defend themselves. These examples bring many questions that I want to know. The biggest of these questions is how do these different types of reporting, the “main stream media”, and the small independent embedded reporters affect the views that the American people have back home? The reason I chose this topic is that after reading The Good Soldiers and Moments of Truth in Iraq, I was intrigued by the considerable difference between what was written in books and what CNN reported on the nightly news.
In this era of globalization, news reporting is no longer just a means of communications, but it has also developed into a tool for change. Prominent journalists like Julian Assange, Nick Davies, Sir Charles Wheeler and many more has changed the landscape and outcomes of information, war and news reporting itself. But Martin Bell has challenged the fundamentals of journalism that is to be balanced and impartial with what he calls ‘Journalism of Attachment’. He even coined the phrase, ‘bystanders’ journalism’ for continuing the tradition of being distant and detached (Bell 1997), which he criticizes “for focusing with the circumstances of violence, such as military formations, weapons, strategies, maneuvers and tactics” (Gilboa 2009, p. 99). Therefore it is the aim of this essay to explain whether it is ethical for reporters to practice what Martin Bell calls the Journalism of Attachment by evaluating its major points and its counterarguments, and assessing other notions of journalism such as peace journalism.
SCHECHTER, Danny (2001). "Covering Violence: How Should Media Handle Conflict?" mediachannel.org. Online at: http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/coveringviolence.shtml, consulted on March 27, 2004.
media) is fundamentally important in understanding the mass media as an agent of those dominant in our society and the forces that motivate them in their exploration of the truth. How to use [IMAGE]? A qualitative analysis of the issues pertaining to journalism and the current Code of Ethics, utilizing information from a variety of different sources to obtain a vast body of knowledge. pertaining to journalism and the current code. Areas of Concern:.
Americans look to the press to provide the information they need to make informed political choices. How well the press lives up to its responsibility to provide this information has a direct impact upon Americans: how they think about and act upon the issues that confront them.
For the most part, journalists have power that can hurt, instead of help citizen autonomy. The ways journalists treat their subjects and sources have generated much concern. The ethics of these two endeavors share much in common, because both use people in various ways to reach each others goals. The well-developed guidelines in research designed to protect research participants' autonomy, to guard against needless deception, and to recognize the special needs of vulnerable research participants have direct application to journalism. Christopher Meyers argues that the news media are ethically constrained by procedure, resulting in journalists asserting power inappropriately at the individual level, and unwillingly giving up moral authority institutionally and globally. In this paper I will discuss how journalists use power and the role that ethics plays in journalism.
Butler in “Torture and the Ethics of Photography” is largely concerned with how our understanding of perceptible reality and our response to the suffering of others are controlled by military and governmental authorities, who by allowing “embedded reporting”, that is, to allow the journalists and photographers to report only from the persp...
Critics of impartiality often start by saying that everyone has an opinion and objectivity does not exist in practice. Indeed, according to postmodern philosophical critique, facts and realities are socially constructed and politically negotiated, and therefore subjective rather than objective. The concept of objectivity itself is taken to be a tool of hegemonic discourse, and science is just politics by other means (J. Tim O’Meara, 2001). What is more, impartial journalism can be ruinous. For example, sometimes journalists try hard to balance their stories from different sides but while doing so they come to the lowest form of journalism, to so-called “he said she said journalism”. It is important to realize that this lazy approach of reporting may present lies equally with the truth, which is hardly different from lying. This was the case of reporting the ongoing conflict at the East of Ukraine. European journalists explained the armed conflict by both, the Russian propaganda point of view and Ukrainian actual viewpoint. The outcome of such superficially impartiality was that some people and even political leaders had not perceived Russia as an aggressor that must be banned with sanctions. To point out, the problem of balance is explained by Nick Davies, the author of the book on propaganda in journalism called "Flat Earth News”. Davies gives the eloquent allegory to what real reporting is about. Journalist can interview a man who says it will be sunny and a man who says it's going to rain. Davies describes that the real journalist does not simply write up two opposite opinions, but looks out of the window. (Davies,
Encapsulated in a democratic homeland since the advent of time, media systems are habitually acclaimed as the “fourth power,” with its journalists often hailed as the “watch-dogs” of such a society. Lending itself to act as ‘gatekeeper’ for the wider society and performing the traditional role of journalism, the media (overall) exist as powerful “instruments of knowledge” that perform the function of providing information to the masses in a public sphere, where issues may be discussed, justified and contested (Scannell, 1995, p. 17). Evidently, media workers play a pivotal role in our society; however, their status in the realm of professions is not definite. Although the above emphasize the predicament at the heart of ...