Hum 176 Final

Media and Culture: Final Exam Essays

HUM/176

February 19, 2012

Jeffery Hineline

Media and Culture: Final Exam Essays Part One

You are the chief editor of a large metropolitan daily newspaper. One of your reporters is caught fabricating sources and making up facts. How do you handle the situation, from disciplining the reporter to explaining it to your readers?

Media plays a huge role in delivering news to the public. Without various media information delivery methods, such as the Internet, newspapers, television, and radio, news would take much, much longer to reach its audience. These modern media delivery methods, including blogs, television, and Internet are a drastic change from the media delivery methods one century ago, which primarily used newspapers, magazines, and radio to deliver news media. Because media is so crucial in delivering news to the public, news media have many social responsibilities to their readers. Chief among news media’s social responsibilities is the responsibility of providing the truth to the readers.

Fabricating sources and making up fact is a serious ethical offense. If I was the chief of a large metropolitan daily newspaper, and one of my reporters was caught fabricating sources and making up facts, there would be serious consequences for his or her actions. When a student is caught fabricating sources and making up facts in an academic setting, the university has every right to expel that student. As the chief of the newspaper, I would have a zero tolerance policy for fabrication and falsification, which I would cover in explicit detail to all of my reporters prior to their employment and periodically review through team meetings. As soon as I found out about the situation, I would immediately fire the reporter on just grounds.

Readers have the right to know the truth. Even in an online setting, ethical and legal considerations such as copyright infringement, plagiarism, fabrication of sources and falsification of...