PressEthic

This morning's Marketplace Report on National Public Radio aired a report about an individual hacking into Apple's online music products and breaking a code that disallowed copying and sharing of music files - illegal activity - and now he faces legal consequences.

The recent power outages caused by snowstorms in upstate New York, and power outages in Queens, underscore a persistent problem with the power infrastructure in the United States.

Often bantered as a overwhelmingly American problem, poor eating and weight gain is now a problem common with many Western and developing nations.

With the possibility of a change in leadership in Congress, media coverage has also delved into the unassuming candidates, those potentially seeking a run at the White House in two years and the ongoing drama inside the beltway.

When the story broke about Cory Lidle's plane crashing into an upper east side high rise treatment seemed to cover the appropriate issues - memories of 9/11, response time of emergency personnel and the specifics of the plane crash and its occupants - but there are other questions germane to a plane crash in Manhattan.

This week two American physicists won the Nobel Prize for their accomplishments in measuring cosmic radiation attributed to a single, explosive event. In addition to providing biographical information about the scientists and informative content on their work many cited this as the final stroke proving the Big Bang.

The Media Lens swung abruptly to Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania this week when news broke about the killings in an Amish community there. Initial sound bytes and headlines tucked descriptives such as "secretive community," "old fashioned" and "odd" into the narrative surrounding the event.

Performances of an opera in Germany where the beheading of several religious figures - Jesus, Muhammed and Buddha among them - were cancelled in response to an anonymous threat. The threat is the issue, and the cancellation of the opera, not the representation of religious figures, beheaded or not.

Reaction from the speech Pope Benedict XVI delivered more than two weeks ago still has legs. Coverage was given yesterday in several broadcast and paper venues to ongoing protests and pronouncements from across Islam. From cartoons to culled excerpts of papal speeches, an argument could be made that the Muslim world is overly sensitized, and that media treatment is more concerned with the conflagration than with taking a reasoned and hard look at Islamic overreaction.

The recent presidential election in Mexico produced a situation not unlike what occurred in the United States in 2000. Coverage of the election aftermath in the United States has not always been balanced, giving more in-depth discussion to defeated candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador than to president-elect Felipe Calderon.

Independent Journalist and video blogger, San Fransisco based Josh Wolf, was interviewed last Friday along with Lance Williams of the San Fransisco Chronicle on Democracy Now! Both are facing action by a Grand Jury for issues involving their work as journalists. Likewise, both assert constitutional and ethical grounds for not complying with court orders. I assert the particulars of each case are different, and, in Josh's case, do not merit the value-laden argument he is waging.

In a New York Times article from Wednesday journalist Jennifer Steinhauer reported on a story that initally broke in the Los Angeles Times. Comments made by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in private meetings with his staff were made available to the public through the campaign office of Democractic challenger Phil Angelides. How those audio files were accessed and subsequently reported is the rub.

In a New York Times article from September 9th, journalist Abby Goodnough reports on a story that broke in the Miami Herald the previous day. Both stories detail the remuneration journalists received from the U.S. government for submissions to Radio Marti and TV Marti. The ethical considerations seem to swirl around the fact that payment came from a government source, but is there more to consider?