PressEthic

An insightful and thought-provoking article was posted on the Poynter Institute's Romenesko, column that reports on media industry news. At the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly makes the case for a standard of ethics when it comes to "outing" or discussing the sexual orientation of public figures in the news.

Though I rarely have the time or patience to watch daytime television (or any entertainment television at all, for that matter), over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the opportunity to talk to my family about ethical issues in the media, and our conversation turned to The Tyra Banks Show.

Sponsorship and advertising seems to have reached an all-time high. Sporting events are the easiest targets. With the upcoming college bowl season, viewers will see half-time reports sponsored by Tostitos and two-minute warnings by other, large corporations. A recent article in Advertising Age reports that sponsors and advertisers have found a new area to spend their money—national landmarks.

Editors at the many media outlets that provide information decide how the news is framed on any given day. They pick the stories that appear in their newspapers or television reports, determine where and when they appear, and what story gets six inches and which one gets a whole page. On November 3, 2006 Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire in the middle of rush hour in Chicago in protest of the Iraq war. Unfortunately, no media listened and the story didn’t appear until November 26 after a reporter from an alternative, Chicago-based weekly put the pieces together on Ritscher’s suicide.

Apparently a mob of Frenchmen saluting like Nazis and trying to kill a Jew isn't front page news.

Mexico has lost one of its most courageous and enduring journalists. He appears to have died of natural causes, but the numbers of assassinated journalists continues to rise.

Copies of a Los Angeles high school newspaper were pulled from shelves and apologies were issued after an anonymous article compared predominantly black students at a local restaurant to “a pack of monkeys.” In the aftermath, it appears the students on the paper learned a valuable lesson in responsible journalism.

A thought on the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko.

And this time it's not about getting trampled by rabid bargain-hunters. The LA Times opted for a different angle on the traditional Black Friday "news" stories on Americans' patriotic consumerism. And the story is a little eerie.

Recently, the Star Tribune was sued by a gay group following the Minneapolis newspaper’s refusal to print an advertisement for a 2004 gay pride event, which the newspaper sponsored. The advertisement depicted two men kissing. I enjoy living in New York City in an era of unabashed political correctness. Sure, every now and then I hear a racial slur, or a derogatory comment about women. But overall racism, sexism and religious intolerance have become unacceptable. So why hasn’t homophobia?

Government interventions in junk food advertising have been recurrent in the news recently, with three different countries offering three different approaches to the problem.

Gerald Boyd died yesterday at the age of 56. Boyd was known for breaking barriers at The New York Times, becoming the first black metro and managing editor. For all of the accolades, his career at The Times was undone in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.

On November 20, CNN reported that websites cannot be sued for libelous information published by third parties, according to a California Supreme Court ruling. This decision could have serious effects on the world of journalism and media: free online expression is taking precedence over libel material.

It’s no news that advertising is a huge part of any publication. Visually, it’s seen on every page, though it’s usually pretty easy for readers to gloss over. The exception is when advertisers and editors try for something cheeky, like in the recent case for one Oregon newspaper.

Thanksgiving, spent this year in New Jersey instead of Michigan, still brings memories of my days growing up on a gravel road in a small rural town. I'll be in touch by telephone today, but, as I watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade on television, and flick between the various news channels, I am struck by the vivid disparity between this reality, cable connected and wired, to the very different routines and lives of many - family included - in the Midwest, and elsewhere, in this country.