Journalism Ethics in the Changing World
“No matter what, I want the best thriller, fast and first!”
This is something that has become the tagline of almost every journalist in today’s changing media. Today’s journalists face pressure from all factions of society for fast, as well as quality news. “Hot” news is the “hottest” demand today!
This growing stress leaves no room for ethics in the journalist’s life. He is compelled to take the not-so-uncommon-path of plagiarism, among many other tactics he uses to cope up with the load on him. Today, the society also has a wild thirst for knowledge, and the people who can quench this thirst are comparatively less in number. This also leads to paucity of time for the existing media industry, which is trying to do and complete everything as soon as possible.
In 2009, quite a popular case of plagiarism exposed the flaws in today’s world of media. Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist was accused of plagiarising a post on The Talking Points Memo site, though the content was quite small. Ironically, 20 years earlier, Dowd had exposed Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s alleged plagiarism, thus, kicking him out of the run for the presidential elections.
Dowd’s political position and the aggressiveness with which she had pursued Biden for the same, made her infamous and brought the scandal to national acclaim. All her claims for her innocence didn’t help tranquilize those who felt she should have been more disciplined and ethical. This case clearly points to the growing unethical nature of the media industry. Dowd was a recognised and an experienced journalist and so, one doesn’t find any need for her to plagiarize the passage she did. We can all imagine how large the pressure put on her would have been, large enough to force a journalist so eminent to bend her morals and ethics. It’s not that she ran out of words, but more probable that she ran out creativity, originality and time!
This case is just one of many others of a similar type and is a clear affirmation that ethics is fading away from the present reporting world. In the rush to get through and to be at the top, journalists compromise with the quality of the news. They tend to focus more on the quantity. “What? His reporters have already reached there? Then my men need to get there too.” Journalists forget that there are other things happening, which are worth mentioning but are not mentioned. Some important issues are touched upon and then left incomplete. Then why run after the same news? Readers often get sick of reading the same news from different sources.
There is a politics that is in play between different news agencies — a desire to rise up by bringing the others down. There is a race where everyone wants to be first, where everyone wants to attain victory through any means possible. An appropriate example in this context would be that of a journalistic scandal in 1980, where a Washington Times reporter Janet Cooke reported “Jimmy’s World”, which was about an 8-year-old, addicted to heroin. Her article was widely appreciated and she also got the Pulitzer Prize for it. But one thing she wasn’t aware of was that meanwhile, police had been searching for “Jimmy”, but nothing turned up. Finally she confessed that Jimmy didn’t exist and each word she wrote was totally out of the blue. This shows how being first has become more important than being right. Instead of constructively sharing the information, there is destructive snatching of the same. This war-like situation, eventually leads to their downfall.
Data is often manipulated to appease to the ones at the receiving end. Sadly, the media thinks it does, but actually it doesn’t. The media focuses on “more” news rather than “better” news. But all that “more” news doesn’t serve much purpose because it is fake or has been manipulated somewhere, in some stage. We rarely get pure, undiluted news nowadays, in the rush to get more. Our journalists have to understand that we want quality news more than quantity news.
