Ethics and Technology

I believe that technology both hurts and harms our ability to be ethical journalists. We can use technology to look up almost anything we want to in an instant, rather than being forced to go to a library or spend valuable time looking up facts and figures. This helps our ethics because it big situations where we need to make calculated ethical decisions, technology allows us to spend more time weighing the ethics of a certain decision.
Technology can also help our ethics because we can talk with almost anyone in the world who has the capable technology. This can allow us to bring a lot of people into the conversation to help us make ethical decisions.
Poynter recently held a conference on ethics in online journalism. Here is one of the things they concluded:
“Journalists should accept the challenge and embrace the opportunity to build new business models that will flourish in an era of digital media. Journalism's highest values can endure only if they stand on a sound economic foundation. It is essential that the journalists who adhere to those values be proactive -- not just reactive -- participants in the process of innovation.”
But technology can also hurt our ethics in multiple ways. As discussed in class, Jayson Blair’s reporting on Private Jessica Lynch’s family looking out over tobacco fields was blatantly false and it almost skipped by everyone. In fact, the false information wasn’t even checked at the newspaper. Blair was obviously a very smart, if very unethical newspaper reporter. He even fooled the rest of the newspaper by saying he was actually in Lynch’s hometown when he wasn’t even close. Instead, he committed a huge breach of ethics by reporting on what he saw on television and then sprinkling in his own lies.
What’s important to remember and what’s pertinent to this discussion, is that Blair was allowed to use technology to help make an unethical decision. It allowed him, and gave him the temptation, to skirt the basic rules of journalism. Technology harmed Blair’s ability to be an ethical journalist and gave him the easy way out of what could have been a good story.
There’s also the issue of Wikipedia. As with any class, it allows for a lot of room for error in our ethics as journalists. Wikipedia is easy, informative and incredibly convenient. However, it’s not always filled with accurate information with whatever article you’re looking at. It can be tough to verify some of the information that’s in there. It can allow journalists to make unethical decisions easily.
Technology can help us become ethical journalists with its ease and volume of usable information. But it can hurt if that information is false.
--John Sahly