Ethics
Most news organizations have strict policies to not pay for the news. But he question is: can a case be made for public interest that makes paying for the alleged Ford video justifiable? Toronto Star columnist Rose DiManno wants her newspaper to pay for the alleged Rob Ford video reasoning that if the Star doesn’t, the video may be bought by people who would prefer to let it disappear for good. The Province in Vancouver also launched a crowdfunding campaign to access the alleged video. Edward Tubb reports.
The Rob Ford video is not news, it’s only gossip, according to two journalism ethics professors, and the difference is the standards of verification. Romayne Smith-Fullerton and Maggie Jones Patterson argue the public must be wondering what outweighed the search for truth.
John Gordon Miller writes the Star skirted around the edges of these editorial principles by rushing into print, without anything but a last-minute attempt to get Ford and his people to tell their side of the story.
After the two high-profile incidents, reporters may be more likely to see sexual assaults at York as news and perpetuate a "confirmation bias," writes Maclean's On Campus Editor Josh Dehaas.
The Nanimo Daily News publisher may not want that racist letter to the editor to define the paper's identity, but it certainly shaped public perception. Making the newspaper look bad isn't the real ethical issue: Having an entire people's identity marginalized is a much bigger problem. The absence of a bad intention does not excuse a bad result, writes Ginny Whitehouse.
When media companies write the paycheques for sports journalists and own the teams the journalists cover, what does this mean for journalistic integrity, independence and credibility?
Is media coverage of B.C. Premier Clark sexist? Or is it fair comment? Katie Hyslop asks reporters, politicians and academics to weigh in.
Can robot reporters replace human journalists? Just because the technology potential is there, doesn't mean that it should be used, writes J-Source Ethics editor Romayne Smith Fullerton. Technology, she argues, cannot assign values to what’s reported, and how it’s reported.
More than six months after Ezra Levant ranted on his show, The Source, about the Roma community — sparking outcries and an ongoing hate crime investigation — he and Sun News Network vice-president Kory Teneycke issued an on-air apology Monday. Eric Mark Do reports. The apology came on the same day that Sun News Network filed papers with CRTC seeking a five-year mandatory coverage digital basic deal in an attempt to mitigate its nearly $17-million a year losses, J-Source associate editor Tamara Baluja reports.
Are journalists making more mistakes than they used to, or does social media simply amplify the same mistakes to a much wider audience? Eric Mark Do reports from the latest CJF J-Talk on real-time reporting in a social media age.
Ethics
edited by ROMAYNE SMITH FULLERTON
Contrary to the old saw, journalism ethics has never been an oxymoron. Most journalists care deeply about their responsibilities toward audiences, sources, subjects and peers. When juggling those loyalties gets hard, the conversation gets going on J-Source's ethics page, which doubles as the Web space of the ethics advisory committee of the 
Canadian Association of Journalists. Romayne Smith Fullerton
is associate professor at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University.To contribute, please click on any "comment" box or contact the editor.
Sub-categories
 | Support J-Source | ||
 | Best online-only article or series | ||
J-Source and ProjetJ are projects of The Canadian Journalism Foundation in collaboration with leading schools and organizations Editor-in-chief, J-Source: | |||
Opinion: The National Newspaper Awards don't reflect journalism in the digital era
The NNAs have been irrelevant for some time now. Basically, the major newspaper chains buy...
Opinion: Media's latest stories on Toronto's Mayor Ford a challenge for a court fight
Hi Sherwin,
No you are absolutely correct.
In two important cases before the...
Chequebook journalism: Should news outlets pay for the alleged video of Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine?
I'm going to assume that this video exists given that the reporting by Gawker and the...