Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning

Twelfth Edition

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Chapter 1: Institutional Pressures

This chapter focuses on the ethical issues that arise with the business demands in the news media industry. The five cases in this chapter demonstrate how media practitioners are often caught in conflicting duties to their employers, to their readers or viewers, and to their own professional conscience. They illustrate some of the conundrums that occur regularly in today’s news business. This chapter features cases that discuss HuffPost’s business model, the mental and physical crises journalism professionals are facing worldwide, lessons from Philadelphia Inquirer’s bankruptcy, the issue of paid journalism worldwide, and the impact of AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT on journalism.

Chapter 1 Video introduction

Transcript

Case 1

Discussion Questions

  • What dangers can exist in a job market that highly encourages freelance work over salaried positions?
  • Are there times when “barriers to entry” can be beneficial in who is allowed to cover certain news topics? If so, how can that be determined?

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Case 2

Discussion Questions

  • How might the quality and quantity of news coverage change as increased financial stresses are applied to individual journalists?
  • Think about other high-stress professions (doctors, nurses, EMTs, teachers). How are these stresses the same or different?
  • What support do you think journalists should be provided with? By whom?

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Case 3

Discussion Questions

  • What are some challenges that can arise when large corporations or media conglomerates purchase smaller, local papers?
  • How can public affairs and government reporting survive and adapt to the new media age?

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Case 4

Discussion Questions

  • How visible should disclaimers be that state an article or story is a paid advertisement?
  • Does it depend on the product or situation?
  • Should online personalities (bloggers, YouTubers, TikTok stars, etc.) be subject to the same standards that journalists are for “paid stories”?

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Case 5

Discussion Questions

  • ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are treated and regarded differently among different professions. While academics might be concerned about academic dishonesty and stolen work, other industries might have no problem with using a text generation software to quickly write out text.
  • Is there a middle-ground for the use of text-based generative AI? If so, where?

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