Sunday, October 19, 2008

Just be ethical ....

As a part of the Multimedia Journalism graduate program at VCU, we are required to take a course in media law and ethics. During a class discussion, one of my classmates asked if one can truly plagiarize ideas. As she put it, “it is possible for more than one person to have the same idea, is it not unfair to punish someone for having the same creative thought as someone else?” To answer her question our professor gave a local example.

Style Weekly and the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD) both decided to do stories about a candy making company that returned to the area. The Style Weekly article was written and published before the RTD began work on their article.

Trouble brewed after editors at Style Weekly began to compare the creative photography of the RTD to their own. There were two striking similarities. For one, both photographs displayed a stack of three candy pieces against a white background. Secondly, the headline for the Style Weekly article was “Sweet Return”, the headline for the RTD article was “A Sweet Return”.




When Style Weekly informed RTD of the resemblance, the RTD photographer was fired for plagiarism and for breaking the company’s code of ethics.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines ethics as the rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession. To govern the practice of journalist, many media professionals turn to the Society of Professional Journalist code of ethics as a guideline. The code has four basic tenants:

1. Seek truth and report it
2. Minimize harm
3. Act independently
4. Be accountable

I applaud RTD for strictly enforcing ethical standards. If instances such as these were able to fall through the cracks, credibility would be lost. As journalist we must do everything to uphold the integrity of our profession.

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