Critical Examination of News Gathering Ethics: Memo for Committee

This report, structured as a memo to a news organization's ethics committee, critically examines the ethical challenges in news gathering. It identifies three key ethical problems: the perception of media as the 'enemy of the people,' the struggle to uphold truth and values, and the erosion of public trust in news due to ethical breaches. The memo provides examples of these issues, such as privacy violations and the impact of sensationalism on political situations. The report emphasizes the need for a strong code of ethics, transparency, and adherence to moral principles in news gathering to restore public trust. It suggests solutions such as restrictions on personal information disclosure, ensuring the integrity of news, and the importance of digital media security to protect privacy. The report references several sources to support its arguments and conclusions.

Running Head: The Ethics of News Gathering 0
The Ethics of News Gathering
Memo
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The Ethics of News Gathering 1
Memo
To: all the news channels
From: news organization
Topic: Provide a media organization ethics committee with a thorough, clear, and relatively short critical
examination of three specific ethical problems and possible solutions for the problems.
Date: June 28, 2019
News is all about sensational, exceptional, negative, and current events (Wijnberg, 2018). It is
necessary to provide all the information to the user but it should follow ethics in their news. This memo
has a purpose to create an ethics committee to the examination of three specific ethical problems and
their possible solution.
Note: it is a common responsibility to all the news channels to secure all the things, which makes an
impact of the personal, professional, and political conditions.
Follow ethics in news creation:
It is necessary to consider the image of a person, community, nation, and many others in a news article.
It is the responsibility of the journalist to secure the rights of a person in their news. News makes a huge
impact on the reputation of a person. Therefore, it is necessary to make a code of ethics for news
creation and distribution.
There are three basic ethics for journalism, which should be followed by all the persons, which are
related to that community. It makes a good image of journalism in the industry. Therefore, it is
necessary to find specific ethical problems and a possible solution to the problems. There are some
ethical issues in the news, which areas:
 Media as ‘Enemy of the people’
 Battle for truth
 Values of human beings
People lose their faith from news and faces ethical issues. There are some examples, which areas:
 Based on (Strashin, 2019), Wilson-Rebound has been broken trust of the government and he
was expelled from the community. Few experts say that he was right at their point, as it was a
personal conversation.

The Ethics of News Gathering 2
 Based on (cbc.ca, 2019), there are some personal issues, which is in media because of news
channels involvement. It is not necessary to provide details about the personal issues, which
makes an impact on the political conditions of a nation.
 Based on (Adhopia, 2019), healthcare department has sensitive information about patients or
their treatments. Therefore, it can be considered in ethical issues that no one-share information
of patients to third parties.
These ethical issues can be solved using proper organization and ethical community for the gathering of
news in journalism. There should be a restriction on journalism, which makes a huge impact on
personal, professional, and political situations.
Journalism should have a code of ethics and provide clean news about reality and do not put anything,
which provides profit to them against ethical issues (Friend & Singer, 2015). According to (Frost, 2015),
journalism must have uses ethics in their profession because it is related to the trust of several people.
In addition, news should have transparency and make trust in people about their work (Phillips, 2010).
Newsgathering should follow morals and ethics, such as virtue, rights, and others. Therefore, people
make faith in the news channels (Waller, 2010). In addition, digital media should follow all the security
channels and reasons to overcome privacy in news (Whitehouse, 2010).
Thanks
References

The Ethics of News Gathering 3
Adhopia, V. (2019, March 20). Canadian health care's 'one issue per visit' problem. Retrieved from
cbc.ca: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/second-opinion-one-problem-visit-1.5061506
cbc.ca. (2019, March 12). How SNC-Lavalin affair draws line between personal morals and ethics of
power. Retrieved from cbc.ca: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-12-
2019-1.5052600/how-snc-lavalin-affair-draws-line-between-personal-morals-and-ethics-of-
power-1.5052607
Friend, C., & Singer, J. (2015). Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions: Traditions and
Transitions. London: Routledge.
Frost, C. (2015). Journalism ethics and regulation. London: Routledge.
Phillips, A. (2010). Transparency and the new ethics of journalism. Journalism Practice, 4(3), 373-382.
Strashin, J. (2019, April 03). Wilson-Raybould may not have broken the law, but her Wernick tape crossed
ethical lines, lawyers say. Retrieved from cbc.ca: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wilson-
raybould-tape-1.5082119
Waller, L. (2010). Indigenous research ethics: new modes of information gathering and storytelling in
journalism. Australian Journalism Review, 32(2), 19.
Whitehouse, G. (2010). Newsgathering and privacy: Expanding ethics codes to reflect change in the
digital media age. Journal of mass media ethics, 25(4), 310-327.
Wijnberg, R. (2018, September 12). The problem with real news — and what we can do about it.
Retrieved from medium.com: https://medium.com/de-correspondent/the-problem-with-real-
news-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-f29aca95c2ea