3 Most Ethical Responsibilties

Journalists follow ethical principles and take legal responsibilities for every aspect of their professional career. As an amateur journalist I find that the three principles/ legal responsibilities that are most important in my opinion are accuracy, protecting confidential sources, and transparency.

Accuracy should be the number one principle for every journalist. The entire discipline of journalism is based on accuracy. Without accuracy your writing cannot be named journalism but yet a fiction piece.

“In fact if a piece of journalism is not accurate, it has no value,” Thom Lieb said in All the News.

Protecting the confidentiality of sources is also a priority in my list of legal responsibilities. As journalists the public trust us to report accurate news and to have credible sources. As professionals if we expect the sources to be credible then we need to develop credible relationships with our sources. A journalist cannot develop a credible relationship with a valuable source if he/she does not protect the sources confidentiality by request. It is unethical to deliberately disregard the wishes of your source if they have upheld their side of the deal. In regards to the legal aspect of this I believe there should be shield laws against federal subpoenas.

Transparency is the third most important ethical principle on my list. To me its just as important as accuracy but goes a little further in dept. in Journalism it is just as important to be unbiased, clear and concise as it is to be accurate. If they want to “gain and maintain public trust”, as Thomas Lieb states, transparency must be apart of a reporters daily practices.

“ Journalist must be as open as possible about what biases they bring to the job, how they get their information and how they make decisions on choosing the reporting stories,” Lieb states.

One example of bad transparency is the Towson University newspaper, The Tower light’s reporting story on the Black Student Union’s party resulting in a violent affair. Many students felt that the two week long, front page story was biased and misleading. Student argued at the State of Diversity forum, host by BROTHERHOOD, about how the story was dragged over time by reporters who did not witness the event and did not have totally credible sources but printed the stories anyway; issue after issue.