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MED312 Media Ethics
Essay questions 2020-21
Coursework 1: Essay: 2,000 words, contributing 50 per cent of your overall mark. Hand-in date: Monday, March 21, 2022
THE BORING – BUT NECESSARY – BIT
Remember, this is an academic essay and should draw on key texts, which must be properly referenced.
Essays submitted without a bibliography and without clear evidence of detailed background reading will fail. These essay questions are extremely topical so you will need to do internet research but you also need academic research; you must use scholarly books and/or journal articles.
Word count: Failure to stay within +/- 10% of 2,000 words will incur a penalty of 10% of the mark otherwise awarded.
Carrying out research for these questions
As well as looking at books on the reading list, we would strongly recommend you look in academic journals, eg British Journalism Review, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism
Academic journal articles are often more up-to-date than academic books – and they are all available online.
It’s simple – just type a relevant word (eg “privacy” or “intrusion” or “fake news”) into the search box of any of these academic journals, accessed via the University Library homepage.
You might also like to search in this excellent, free online resource:
https://archive.org/details/books
On some of the topics covered in the questions there has been much comment and analysis by columnists and experts in the press – you could quote this material. But that is not a substitute for academic source material; you would still need academic sources as well.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to source the entire essay from internet searches.
Choose one of the following:
QUESTION 1
A reporter for a regional newspaper/broadcaster is sent out on a ‘death knock’ following the death of a young boy in a road accident. The reporter is a friend of the grieving mother. The mother answers the door, and in the interview reveals that she had been walking the boy to primary school when he had run out into the street to chase his football. She feels racked with guilt because she had not been watching him at the time – she had been busy texting on her mobile phone. She realised how often she and other parents were distracted by their phones. What are the ethical considerations of running such an interview?
A good answer should examine the ethical relationships between the interviewer, the interviewee, the publication, the reader and society as a whole. How does a journalist balance the competing interests between them? You must consider codes of conduct and philosophical theories of ethics.
Advice/context
We will look at philosophical theories of ethics in next week’s lecture and seminar – and their relationship to codes of conduct.
We will look at privacy and intrusion in depth in Week 5’s lecture – the week after next.
One excellent source of information about this comes from the IPSO Editors’ Codebook,
First, you should not answer questions in your introduction, your introduction and conclusions is basically the same. In introduction, you should give the outline of your essay to five clarity. (This essay will do bla bla. It will be done by analysing bla bla
Second, there is no methodology section in essay, you should not include it and write something relevant instead
Third, you can’t keep the title of the sections like introduction, conclusion, it need to be cohesive and not separated
Fourth, i think some of your discussion is not relevant to the essay questions, like the gender and religion thing seems unnecessary or the relationship with the reader (you should talk about interviewee, not readers
Fifth, you seem like you did not follow the advice and didn’t include what must be in your essay: ethical fault lines, IPSO code, privacy and intrusion, and power balance between interviewer snd interviewee.
And fix your bibliography because it seems like you didn’t include everything in the right order. Check cite them right website to make sure you’ve not missing any full stops, commas, quitation marks and putting for example publication place and page range in the right place
You should’ve followed the guide
They basically said what you need to write
THE BORING – BUT NECESSARY –
BIT
• Remember, this is an academic essay and should draw on key texts,
which must be properly referenced.
• Essays submitted without a bibliography and without clear evidence
of detailed background reading will fail. These essay questions are
extremely topical so you will need to do internet research but you
also need academic research; you must use scholarly books and/or
journal articles.
• Word count: Failure to stay within +/- 10% of 2,000 words will incur a
penalty of 10% of the mark otherwise awarded.
• Question 1.
A reporter for a regional newspaper/broadcaster is sent out on a ‘death knock’ following the death of a young boy in a road accident. The reporter is a friend of the grieving mother. The mother answers the door, and in the interview reveals that she had been walking the boy to primary school when he had run out into the street to chase his football. She feels racked with guilt because she had not been watching him at the time – she had been busy texting on her mobile phone. She realised how often she and other parents were distracted by their phones. What are the ethical considerations of running such an interview?
• A good answer should examine the ethical relationships between the interviewer, the interviewee, the publication, the reader and society as a whole. How does a journalist balance the competing interests between them? You must consider codes of conduct and philosophical theories of ethics.
1.b MUST ANSWER
Advice/context
• We will look at philosophical theories of ethics in next week’s lecture
and seminar – and their relationship to codes of conduct.
• We will look at privacy and intrusion in depth in Week 5’s lecture –
the week after next.
• One excellent source of information about this comes from the IPSO
Editors’ Codebook, which we’ll look at then.
• We will also look at the ethics of interviewing – the balance of power
between the interviewer and interviewee.
Essay advice
MED312 Media Ethics
1
Essay Structure
Introduction
Outline your approach to question
Outline your essay structure
Don’t answer the question in the intro
Say what the essay will do and how it will do it
Main body
Be coherent
Be relevant
Conclusion
Sum up your key points
Answer the question
You don’t need to provide headings for the sections of your essay
2
writing
Your essay should show that you’ve carried out research; that you have looked at the relevant issues – looked at all aspects, where relevant considered both sides of an argument; set out the key facts
It’s not about you giving your opinion.
Be careful not to make huge statements – about the state of journalism, for instance – without backing them up with evidence and an in-text citation.
Good practice:
Previous research supports the view that, on balance, the EU tends to be negatively portrayed in the UK press (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999; Gavin, 2001; Norris, 2001).
Bad practice:
The British press is always criticising Europe and is absolutely biased against the EU.
Don’t use of the first person – I, me, my
3
Harvard Referencing
As you should know by now, you will need to reference your reading using the Harvard system.
There are two key areas of referencing:
In-text citations
Bibliography
You are now at the end of your third year – you should not be making any mistakes when it comes to referencing!
Make sure you are using the correct style for in-text citation and bibliographical references
In-text citations
You use an in-text citation to show where you have obtained your information.
If you are quoting a book or other academic source directly, you use an in-text citation such as the following:
‘Magazine journalists have become increasingly multi-skilled’ (Gough-Yates, 2003: 47).
Note that the full stop goes after the citation.
An alternative is:
As Gough-Yates (2003:47) argues: ‘Magazine journalists have become increasingly multi-skilled.’
In-text citations
If you are making a general statement based on a passage you’ve read, the citation is as follows:
There is evidence that magazine journalists have become more multi-skilled (Gough-Yates, 2003).
Make frequent use of citations in your essay.
Your essay will fail if it contains no quotes or citations.
In-text citations
When citing newspaper or online articles just use author’s name and, if available, year – do not include full web address or headline until the bibliography:
(Preston 2013)
Bibliography
A bibliography is a list of the sources you’ve cited in your essay
It comes at the end of your essay
It is on a separate page
It is in alphabetical order (of author)
Your essay will fail if there is no bibliography
Bibliography
In a bibliography we can list various kinds of sources:
Books:
Gough-Yates, A. (2003) Understanding Women’s Magazines. Abingdon: Routledge.
Book chapters:
Schudson, M. (2005) ‘The Sociology of News Production Revisited’
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