Positive and Negative Utilitarianism in the Media

By: Brittany Walker

When reading the news, mostly everything is negative. Whether it be a terrorist attack, death or something about President Trump’s new healthcare bill that is not going to get passed. The news updates I have received on my phone in the past 24 hours have been negative. There was a chemical attack in Syria, a suicide bomber in Russia, a sex abuse scandal happening in the sports world and many more. Although it is the job of journalists and news organizations to give the public updates on what is happening in the world, are they always making the right choices by doing so?

Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher and founder of “utilitarianism.” Utilitarianism is a theory about a person’s reaction (happy or sad) to something that is happening. For instance, if a person does not like to play a certain sport, but it helps keep them in shape, is it really worth it to keep playing that sport? This same concept can happen with news stories in magazines, online and on the TV. Today, on April 4, CNN.com posted an article named “Suspected gas attack in Syria Reportedly Kills Dozens.” This caption does not make anyone feel enjoyment, nor do they gain anything from it.

 

 

When being a journalist, you may have to use the utilitarianism theory to make ethical decisions. Clifford Christians explains utilitarianism in a better way in his article “Utilitarianism in Media Ethics and Its Discontents.”

“Moral action, based on the degree to which is useful or harmful, frees a society from believing in divine standards or agreeing on a metaphysical theory of morals. Instead it is close to the ground, rooted in ordinary human motivation to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. Moreover, utilitarianism is intellectually appealing in the same way scientific theories are,” writes Christians.

It is hard for journalists to always pursue pleasure in the stories they are reporting. It is sad that there are more negative stories to report than positive and up-bringing ones. No one person wants to constantly hear about the awful things that are happening in our country and other countries. As a reader of the news, I never actually think that journalists think twice before reporting a story that will just bring viewers down.

Abstraction and Time With Wiretapping

President Trump has recently accused Obama of wiretapping him. There are theories that claim this is being said to shift the bad publicity off Trump and on to something of a positive note. Although there have been some not so good publicity focusing on Trump, distracting people from one bad thing to another was not a good way to help himself out.

Peter Beinart, writer for The Atlantic recently wrote about this situation, and more or less ended up criticizing the Times.

“So why did Trump do it? The Times ignored another, more plausible, theory: Trump isn’t distracting from the investigation; he’s seeking to discredit it. By alleging that Obama personally ordered his wiretapping, Trump is claiming that partisanship motivates the investigation into his campaign’s Russian ties,” Beinart wrote.

This situation relates back to abstraction, time and ethics in journalism. The SPJ Code of Ethics is a common list of rules that journalists follow for their jobs. Minimize harm and seek truth and report it are two of them. Within these, there is the big question about whether or not it is okay for journalists to ever lie. In this case, the people are wondering if it is Trump, an even bigger public figure, who is lying.

Abstraction and time can be a form of lying. The timing of these events – in which Obama is being accused of “bugging” Trump’s phones, etc. is not even known. Abstraction is when something is being said without the full truth. This is what is happening with the wiretapping accusations. There are many different news outlets covering this story and remarks being said by reporters, President Trump and readers, but nothing is the full truth.

The New York Times wrote “perhaps it should be no surprise that it came to this between the 44^th and 45^th presidents. During last year’s campaign, Mr. Obama called Mr. Trump a con artist and a know-nothing who could not be trusted with the nuclear codes.”

The Atlantic also quoted the Washington Post about why Trump believes this is happening to him.

“His presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures,” The Atlantic wrote.

There is an unusual amount of hidden facts to this story and an obscene amount of abstraction as well. People are believing whatever they are hearing. This type of information with no clarity is seen all the time in the media.

Social Learning Theory in Today’s Society

By: Brittany Walker

 

Most people do not realize all of the affects social media has on them. From Twitter, Facebook posts, news articles and even Buzzfeed, reader’s opinions or the readers themselves are changing because of what they are reading. This society has turned to social media for all of their information and has let it have a bigger impact on them than need be. This type of process deals with the social learning theory and media, started by Albert Bandura in 1925, and the stages of moral development. The media also depicts things differently. Developing opinions based on social media can have a more negative affect than a positive one. Over the past decade, as technology becomes more utilized and improved, the social learning theory has become more important to the way children grow up and think.

In 1983, Richard Clark did research to see if media actually had an influence on the way people learn. His research proved that media “do not influence learning under any condition.”

“Media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition,” Clark said.

Within the past year, there have been many violent acts in and out of this country and a switch of presidents that has caused America to go downhill. The social media (television, news, etc.) has not made these situations any better. Recently, Associated Press posted an article titled “Trump targets many more immigrants for possible deportation.”

A girl I babysit, who is a young Hispanic girl, had seen everything on the television about Trump’s “wall” and immigration ban. She had asked me about it before, but today she saw this photo and the title of the article. She asked me “Am I going to have to move?” I explained what this meant and re-assured this 10-year-old that she would be fine. A few minutes later, she looked at me and said “This new president makes me hate myself.” It broke my heart to hear those words, but it made me even more mad that this was happening because of the negativity going on in the world.

When self-hate is starting at a young age because of the events going on around them, it proves Bandura’s theory is correct. When Bandura was creating this theory, he did the Bobo doll experiment that proved children will take after adults when they seem them behave a certain way.

Cathy Faye, the Assistant Director of the Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron, was quoted on www.physocologicalscience.org talking about the Bobo doll experiment.

“In many respects, this research helped create the shift in psychology from a behavioristic to a social-cognitive approach to learning,” Faye said.

 

Sources: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/bandura-and-bobo.html#.WKzOtMdlm9Y

 

http://web.uconn.edu/myoung/Kozma.pdf

 

Lying and The SPJ Code of Ethics: Beneficial or Not?

Lying will always be a very controversial topic; whether it improves situations, fixes problems or is just easier than telling the truth. Lying can be done quickly with nothing being backfired on the person who lies usually. The act of lying has been seen frequently lately, or thought to be seen. With Trump becoming president, there is much to talk about with the actions he plans to take while being president. Even at a smaller stand point, college students lie daily. For some people, it becomes a habit and they do not realize they are lying.

In class, we talked about multiple topics that revolve around lying. Two big questions are whether lying is worse because of the person doing it or why someone lies in the first place. President Trump has quite the Twitter account that really puts him on blast. His lies are not little white lies someone might tell a friend, they are dealing with real life problems, with the country in which we live in. The Washington Post published an article written by Sam Waterston titled “The danger of Trump’s constant lying.” Waterston writes about the problems that have and will continue to up rise if Trump continues to lie or say “alternative facts.”

“The great issue of today is lying – constant lying in public. Lying is the ally of faction and, since President Trump’s rise to power, it is the greater danger. Yes, the word is lying – not negotiation, salesmanship, bluster, attention-getting, delusion, deception, braggadocio, exaggeration, bullying, alternative facts, or any other euphemism,” Waterston states.

Lying does not only harm the people being lied to, but also the people doing the action of lying. Their reputation and career are at stake. While Trump is twisting up facts to everyone in America, there are a few journalists doing the same thing. Although there is a big difference between Trump and journalists, there are people who look up to both to receive the truth. When lying comes into play, it is hard to ever re-gain trust back.

In journalism, there is such thing as The SPJ Code of Ethics, which are four rules journalists follow. Code of ethics are meant for any businesses, really, but should there be a code of ethics followed outside of the work place? In 2015, Jostein Gaarder, a writer for The Huffington Post, published an article called “The Ethics of the Future.” Gaarder explains philosopher Immanuel Kant’s explanations about ethics in an interesting way.

“Without a set of supranational norms and rules of law, it’s impossible to hold people responsible for war crimes, for oppression of the freedom of individuals or for crimes against humanity. Some universal limits have been set for what the international community can accept as the domestic affairs of an individual nation,” Gaarder said.

Gaarder makes a good point trying to re-iterate why Kant believes ethics improve things. If codes of ethics were not invented, things in social media, journalism, politics and many other areas would most likely fall apart. Codes of ethics give humans the balance they need and suggested rules they should follow.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jostein-gaarder/ethics-future_b_8576266.html

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sam-waterston-the-danger-of-trumps-constant-lying/2017/01/30/71f76e2e-e72a-11e6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html?utm_term=.470be03cf260