Associated Press dropping the term “illegal immigrants” paves way for reflective word choice in mainstream media

Immigration reform has become an increasingly hot topic in the United States, but it also has become such a controversial and murky political issue that many political leaders prefer to avoid the topic. Journalists have a particular power in conceptualizing the public discourse about immigrations, which gives immense amount of authority in shaping how society perceives immigration and immigrants on a day-to-day basis.

In the past few months, Associated Press (AP) and other major media organizations have dropped the use of “Illegal Immigrants”  − a term to reference migrant populations that do not have documentations standardized by the US government. This terms has widely been criticized by human rights and Latino immigration-rights activists, who consider that the “term criminalizes people rather than their actions”.

Huffington Post argues that “AP’s dropping of 'Illegal Immigrants' could have wide Ramifications for Media” because major media organizations may follow in suit. On the other hand, the change has made AP a political target of some right-wing organizations. Fox News, for instance, has questioned why AP would change the choice of words when government administration also use “illegal immigrants”.

The types of words used to describe a population have immense power in the way a group of people is perceived within the political sphere. AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carrolls explained AP's position in a blog, as reported by the Washington Post:

(...) it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally. (...) The move, Carroll writes, is part of a broader shift away from labeling people and towards labeling behavior — for example, referring to people ‘diagnosed with schizophrenia’ instead of ‘schizophrenics’. 

Not only is the shift in word choice changing how media organizations will report on undocumented immigrants in the United States, but this is also a demostration of media organizations challenging the vernacular used by high raking government officials to describe a group of people. Words have a powerful ability to set the understanding an event, and media organizations’ close examination and reflection on words are an integral part of journalism ethics.

- Rebecca Son

Sources:
Huffington Post
Washington Post
Fox News

Going Undercover in North Korea

John Sweeney during his undercover trip to North Korean in late March

The BBC has faced criticisms over the last week for its decision to air a controversial Panorama episode entitled “North Korea Undercover.” The segment was filmed by John Sweeney, an undercover reporter, who travelled to North Korea as part of a student group from the London School of Economics (LSE). The film has resulted in extensive dialogue over the ethics of undercover journalism, and the effect such coverage might have on the unsuspecting individuals involved.

According to the BBC, all the students on the trip had consented to having the reporters accompany them and were aware of any risks they might be taking. However, LSE officials have argued that there was no written consent and that students were misled on a number of facts about the trip. The dispute has sparked controversy over the potential dangers the students might have faced, including deportation or arrest. Since returning from the trip, the students have received complaints and even threats from the North Korean government that their private information might be made public. Alex Peters-Day, the general secretary of the students’ union at the LSE, claimed that the BBC “used students essentially as a human shield in this situation.”

The undercover film may also have weakened the future credibility of academic institutions organizing such trips. The president of the British Academy, Sir Adam Roberts, and the president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, stated in response to the incident that “The ability of academics to work, study and carry out research around the world is hugely dependent on trust and respect for their integrity, and it is vital that this trust is not undermined.” The BBC’s use of a university group in order to make the film may have jeopardized the future of academic trips to sensitive areas like North Korea, as well as perhaps damaging the research of current scholars.

The HuffPost raised a very different criticism, writing that the program endangered the North Korean guides who unsuspectingly led the student trip. The article quoted Professor Keith Howard from the Centre of Korean Studies at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, who reminded readers that:

Away from the public eye and lacking any of the protection that a foreign passport gives to the students and journalists who took the trip, the North Koreans who helped facilitate the tour will certainly have been accused of not having done their job properly…the journalists involved appear, then, to be prepared to consign those they have deceived but taken advantage of to prison sentences, loss of jobs and rations, and isolation. 

The BBC, on the other hand, has argued that despite the drawbacks, “the film was strongly in the public interest.” It sees the dissemination of information about a country as reclusive and confrontational as North Korea as outweighing the potential disadvantages. The Guardian supported this assessment, asking “So was the BBC justified in using subterfuge in getting a Panorama team into the country just as the Pyongyang leadership were trying to convince the world they were preparing to launch a nuclear war against the US? Surely, merely to ask the question is to answer it.” North Korea’s secretive nature has made information regarding the country both intriguing and crucial. The recent political tensions coupled with North Korea’s aggressive pronouncements have made it even more important to discover what is occurring within the nation’s borders. Ceri Thomas summed up the BBC’s position, stating that the reasons to show the film were simply “overwhelming.”

So, do the pros of the undercover documentary outweigh the cons? It is hard to tell. Both sides of the debate have offered compelling arguments about the BBC’s responsibility in this situation.

- Kate Davidson

Sources:

BBC 
BBC 
The Guardian
The Guardian 
The Independent 
Huffington Post United Kingdom

Journalistic responsibility through word choice: The case of SOPA and PIPA

This past week Amy Goodman interviewed Icelandic lawmaker Birgitta Jónsdóttir about the role of government in relation to the control of information. Their interviewed focused primarily on Wikileaks, but their conversation led to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protection I.P. Act (PIPA).

SOPA and PIPA were US bills that were designed to curb illegal distribution of music, movies, and software—moreover what is considered as piracy. Media companies such as Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are major proponents of these bills as one of the objectives is to properly compensate creators. The bills' opposers argue that these types of policies restrict freedom of speech (censorship), stifle innovation and collaboration, and will adversely affect tech companies.

Amidst these combating forces, how did media organizations portray piracy? Who are the actors and agents that are prompted up? And under what agenda? Neither SOPA nor PIPA were passed, but the production and reproduction of information will remain a hotly discussed issue for years to come. A few of these issues should be addressed as soon as possible.

Earlier this January, The New York Times published an article, Tech and Media Elites are Likely to Debate Piracy. The New York Times framing of the issue circulated around media elites versus tech elites, and the ways in which anti-piracy bills affect the agenda of these industries. The problem identified is that of the effects of these bills on elite industries. The term “piracy” has now automatically become synonymous with stealing or illegal. It puts an image into the readers’ minds about the ethical judgment on information technology. Another word for what has been dubbed "piracy" is actually file sharing. The perception of file sharing is a technical meaning that describes the way in which information is shared with the use of new information technology. New information technology has a strong role in changing and shaping society’s habits and, the regulation and attempts to discipline the Internet is going to bring interesting discourse on issues that are no longer bound by physical geography.

Media professional should carefully consider assumptions that are woven into the language used to describe actions and events because they hold an abundance of power and influence to articulate the way information is interpreted. The words that they use and the meaning and value they are equated are immense influence in they way audience digest information.

- Rebecca Son

Sources:
Democracy Now
The New York Times

Ethics in the media coverage of Thatcher’s death

Margaret Thatcher was a polarizing figure in life, and this remained ever so true in death as well as we learned of her passing earlier this month. While some news outlets expressed grief and celebrated the woman’s achievements, others took the opportunity to focus on the many controversial conflicts and battles she led. This in turn sparked a debate about whether speaking ill of the dead in the media is ethical practice.

On April 8, 2013, Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian, defended that one-sided praises and respectful silences for public figures are misguided and supported that it is appropriate to criticize the dead who wielded significant influence. He wrote:
Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandist whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

On the one hand, Thatcher’s infamous controversial stances such as hers on the Irish Republican Army prison hunger strike in 1981 or her role in the Falklands War were greatly discussed in media worldwide. On the other hand, “celebrations” of Thatcher’s death were also reported. The Huffington Post posted a number of pictures online. In some, people gathered in squares, popping champagne or in one case, waving a sign “The witch is dead”. While a critical analysis of Thatcher’s legacy may be thought provoking, one may wonder what purpose The Huffington Post’s pictures may have served.

We’ve discussed photojournalism a few times in this blog. Images can have a determining effect on the perception of a story. How can the media select images of controversial and polarizing events that tell the story without risking sensationalism?

Two Steve Bell’s sarcastic cartoons below refer to Thatcher’s death and her funeral cost. What do you read from these two cartoons?

See original image here


See original image here

- Yiwen Tong


Sources:
The Guardian
The Huffington Post

Metaphoric Reasoning in Information Ethics

This year, CIME's blog will be welcoming expert guest bloggers to share their thoughts and ideas on media ethics. We started off the series in January and we're very excited today to continue the series and share with you this peice by Andrew Rens of Duke Law School.

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By Andrew Rens

Is a denial of service (DOS) like a sit in at lunch counter or is it more like vandalism? Is spoofing a MAC address to download thousands of articles the same as checking out all the books in the library or breaking open a vault with a crowbar?

What considerations should guide media professionals when choosing metaphors to describe emerging technologies and the ethical questions that they raise?

When we talk about information and communications technology, a realm that we don't have direct access, we speak about distant actions by distant machines, 1's and 0's, electrons shifting position unseen and beyond touch. We speak of packet switching protocols, clickstreams, surfing, webpages, the cloud. Only a few grasp the algorithmic abstractions behind these metaphors, everyone else has to talk things that can be visualized like packets, streams and clouds. When we talk and reason about information technologies we do more than use metaphors, we engage in metaphoric reasoning.

We choose metaphors not for their ethical content but because they are vivid, surprising and memorable. But often our metaphoric reasoning is ethical reasoning and all too often we aren't conscious of the way in which the metaphors we choose affect our ethical reasoning. While our moral intuitions may be well developed for a world of tangible objects of houses and cars and bank vaults we are still figuring out the world of intangibles given to us by information technologies. Part of that figuring out is done by equating the tangible with the intangible.

Aaron Swartz, a genius who spent his energies trying to increase access to knowledge was prosecuted essentially for spoofing MAC address. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz defended her decision to prosecute by saying “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” (CNN)

Of course Ortiz was speaking metaphorically, she did not charge Swartz with the common law offense of theft, nor did any of Swartz's actions remove the information or make it inaccessible to anyone else, instead she sought to create a moral equivalence, with tragic consequences.

Innovations in information technologies continually confront us with new ethical problems. How societies ultimately answer these questions is contingent on the metaphors chosen to represent the problems. Media professionals are likely to encounter new information ethical questions long before other social actors, reporting on and framing problems months and years before judges and policymakers grapple with them. As a result the metaphors that media professional use to talk about emerging technologies and their attendant social changes often determine social and political responses. Because of this power to characterize ethical problems media professionals have a particular responsibility to choose metaphors based not only on their attention grabbing properties but with an eye to the ethical consequences of their choices.

How? Be upfront about the difficulties of characterizing a new phenomenon, pose the question to your readers which metaphors are more appropriate. You can consult others who've grappled with how to communicated the complexities to a wider audience. While the verbose pedant is a popular journalistic trope there is a new generation of social media savvy academics including Bella Coleman and Heather Ford who communicate their research to a wider audience and are alive to the power of metaphor in describing new technologies. Be critical, is downloading really akin to theft? It may sound striking but it forecloses an important moral inquiry.

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Andrew Rens is a scholar of the complex interactions of law, knowledge, and innovation, who teaches in Access to Medicines: Intellectual Property and Global Public Health at Duke Law School where he is an doctoral candidate. He blogs at http://aliquidnovi.org

Fracking: A Debate between Fracking Corporations and the Public

In the last couple of weeks the media’s coverage on hydraulic fracking - the process of producing natural gas from shale rock layers - has become an interesting debate because of the extreme divergence in the problem definition, or the lack thereof, between mainstream and alternative news organizations.

On March 28, 2013, NPR a center left public news organization released an article called “Cheap Natural Gas Pumping New Life into U.S. Factories”. The journalist frames that the increase expansion of fracking practices in the US is the keystone to revive the manufacturing industry as well as the US economy. The benefits of fracking adhere to under the umbrella of job growth. Moreover, the journalist disproportionally addresses the benefits of fracking within the interest of manufacturing corporations. The journalist does not bring into public debate the sustainability of fracking jobs, the long term effects of water contamination in rural communities, nor emanate challenges of regulating hydraulic fracking.

NPR framing of a public debate is missing the perspectives of actors outside the stakeholders with considerable monetary gains by bolstering fracking. The articles above by NPR, briefly explains the perspective of environmental groups, but fails to shows how fracking creates a greater issues of socio-environmental inequity in the US. Why are there no quotes of rural poor communities members that live alongside fracking manufactures? Or a discussion on sustainability of this kind of industry? In short, the way in which journalist set agendas and bring attention to a particular perspective regarding fracking in unequally distributed in center left media organizations, such as NPR.

On the contrary, an article from Alternet provides a bottom up perspective on the fracking methods. Fracking fields are expanding in urban southern California, and subsequently impeding on to residential communities and adversely affecting water qualities. They legitimate their arguments (the long term and short term effects of fracking) from sources such as community organizations that represent the needs and grievances of the residences, families that live adjacent to fracking fields, and environmentalist organizations. These sources represent a more complete debates and perspective outside the interest of profiteers, as in the case with the NPR article.

The mainstream and alternative journalists diverge in part by the sources they choose to use. In the case of NPR they choose corporations who have monetary interests in promoting fracking, while Alternet has chosen to place salience on the ground realities of communities affected by fracking fields. When it comes to issues of such national interest, news organizations should gather divergent points of view. For a true public debate to take place, news organizations have a responsibility to present multiple sources and bring opposite voices to the table.

- Rebecca Son

Sources:
NPR
Alternet
Whatisfracking.com 

Images Sources:
Stop Fracking Now
National Geographic Fracking Site