Responsibilities include attending lectures, leading/teaching 3 individual discussion sections, attending weekly meetings with instructor, hold weekly office hours, grade assignments,
COMM 305.008 - News Media Ethics
Lecture: MW 4-5:30pm
Discussion sections: Tu 9-10am, 10-11am, 11-12pm
This course focuses on problems in journalistic ethics at a time of growing concern over standards of news coverage. Beginning with an historic overview of traditional journalistic ethics, the course studies changing values in news coverage as media decision makers adapt to social, economic, and technological changes. The course highlights problems of sensationalism, infotainment, anonymous sources, hidden cameras, punditry, the lowering of the wall of separation between the business and editorial sides of news organizations, invasions of privacy, and the personal behavior of journalists. How well journalists resist pressures to compromise their standards is a major focus of the course. The course also studies journalists' responsibilities to their profession and to the public, and examines proposed solutions to the problems of ethics violations.