Journalism schools should have a standard code of ethics
By Laura Testino In Walt Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the cartoon candlestick character, Lumière, leads a musical number featuring the other anthropomorphic kitchenware. Soon after the song, “Be Our Guest” begins, Lumière exclaims to “Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious!” But some journalists would do no such thing: the black and white stuff is […]
Is there an ethical difference in reporting the ‘chemical-related’ deaths of Philip Seymour Hoffman and another person?
Had it not been Super Bowl Sunday, the world might have taken even more notice about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, found dead on Feb. 2 wit h a needle in his arm and 70 bags of heroin in his apartment. A quick Google News search this morning showed more than 5,300 articles about […]
Where do we teach ethics in branding? Debbie Millman doesn’t fully say.
The School of Visual Arts in New York City is cranking up the nation’s first-ever master’s program in branding, led by Debbie Millman to help students focus on what Pacific-Standard magazine calls “the intricacies of how words, images, and design help shape public perception, opinion, and belief.” But something clanged at me in Paul Hilbert’s […]
On watching a media student steal from a restaurant (or, ‘How can I successfully teach media ethics when they don’t have much to start with?’)
The boy wanted sushi, so we ended up sitting next to a pair of university students around the grills of a Japanese restaurant where the chef puts on a show whether you want it or not. The chef was clearly enamored of the two girls, who ended up with much more food than me and […]
‘Media’ professor asks students to lie to journalists
It would be easy to pile on Peter Chen, the government professor at the University of Sydney who created an assignment that involved pitching made-up stories to the Tharunka student newspaper. Here’s the assignment, according to the paper’s “USYD media assignment not big on ethics” editorial: Project 2: Prank Tharunka Using your understanding of the […]
Walking away for ethical reasons pays off in case of CNET reporter
We recently wrote of CNET News’ problems with its parent CBS, in which the network told its tech news company to remove Dish’s “Hopper with Sling” device as a “Best of CES” product because CBS is suing Dish over the device. CBS hasn’t backed down much, and among the fallout is that Consumer Electronics Show […]