Ethical Decision Making Media Are Research Paper

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Fidelity is also an obligation, to the journalist's ethics in particular truthtelling. Beneficence could be applied to helping law enforcement. As the decision at hand consists of two mutually exclusive options, one of these obligations would need to be overriding. It is most likely that for the journalist this would be to communicate all of the information in keeping with the journalistic code of ethics. This approach, however, does not represent a resolution of the ethical dilemma so much as it represents a cop-out. The decision as to the absolute obligation is too subjective. If the decision-maker was going to "go with his gut," there was no need to treat the issue as an ethical dilemma in the first place. The notion of an ethical dilemma is given short shrift by a system that argues there is a dilemma but the answer is to do whatever you want and argue that this choice was the absolute obligation all along. Pluralism may yield a response in this situation, but it yields no insight and is therefore a poor choice of an ethical decision-making model.

An ethical dilemma is born of a choice between to equally reasonable options. When the media is confronted by the knowledge that deliberately withholding information may be beneficial, it must decide between its professional ethics and the potential benefits of that withholding.

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Journalistic ethics do not exist for their own sake. They exist to serve the needs of a specific constituency, the general public. It is the benefit to this public that should therefore serve as the guidepost for the resolution of this ethical dilemma. While some schools focus on the potential outcomes to theoretical future victims of the criminal, it is unreasonable to resolve on ethical dilemma on a possibility, unless that possibility is in fact a near certainty. In this situation, the future is sufficiently lacking in clarity to provide a meaningful guidepost. This may hint that utilitarianism is an inappropriate means by which to resolve this dilemma, but that is not the case. Utilitarianism can and should be used to resolve this dilemma, but strictly on the basis of known outcomes. And in that case, it is known that withholding the information has known consequences; revealing the information does not have known adverse consequences, only assumed ones, and even those do not affect the public at large......

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