Your ethical decisions are obsolete
The New York Times had an interesting visual dilemma in June that illustrates the problems with thinking like a newspaper when you are a news source online.
Poynter Institute’s Ken Irby describes the story here.
Basically The New York Times followed any standard, good ethical thought process: do no harm, by protecting their foreign source and photographer from violence by not posting a story or image online (international medium) that could have violent reprocussions outside of the United States. Instead the published it in print for the public good and to elicit help from their U.S. medium.
This is good ethical thinking.
But they forgot about the Internet. The Times posted the front page of that day. To me that defeats the purpose of not posting the image online to begin with. Also, a readable PDF of their front page runs on Newseum.org every day. I can’t confirm if it did or not. For sake of argument we’ll say it did and that’s an important aspect of your ethical decisions to keep in mind.
Also, the images were resold to other publications who published them with credit and identified the subject, accessible to anyone around the world. The Times made their decision in a vacuum, it would appear.
It’s difficult if not impractical, though, to take responsibility for other sources’ ethics, especially when The Times don’t own rights to the images to begin with. But, making a decision doomed to fail seems irresponsible as well. So how do you deal with this kind of issue?
What happened next is even more confusing and puts The Times at a painful disadvantage. The source lied about what happened. Her baby was not injured by rioters but had club feet. So as with most newspapers, The Times ran a correction. But I don’t understand their method of correcting stories online.
I generally disagree with The Times’ practice of appending corrections to a story without changing the actual error. When one leaves an error online it is infinitely repeated by other people and Web software. The Times also does not point out the location of the correction in the story, which causes confusion for the reader once they get to the inaccurate spot.
Ethically this causes more harm as the false story is propagated throughout the Web, damaging public record, not preserving it. In the interest of transparency, the newspaper should still specify the correction, which they do in two places, but it should also change the story to reflect the truth.
Otherwise you’re just another source of inaccurate, uncredible journalism.