Journalistic Ethics Clash with Economics
Created | Updated Sep 14, 2012
What happens when Journalistic ethics or standards clash with economics?
All too often, economics wins. In an age of an exponential rate of change, traditional media channels are fast being replaced by chat rooms. Then ever more spontaneous tweets are heard the world round. As twitter.com proclaims: “Instantly connect to what's most important to you. Follow your friends, experts, favorite celebrities, and breaking news.”
This is not just about the individual decisions of Editors or Managers, this is about the fact that most news channels are for-profit enterprises. To survive, many have merged into conglomerates that are “publicly owned.” Now when a media complex makes an ethical decision, it is not as much about the journalistic integrity to the reader public as it is about the ethics of a business serving the whims of the investing "public." The survival of trusted public media channels is seriously threatened.
What Journalists are faced with is not so much the old standards as much as, “Will there be a place in the world that will pay for their valuable contribution to society? Money decides what is valuable, and big money has rushed through the profits of yellow journalism and is sinking its teeth into common chatter.
Is this what society wants from a free enterprise system? I, for one, do not.
