Lecture 8
This weeks lecture brought about a brand new perspective to me. I'd always known journalism and photojournalism were hard jobs mentally, morally and sometimes physically. But this week, I was faced with most journalists' biggest internal debate: ethics.
We were shown 10 different advertisements and were told to write down whether we thought they were ethical or not and in good taste or just plain tacky. There were plays on words and on images. There were confronting scenes, offending sayings and moments that just made you shake your head.
Everyone has a different sense of right and wrong, so who decides whether an ad should be allowed to air or if it should be disgraced and never be viewed by the public? They get it wrong sometimes, too. Take the infamous "Where the bloody hell are you?" ad starring one of my least favourite people, Lara Bingle. Australian tourist companies spent thousands upon thousands of dollars creating this short television commercial promoting Australia for foreign countries, only to have it thrown back in their face. The ad was banned in the UK because of the word 'bloody' (though I might mention here that Ron Weasley uses the word 'bloody' far too often to be offensive to everyday Brits).
It all depends, surprise surprise, on who you work for. Different work places have a different code of ethics, most of them revolving around one of these three ideas:
- Deontology - following rules, principles and duties.
- Consequentialism - getting a 'good' or 'right' outcome, no matter the means of achieving it. Or
- Virtue - 'goodness' that comes from habits or dispositions of character.
Something that made an impact on me during this lecture, was when Bruce said, "ethics is rarely a choice between absolute right and absolute wrong, but choosing the lesser of two evils."
In our tutorial yesterday, we were shown examples of photojournalism where the photographer chose to capture a moment instead of helping it. The most famous of these being, of course, Kevin Carter's picture in the Sudan:
This young girl was unable to reach the food station not too far away and was being circle by a vulture. Even though he scared the vulture away after taking the photo, he did not help the girl because he was under strict instructions not to touch any of the people there. Carter was harshly criticized for this moment, and ended up taking his life a year later due to the pressure.
It's the biggest question any of us will have to face, and we won't all choose right.
Lecture 9
On a lighter note! The week that followed, we discussed news values and what you need to write a good story. Millions of events happened everyday. Out of those, only a tiny portion will be seen as potential news stories, and only a fraction of those will actually be published. The four greatest factors to any story are the following:
- Impact,
- Audience Identification,
- Pragmatics, and
- Source Influence.
News Values are not the same across every country and every news service. There is a long list of factors that a news company may value. For example:
- negativity
- proximity
- recency
- currency
- continuity
- uniqueness
- simplicity
- personality
- expectedness
- elite nations or people
- exculsivity
- size
- visual attractiveness
- entertainment
- importance
- weight
- controversial
- emotional
- usefulness
- educational value
- good news
- bad news
- celebrity
- follow-up
- newspaper agenda
It may seem like a long list, but these are only a few of the possible values deemed important by different news services. Mix a few of them up and BAM! you've got a news story.
That's all folks, hopefully I'll get my head together and post something else soon. Until next time!
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