Jeff Martin
Reading Summary 2
Reference: Muller, D.
(2010). Ethics and trauma: lessons from media coverage of Black Saturday. Australian
Journal of Rural Health, 18(1), 5-10. doi:10.1111/j.1440-1584.2009.01117.x
Theme: Media response to restricted access
areas within a disaster zone may be varied, and some were viewed as
unethical. There was a lack of consensus
on what was ethical.
Summary: In February, 2009 there was a large brushfire
in Victoria, Australia. 173 people died
and 414 were injured. The media
scrambled to get access to the affected areas and were stopped at government
roadblocks. However, there was no
consensus among media people about the correct ethical response to roadblocks. In general, media people tended to place a
higher value on successfully meeting the competitive pressures under which they
work, and on carrying out what they saw as their duty to inform the public,
than on the countervailing ethical duty to respect the law.
- The range of
responses was wide:
- Find another way in
- Get past by chance
- Get past by deception
- Resist deception
- Accept the roadblock
- Journalist’s
response to respect of private property was also varied. The responses ranged from staying off of
private property completely, to sifting through ashes at the sites of
burned down homes where people had died.
- These are
concrete ethical questions to which the media’s codes of ethics give only
the most abstract – and sometimes ambiguous – attention.
Other reading: It’s not the role of our media and our
journalists to shield us from truth; it’s their job to confront us with it. In
this respect, the plurality of imagery is both a blessing and a curse, because
in the sort of panic that follows an event like yesterday’s bombing, anything could
be real.
Hawking, T. (2013). The Ethics of
Disaster Photography in the Age of Social Media. Flavorwire.com, retrieved from: http://flavorwire.com/385270/the-ethics-of-disaster-photography-in-the-age-of-social-media/
Application: Journalists, much like the
rest of society, are bound by ethical rules.
Also, just like the rest of us, they are all individual people who will
subjectively interpret these rules as they will. Some will view laws and rules as solid and concrete. Others will see a certain situation as
unique, and will say that the rules and laws do not apply or can be bent.
