Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest arise in the media all the time and it is important to understand them in order to make ethical decisions. Conflicts of interest deal with conflicting relationships, conflicting public participation, and vested interests and hidden agendas (p.213). As journalists, you should not incorporate your personal life with work. If I were a journalist and I wanted to do a story about sororities and greek life, it would be unethical if I talked about my own experiences and only interviewed girls from my sorority. To be completely fair, I should interview girls from all the other chapters and not my own. But it would be best if I didn’t even do the story at all and someone else who wasn’t greek should cover it. My mom has to deal with conflicts of interest every day since she works for the government. For example, we cannot have any kind of political signs in our yard because she is not allowed to display her political views. All jobs deal with conflicts of interest especially public relations. The book had a good example of conflicting interests if a public relations firm represented an oil company and an environmental group. That just wouldn’t be ethical.

One major conflict of interest is checkbook journalism. Usually it can be unethical, but sometimes it is necessary to get your story. I have never really agreed with paying a source, but when dealing with media competition, it is sometimes necessary. Many major news sources have used checkbook journalism including the New York Times. The Times paid $1,000 in 1912 for an interview with the wireless operator of the Titanic. I believe that if journalists need to use checkbook journalism to get a great story, they should inform the public that they paid their source. That way the public can decide if the information is accurate or not. It would be very unethical if the public was not aware of checkbook journalism and the source would lose a lot of their credibility. An incident of checkbook journalism was used by ABC after the Columbine shootings. ABC paid $16,000 to a friend of one of the gunman in order to obtain home videos and other details about the shooters. Even if checkbook journalism was the only way to get that information, ABC should have told the public that the information was paid for. I think that it is deceiving to not let the public know where the information came from and that a price was paid in order to get it. Situations like that can really damage the credibility of a network like ABC.