PressEthic

Today, AM New York included a piece in their "five years later" coverage on a NY1/Newsday poll about New Yorkers' thoughts about possible further attacks. The story leads with this alarming statment:

Most New Yorkers expect another city terrorist attack in the next five years and a majority favor some form of profiling of Muslims or Middle Easterners....

Rising like a phoenix in defiance of mainstream media, independent (and often free) presses frequently cover the stories and print the perspectives that can make the corporate giants decidedly uncomfortable. This week they were awarded a measure of protection and even validation through the passing of a very strange bit of California legislation.

Whether it be Lindsay Lohan or Valerie Plame, our nation's most chased-after celebrity names have found public refuge in an almost amusingly ironical way--not by escaping the cameras and gossip into their hillside mansions, but by making an appearance in a Vanity Fair photo shoot. For a fleeting moment, an overexposed celebrity exists in a conscious state of harmony with the press: With every exclusive cover story, Vanity Fair maintains its status as the crown jewel of celebrity magazines, while its subjects are given both a chance to explain themselves to the public and showcase the intimidating extent of their stardom. After all, a Vanity Fair story may be the most important difference between B-list exposure and A-list glamour.

Do front page ads open the door to ethical complications by concentrating a large portion of ad revenues with one single advertiser? This discussion focuses on Jack Shafer's 7 Sept. 2006 Slate.com media commentary piece.

While the public questions the ethical behavior of our various media outlets in obtaining information and protecting sources, Hewlett Packard (HP), one of the nation’s largest technology companies, is facing possible criminal charges for using a process called pretexting to access the phone records of nine journalists.

It has long been a contention that the journalists need to pay more attention to the religion beat. The media, perhaps squeamish of other-worldly moral messages, missed the boat on covering how faith factored into the 2004 election. The issue resurfaced at the Religion Newswriters Association annual conference held this past Friday.

James Frey and Random House settled a lawsuit with readers, lending validity to the grievance that the author had exaggerated and fictionalized portions of his book "A Million Little Pieces", which was marketed as non-fiction.

I was walking home the other day through my neighborhood in the Gramercy Park area, when I saw a poster endorsing Brian Kavanagh for Assemblyman. The interesting part about it is the fact that the endorsement was made by the New York Times.

After naturalist Steve Irwin's fatal encounter with a stingray while filming a documentary in Australia last week, curious media-minds wanted to know: will the footage of his death be broadcast?

When creating a work of fiction based on actual events, how far is too far to stretch the truth? ABC's upcoming mini-series on the events leading up to 9/11 incites a wave of furor from bloggers, liberal groups and former government officials who accuse the network of dramatically fictionalizing (and falsifying) the events.

The headline of a September 9th New York Times article declares, "U.S. Paid (my italics) 10 Journalists For Anti-Castro Reports". Paid? My God! Do you mean to tell me that journalists don't work for free?

Does the Times believe this to be a shocking revelation? Are we supposed see this as proof of the conspiratorial nature of the Bush Administration?

Apparently the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, a division of the U.S. Government-funded International Broadcasting Bureau, has for several years been hiring Cuban-American journalists in Miami to produce documentaries that are critical of Fidel Castro's communist government. These documentaries are then, through a variety of means, surreptitiously broadcast onto Cuban public television and radio.

Awful things happen in awful places. Those that go there—brave and brazen reporters—bring back news from the dark corners of the world. The public relies on these brave souls to illuminate and tell the tales for the entire world. They are the ears, the eyes, and the conscience for us.

Sudan is one such place, and American journalist Paul Salopek is one such individual. According an Associated Press article by Felicia Fonseca, "Salopek, 44, was on assignment for National Geographic magazine when he was arrested Aug. 6 and accused of passing information illegally, writing 'false news' and entering the African country without a visa."

On another blog I took the Poynter Institute to task for writing ethical guidelines that are poorly conceived, vague and badly written. Even so, their list is useful as a jumping off point for a conversation about press ethics, and today I'd like to address one of their recommendations: "Embrace the relationship between journalism and democracy."

Is their any issue in journalism as fraught with controversy?

The image of the reporter as a lunging government watchdog is whimpering once again. The Miami Herald reported today that ten journalists received regular payments, ranging from $1,550 to $174,753 since 2001, from a U.S. government agency.

Based on the book by John le Carré, the film The Constant Gardener was deservedly lauded this year for revealing the bad doings of pharmaceutical companies in contemporary Africa, a subject that has hitherto hardly been considered in mainstream fictional media. As I walked out of the cinema, however, one glaring question remained unanswered: where was contemporary Africa in the film?