3 Ethical Dilemmas - Afif

I am Afif from S203 and today I’ll be talking to you about three ethical dilemmas that i have chosen. 

The first one is plagiarism. Plagiarism is when you take something from the internet or any other written source of information and then claiming it as your own. For example, if you are writing a report about the Moon, and you copy and paste information from the web to your report without crediting the source, that is considered plagiarism, even if you edited it. However, if you were to go to the Moon and conduct experiments yourself, then come up with a report based on that, it is not plagiarism. To summarise, plagiarism is stealing other people’s work without crediting them and to avoid it, remember to cite the references or do the experiments yourself.

The second ethical dilemma is Commitment to Accuracy. It is how much the journalist cares to make sure that the correct information is passed to the public. For example, if a journalist does not really care whether the accurate information is passed on and only cares about his business, a story with the title of “Zombies chasing marathon runners”, which is the story about people dressed in zombie costumes encouraging runners to go faster, may be changed to “Zombies invade town”, in which the journalist mentions about the zombies eating people and nothing about the race. This would cause panic among the public and everyone would want to read the report.

The final ethical dilemma is bias. Bias means the inclination or prejudice for or against a person or a group. A journalist must not be biased against a group of people to make a report fair. If not, the journalist would give a one sided opinion of it. A journalist should keep their opinions to themselves and write it such that the audience would see the two sides of the report. For example, an election between Mr A and Mr B. Given the scenario that you support Mr A and you’re supposed to write about Mr B, if you are biased, you would say the bad things about Mr B and how Mr A is better. You should avoid being biased and be fair.