Ethical Dilemma

Hi, my name is Xiao Tao and today I will be talking about 3 of the 7 dilemmas of journalists. I will first be talking about being bias. To put it simply, being bias is being with or against a person when reporting news. The journalist must not be biased or the information will be mainly on his/her opinions and the other side of the story will not be covered, leading to an unfair judgement and confusing others. An example is when person A did something bad to person B and the journalist is a friend of person A, therefore he writes good things about A but bad things about B to coax readers to thinking that person A did the right thing.

Secondly, I feel that a journalist must not plagiarise, which is to copy something from somewhere to use it without citing the source or acknowledge the person who created it but instead state that you created it yourself. It will be very unfair for the person who spent a lot of time and effort into writing the article and to find out that it has been copied without acknowledging him/her. An example is copying a whole article and posting it in a magazine or newspaper, stating that you made it. The original person who wrote the article will be able to sue the journalist for plagiarising.

Lastly, the journalist must be committed to accuracy in the article. It means that the journalist has to report very accurate data and confirm that all the information is true before publishing the article. It is crucial to preventing the readers from getting false information and there will be conflicting information everywhere, leading to confusion and nobody will know which is the true information. An example is when journalist A publishes an accurate article whereas journalist B did not check the integrity of the information before publishing it. Therefore some readers will think that A is correct while some will think that B is correct, therefore there will be conflicting information and nobody will be able to figure out which information is correct.