PressEthic

This week, both Iran and China took significant steps to further restrain their domestic news agencies.

The Iranian reformist newspaper Shargh was one of four publications shut down this week by Iran’s conservative press monitor. The government order to shut down Shargh came after repeated warnings for publishing “heretical articles, insulting religious, political and national figures and revealing information in defiance of the Supreme National Security Council”, according to the Iranian press monitor.

In China, new regulations were enacted on Sunday that gave the government-run news agency Xinhua control over distribution of news and information from foreign media services such as the Associated Press and Reuters. Xinhua said it would prohibit information that it thought might violate national unity or social stability.

New York Times reporters and editors are officially addressing more ethical problems then libel law and accurate fact gathering.

Low-income, minority communities are still lagging behind in accessing the internet

After spending the morning of September 11th, 2006 at Ground Zero for the memorial services I wondered extensively about the impact that the "Investigate 911" protestors had on the event. I have my own theories as to why they were there and even the appropriateness of their presence considering it was a day of mourning for the dead and not politics.

Sasha Baron Cohen elicits uproar from the Kazakh government based on satirical portrayal in new Borat movie.

Exploring the ethics of making web links to extreme right-wing websites.

The six-hour, two-part docudrama produced by ABC about the lead-up to 9/11 has drawn harsh criticisms from democrats for being misleading, biased and inaccurate.

Various newspapers broke the story today of the identity of the creators of Lonelygirl15, a username for a made-up character named "Bree." On YouTube.com, "Bree" posted numerous video diaries that were viewed by thousands as word of the diary grew. However, "Bree" is really an actress, and her diary is pure fiction, the work of filmmakers. Is this kind of public deception ethical, or can be excused in the name of art?

Lawrence Wright, esteemed journalist and author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the path to 9/11... described the turmoil he felt at interviewing people whom he knew had "done terrible things," and asserted that this presented "moral quandaries" where the line between being a journalist and being a human was, at best, blurrily drawn.

As journalists, we are taught to let the facts speak for themselves. As writers, we still have to judge their value.

Overstock.com coined the phrase, "It’s all about the O," in its television ads. Apparently, it is all about the "O" for the New York Times Company and Time Warner, Inc. also; the "O" meaning online.

Should students feel obligated to censor their Facebook profiles just because some employers might sneak into the system and use a student's profile against them in the hiring process? If the employee has to obtain an email address from that student's college by misrepresenting themselves or by getting access to the student's friend or college network through an alumni, isn't that tactic of obtaining information completely unethical?

As Callahan thoroughly discusses in "The Cheating Culture," a big part of cheating in America takes place in High Schools. He argues that the pressures of getting into a top school can instigate cheating on exams. In light of all this, I was refreshed to find an article on the front page of the Times about how Harvard University is doing away with its early acceptance program.

This week's New Yorker's pages offer reliably illuminating accounts of issues related to the Middle East. But timing is everything.

Should an off-duty journalist, confronted with evidence of corruption, always investigate? Or is it sometimes appropriate to look the other way, as I did this summer?