This past weekend I went to an Abba tribute concert. It was fun and exciting, but when they sang their song about money, it reminded me of the last lecture in my communications class. Is money really funny in a rich man's world?
We had a pretty heated discussions about what is ethical and what is not for a journalist. You ask, "Why? What's ethical is ethical, follow the guidelines and you will be fine." This is where being a journalist can get a little messy. There are no set rules to follow. Everyone personally defines what they will and wont do, cover, say, attend, etc. Yes, you must follow the rules at your specific network or station, but as a profession as a whole, there has yet to be made a concrete law. This is where the Society of Print Journalism Code of Ethics, (http://www.spj.org/), helps out. Read around the web page to get an idea of what is the ethical trend right now.
In this debate, we talked about the Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska in 1989. I wasn't very sure about what it was, so I did some research(http://tinyurl.com/7bxhur4). It was one of the biggest environmental disasters at the time, spilling more than 10 million gallons of gas into the icy Alaskan waters.
This video shows the impact that is still found today because of the spill.
We were given a situation and had to decide how we would deal with it. In Alaska, most of the money made is made by the extraction of oil. They call it "Oil Money." So when a tiny News Radio company, struggling to survive, is offered a thirty-two thousand dollar grant from Exxon to cover oil related news it didn't seem like a big deal. But it was. The company decided against taking the grant, and eventually went out of business.
This didn't make sense at first. Most of the money in that part of Alaska was being made from oil companies anyway, so why couldn't they accept the grant and allow the company to survive?
The answer is because it wasn't ethical to take the money. I agree with their decision. Even though Alaska is full of "Oil Money" this money was going to be given to them as a "gift" if they would cover the oil spill. If they had accepted the gift, they would have had to cover the oil spill in a light that positively reflected Exxon, because they were now obligated to support the company that supported them.
It all comes down to your worldview. What you view as right or wrong is different from the person next to you. When you get stuck in situations like the little news radio company in Alaska, you have to have made solid decision on what you believe is right. You need to make your own code of ethics and stick to it, no matter the situation. Now is not the time to be a fair-weather journalist.
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