3 Ethical Dilemmas - Ben

Hi there, I am Ben from 203 and today, I will be discussing about three ethical dilemmas that journalist face

First, I will be talking about bias

Bias- Reporters will tend to be bias towards one side whenever they publish an emotional news that they feel only one side of the story is required for people to feel the same as the reporters. By doing this, journalists are limiting the viewers of their opinion and not being fair and impartial to the people involved in the news. And example of this is when a journalist is publishing a news of 2 people fighting, and when the journalist is bias towards one side of the party, he or she publish will the news off as one side of the party is innocent and the other side of the party is totally at fault. Doing this, the viewer will not have the full story. What if the so called "innocent party" was the one who started the fight. So, Journalist should always put aside their emotions and be as objective as possible and allow the viewers to look from different perspective.

Plagiarism - Plagiarism is when someone claim others work from the internet, books and newspaper then passing off as one's own. This is similar to stealing from them. A journalist who come across other people's news or report and then write it off as though as it was originally from him or her without crediting where or from whom the source is from is considered plagiarism. Just imagine you are a professional journalist, and you found out a big story, you then wrote the news in detailed form and posted it on your blog to share it with the public. But the next day, you found out that that particular news appeared on the newspaper, and the article was exactly the same as what you have written on your blog. You then continue reading and realized your name was not credited, but in fact it was someone else's name who got credited. At that moment, how do you feel when someone else was credited for plagiarizing your work. And so Journalist should keep their work original, and he or she uses a source, they should always credit the person who wrote it or provided the information.

Commitment to accuracy - commitment to accuracy is somewhat connected to bias. Commitment to accuracy is how much effort you put in to check and find out the absolute truth before you publish any news. Bias is one of the factors affecting the accuracy in your news. If you are bias to one side of the party, journalist tend to twitch the news and the news will no longer be accurate. Another factor would be because the journalist took a source from the internet and did not bother to verify the accuracy of the source and publish the news, the accuracy of the news and the opinion of the viewers will be affected greatly.