Media Ethics Issues and Cases Chapter 4

Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances

"What you choose to be loyal to should be capable of inspiring a similar loyalty in others who are both like and unlike you."

In reading Chapter 4, this was the one quote that spoke to me. I wanted a deeper understanding of how this could be true to journalists and professionals alike. How could one's loyalty spark a chain reaction of similar loyalties? I had to revert back to Josiah Royce's ideas on loyalty. Reading more about Royce's teachings created a deeper conflict within me because I agreed with only some of what he claimed to be true about loyalty and its ability to guide our ethical lives.

I had no idea where I stood when it came to loyalty. I knew the cliches: Dogs are loyal, you want your friends to be loyal, you want to be a loyal friend. But what does loyalty mean? 

After some self reflection and compilation of the ideas in this chapter, I have decided that Loyalty is quite complex and can not be used as a singular ethical guideline. I have come to understand that Loyalty has a lot to do with the community in which you operate, and each individual has many layers of loyalty.

"A worthy cause should harmonize with the loyalties of others within the community."

This is another quote from Royce, it shows a unique perspective of loyalty - a community perspective. How does an individual with individual loyalties fit into a society that has different loyalties? while trying to answer this question, the first thing that came to mind was Venezuela. 

Yesterday a series of non-violent protests broke out into violent riots, killing many. This is not an isolated incident; there is growing discontent among Venezuelan citizens springing from economic disparity, high inflation, and scarcity of of resources and products. Conflicting loyalties arise when one looks at the protesting citizen: The Venezuelan citizen has a loyalty to his/her country, but they also have a loyalty arising from the absolute necessity for goods and resources. They have a loyalty arising from shared humanity that may cause them to demonstrate for a fair society that promotes common good, but they also value their life and lives of many. 

These conflicting loyalties can be found anywhere, and they can create conflict and ethical problems when one must decide between competing ideas. This is why I loved William F. May's Layers of Loyalty.

Media Ethics Issues and Cases Chapter 2

Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth

"Nothing is what it seems."

Like The Matrix, nothing is what it seems when it comes to truth and objectivity in the news. Chapter two delves deeper into the profession providing content on different kinds of truth and each of their relationship with and interaction in the news media. To explain the different views of truth I thought it would be easiest to use a concrete example. Here is a picture of my two good friends, Hunter and Kaitey (from Left), and my twin sister, Christine, in Disney World's Magic Kingdom.

1. Pre-Socratic Greek View of Truth: looking at the picture through the pre-Socratic lens would be nearly impossible. This view of truth depended heavily on memory because of the oral culture that existed as a way to pass down information from generation to generation. I suppose that to view this picture in a pre-Socratic way I would have to memorize the colors and the background and the expressions on their faces, I would be able to call to memory the moment when I took this picture and how Kaitey's arms held them all together, bringing them closer to one another beneath a landmark of our childhood. "This oral notion of truth was gradually discarded once words and ideas were written down", it was replaced with Seeing is Believing which makes it much easier to find truth in an image such as this.
2. Plato's View of Truth: Plato linked truth closely with human rationality and intellect. "Plato equated truth with a world of pure form, a world to which human beings had only indirect access." So in Plato's true or pure world there would not be a White man staring at a map in the right of this picture, or another White man with a tripod on the left. There may even be more of a diverse racial demographic represented in this picture. My friends would be directly centered in front of Cinderella's Castle and the sky would be a little brighter. The truth of this photo, just like the truth in Plato's cave is knowable only to the human intellect and can not be verified.
3. Enlightenment Concept of Truth: This view of truth is linked to the senses. "Truth has become increasingly tied to what is written down, what can be empirically verified, what can be perceived by the senses." This concept of truth calls 'Objectivity' into the equation. Objectivity relies on facts and knowledge and requires that the writer separates fact from opinion. So, while taking this picture I remember hearing Christine's short loud laughter as she opened her mouth, I remember seeing the purple flowers behind them and noticing how they complimented Kaitey's shorts. I remember Smelling sweet pastries from a near-by bakery on Main Street. These things are true, in the Enlightenment view, because they were derived from my senses and they are also true because the majority of the people in this picture also saw the flowers and heard the laughter and smelt the sweet treats, my truth was widely universal. If I had said 'In this picture it looks like my friends are happiness imposters, they are only smiling for the camera" that would be an opinion. I do not know how truly happy they were here regardless of what the picture looks like.
4. The Pragmatic View of Truth:  Truth in the Enlightenment view was determined in only one way- through the senses. In the Pragmatic view, truth became more individual and less universal. Pragmatism challenged Objectivity. If this image were viewed through a pragmatic lens, It would be viewed as a specific situation and the context of the picture would have a great deal to do with the way it was interpreted. I could say that Kaitey did not get a good nights sleep the night before and was feeling exhausted; and Christine had, one day earlier, competed well in a Track and Field Regionals Race; and Hunter was feeling bittersweet because her three closest friends were going to college soon. Hearing these subjective facts changes the way one looks at the image. Do I, as a writer, even have the authority to report on something because the truth of a matter is so subjective?
5. Postmodern View of Truth: This Postmodern Philosophy is a "logical extension" of Pragmatism, it states that meaning and truth can not exist apart from context. This picture would not even exist, or at least be considered truth, without the context it is taken in.
6. The Convergence Theory of Truth: This theory states that truth is discovered through many different methods of investigation that would make up an overall mental idea of the events that took place. If this picture were to be used in Convergence Journalism, It may be featured in an article that described the setting and the weather, it may state who the girls in the photograph are and why they are in Disney World. There may be an eye-witness account of the picture being taken displayed in the article through a series of quotations or displayed in an audio format that can be listened to by the audience. There may even be a picture of me taking the picture, or an infographic with information on how many people a day take a similar picture in front of Cinderella's castle. All of these sounds, images, and words are methods of understanding the truth depicted above.

The chapter talks about how news media must be "neutral, yet investigative. It must be disengaged, but have an impact. It must be fair-minded but have an edge." This refers to the way that the information is being framed and plays a huge role in the audiences response to the news. The ethical news values set out at the end of the chapter focus on Journalism's commitment to the truth and outline specific ethical practices. My favorite of the values is Reciprocity, that is "treating others as you wish to be treated" in the IRE survey of journalists I was surprised to hear how hypocritical the journalists were, willing to falsify or withhold information but unwilling to accept when that happened to them. Reciprocity focuses on the readers relationship with the writer as one of mutual respect.

Media Ethics Issues and Cases Chapter 1

An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making

"In the end, you will have tools, not answers."

In Chapter one of Media Ethics, Issues and Cases, I explored six different models of ethical decision making: Bok's Model, Aristotle's Virtue Ethics, Kant's Categorical Imperative, Utilitarianism, Communitarianism, and the Pluralist Theory of Value. Each decision-making model focused on different aspects of the deciding process. Aristotle's Virtue ethics focused on the actor, or the person facing the ethical decision, Kant's Categorical Imperative focused on the action, or the universal duty to act, and Mill's Utilitarianism focused on the outcome, or the consequences of the act similar to Communitarianism which focuses on society-wide issues of social justice. Bok's model engaged the actor to think about the action and its consequences while Ross' Theory of Value highlighted the competition between what is right and what is good.  

"The test of a moral act...is it's universality." Last semester in Theology I learned about Kant's Categorical imperative. My class studied how his thoughts about the 'individual exception to the universal imperative' were paralleled in the biblical account of Abraham and his son, Issac. So reading about the universality of a moral act naturally intrigued me. I enjoyed developing a deeper understanding of Kant's thoughts on duty through the lens of ethics and not faith.

William David Ross' Pluralist Theory of Value was also very interesting to read about because I had never quite pondered the difference between what is good and what is right. "Not all right actions will be productive of the good", they are both competing ethical claims.

Looking through the lens' provided in chapter one I now understand that to truly make an ethical decision one must take into account the different actions that can be made and their consequences. The six different ethical decision making models are the tools provided to any decision-maker, to me. I must use these tools to make ethically sound choices. there is no book with all the answer to this worlds questions, but we have tools and minds to help us along the way.

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