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An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making 1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making By the end of this chapter, yon should be able to: • recognize the need for professional ethics in journalism. • work through a model of ethical decision making. identify and use five philosophical principles applicable to mass communication situations. MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS Scenario #1: You work as an intern for a start-up news organization that has a busi­ ness model based on collecting broadcast coverage of specific stories from multiple news outlets, editing the coverage, adding studio-produced introductory comments, and selling the resulting packages to media outlets that have neither the staff time nor the facilities to produce high-quality, in-depth on-air or Web work. Your organi­ zation accurately credits those who produced the original coverage you aggregate. Most often packages are compiled from international news sources, although some­ times they include video and comments from bloggers, domestic on-air media crit­ ics, and others. The start-up is now in its third year; it has reached its capitalization goals, and while its subscriber base is modest, it includes Web outlets such as the Buffington Post. Part of your job is to help produce the packages the organiza­ tion sells. But, you are also charged with scouring the Web for references to the story topics your organization is aggregating coverage about. Wben you find such a Web site, you are told to craft a laudatory response to the site content which must include a reference to similar content from the news organization you work for. In these messages, you are instructed not to disclose that you are au employee of the news organization you are required to mention. What should yon do? Scenario #2: According to documentarian Josh Fox, it all started with a letter he received from a natural gas company in 2009 offering to pay him $4,750 per acre 2 CHAPTER 1: An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making (Fox inherited 19 acres near Milanville, Pennsylvania, including the house he was born in, from his parents) for the right to drill for natural gas on his property which sits atop the Marcellus shale, a rich natural gas deposit. The drilling process the company will use is called hydraulic fracturing, "fraking" in the oil and gas business. Fox, who claimed to know little about the process or its potential monetary and environmen­ tal impact, took the letter as impetus to report, shoot and produce the docnmentary Gasland which, in 2010, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary film. Gas land, which is based on first-person, point-of-view reporting, shot with a handheld camera and often crudely edited, has been politically influential, serving as part of the impetus to regulate fraking in several states. Early in Gasland, Fox's first documentary, Fox speculates about why so many average people were willing to talk to him about their experiences with fraking. "I guess if you have a camera in your hand, you know what you are doing," he says. With the advent of Op Docs in the New York Times and the emergence of first-person, point-of-view reporting in many media channels, what are the rules for "knowing what you are doing" in the making of documentary films or journalistic pieces that rely on these seemingly new information collection techniques? Scenario #3: You work for a PR finn that represents pharmaceutical giant PharMedCo. The drug company has an herbal medicine used successfully in Europe to lower blood pressure. PharMedCo wants to sell it in the United States. It is planning a major national promotion, generating large fees for your firm. It wants to use "third-party strategy," hiring key opinion leaders in the medical world to help get the word out and create a buzz by talking up the advantages of herbal products, but they would not push PharMedCo's new herbal medicine directly. In doing some research, you discover a little-known piece of information: if the herb is used in combination with another over-the-counter drug, it can be abused to get high. Yon tell PharMedCo, but it wants you to go ahead without informing the third-party experts, who might possibly back out or even warn the public. What should you do? Scenario #4: You are on a vacation car trip in another state when you narrowly miss becoming personally involved in a multiple-fatality car accident. You and your friends are not hurt, but you are on the scene before police and other first-respond­ ers arrive. The accident involves a striped-down van carrying 15 people, none of them wearing a seat belt because both seat belts and the seats themselves had been removed from the van. Several passengers have been thrown from the van and oth­ ers are trapped beneath it. You have some minor first-aid training. Those responding initially are overwhelmed by the number of those injured and the seriousness of their injuries, so they ask you to help with the least seriously injured. You do so, and in the process overhear conversatious among the police and medical personnel that those in the van are immigrants, that they are being driven to a manufacturing plant more than 50 miles from their homes on a daily basis by those who have brought them into the country, and that tltis sort of accident-while more lethal than most­ is not the first to have happened in the area and to this immigrant population. You are badly shaken by what you have seen, but two days later when you get back home, you realize that the accident you witnessed is a potential "tip" to a significant news story. What might that story be? How do you, or do you, convince your news­ paper editor to give you the time and resources to investigate what you, yourself, admit is a tragedy that happened in another state? CHAPTER 1: An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making 3 The Dilemma of Dilemmas The scenarios 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 infonned 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 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 in 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 the information in the scenarios above, 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. Since 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. While 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 consis­ tently ethical approach to your work as a reporter, strategic communication profes­ sional 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 4 CHAPTER ] :An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making A Word about Ethics The concept of ethics comes from the Two thousand years later, ethics has Greeks, who divided the philosophical come to mean learning to make rational world into separate disciplines. Aesthetics decisions among an aiTay of choices, was the study of the beautiful and how a all of which may be morally justifiable, person could analyze beauty without rely­ but some more so than others. Rational­ ing only on subjective evaluations.
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