Journalism-Lecture 8 - Ethics

This week's lecture was all about ethics and how they can differ between people. We had a guest speaker come to talk to the group, his name was John Harrison and he had worked with Bruce in the past.

We started off the lecture with a picture of a ethics cross with the words good taste, bad taste, ethical and unethical around the quadrants.
We were then shown a series of 10 advertisements or television commercials and asked to rate them in the quadrants according to our feelings about them.
I thought some of them were unethical and inappropriate but some were good advertisements.
These are some examples that we were shown...

After we had finished scoring all of the examples we were then asked how to we distinguish between the good and the bad, the ethical and the unethical, the right from the wrong, the difference between the bad, the wrong and the simply tacky?

How do we work it out? After looking at the advertisements, more importantly who has the right to say if it is right or wrong, good or bad, ethical and unethical? 

Primarily because it seems like everyone has a different opinion and view on things.

We were then informed of the various ethical theories which were deontology, consequentialism and virtue. Deontology involves  rules, principles and duties. Principles such as you will do the right thing by following these rules, all ethics codes are deontological, and a choice between an absolute right and an absolute wrong. 

Consequentialism is about getting a 'good' or 'right' outcome that matters, doesn't matter how we got there, the end may justify the means, and the greatest good for the greatest number. 

Finally virtue ethics means that "goodness" comes from good habits or dispositions of character and these habits are 'virtues' such as courage, justice, temperance and prudence. 

These habits of character are in the 'golden mean' of behaviour. 

The mean, for example courage is the mean between rashness and cowardice. Justice is the mean between the in-justice of overzealous and excessive law and the injustice of lawlessness. 

There are several types of ethics codes. They include the MEAA code, the PRIA code, the AFA code and the AANA code. 

The main thing I learnt from this lecture is how different people's opinions can be in relation to ethics and how they are applied to real-life examples. 

I don't think ethics should be necessarily put into categories but everyone should be allowed to label something how they see it. 

Furthermore, considering ethics is such a controversial issue in journalism I looked into some websites  relating to ethics in journalism and their codes they abide by.

Below are some links to some interesting reads.

http://www.australian-news.com.au/codethics.htm

http://www.alliance.org.au/code-of-ethics.html

It is interesting because some websites share similar principles of ethics, whereas some have more or less codes to abide by.