Donald Trump and his lawyers fined $1 million for ‘revenge’ lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, but you wouldn’t know that by only reading FoxNews.com
By Chris Roberts It’s news when a former president sues his opponent, and in March 2022 news organizations such as FoxNews.com placed at the top of their website the news that Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit claiming that his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, were among those part of a conspiracy “to create a […]
The ethics of food journalism
By: Kasey Hullett Entering into the world of food criticism and review is more precarious than I thought. Recently, there has been an outbreak of lawsuits from bad reviews on not only Yelp but blogs as well. In California, a groundbreaking law was set forth to protect Yelpers from defamation charges. You would think that […]
A Call to Arms: Using ethics in digital media
By Judah Martin I would hesitate to call myself a practicing journalist. In fact, I think such a claim would be patently wrong. In the years that I have worked as a student writer for The University of Alabama’s engineering college, I have written news releases, research articles, award announcements and “In Memorium” obituaries for […]
Journalism has a duty to provide in-depth information
By Laura D. Testino The news never stops. Twitter never stops. And Joe Weisenthal never stops. Weisenthal, known online as @TheStalwart, left his position as executive editor of Business Insider a year ago today for a television position with Bloomberg Media. While with Business Insider, New York Magazine published an article about Weisenthal’s media consumption […]
In defense of the photos of the lifeless Syrian boy
By Layton Dudley The cliché saying goes that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ The question in journalism is, in regards to ethics, when should the photo do the talking? Recently, an international photo surfaced that has caused controversy within the media. The photograph depicts a lifeless Syrian boy, named Aylan, only three years […]
What I learned from working on the Society of Professional Journalists’ new Code of Ethics
This month’s biggest personal and professional success may not make it on my tombstone, but it is a thrill to note that words I wrote are included in the Society of Professional Journalists’ new code of ethics. Delegates of the nation’s largest journalism association approved the code on Sept. 6, 2014, nearly 18 years after […]
Facebook news feed emotion experiment was a failure of journalism ethics, too
News that Facebook manipulated content of nearly 700,000 users continues to make waves, and now a Democratic senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company and researchers properly notified and/or debriefed users that they were being used as experimental subjects. The 2012 experiment tested whether users posted higher levels of positive […]
Jeff Jarvis on why ‘sponsored content,’ advertorials and other blurrings between news and ads are a bad thing
Worth a read today is Jeff Jarvis writing about the blurring between news and advertising content. He argues that advertising that looks like news content is bad because of: Inconsistency in the ethics of news organizations that do this. Conflicts of interest between advertisers and news. Brand value losses for news organizations. His bottom line: […]
Fox News says GOP politicians say sequestration is just hype, but fails to notice GOP politicians worried about sequestration
FoxNews.com’s top story is a think piece that quotes plenty of GOP folks saying that the Obama administration is making too much out of the impending mandatory cuts to federal spending. The headline: “Economic Armageddon? Republicans call sequester warnings hype.” (Or, a sexier hed from the site’s front page: Chicken Little Tactics? GOP Points to […]