Role
The role of undercover journalism has become the topic of much debate as moral and ethical lines have been crossed. The nine elements of journalism as outlined in a book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel are as follows:
- Journalism's first obligation is to tell the truth.
- Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
- Its essence is discipline of verification.
- Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
- It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
- It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
- It must strive to make the news significant, interesting, and relevant.
- It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
- Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
As reporters have gone undercover some of these guidelines have been bent and broken in order to uphold others on the list. Undercover reporting has brought to light numerous atrocities throughout history, yet often these reporters sacrifice ethical and moral code in the process.
Read more about this topic: Undercover Journalism
Famous quotes containing the word role:
“Where we come from in America no longer signifies—it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways were not like ours, but because they simply did not work.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“In today’s world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)