The first annual Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium raised awareness of ethics in media Thursday. The University of Idaho hosted the event and hopes to make it an annual symposium.
“It started with a conversation between CLASS Dean Katherine Aiken and myself about ways we could raise conversation between the School of Journalism and Mass Media in Boise and at the same time elevate discussion of ethical issues in Moscow,” said Kenton Bird, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Media. “The driving factor for this workshop is how technology has changed the practice of journalism, the practice of law and the way business interacts with consumers.”
The symposium was an all-day event in Boise Thursday, but streamed live on the Idaho Public Television website.
The day began with a keynote address by Bill Drake, chairman of the Drake Cooper marketing and advertising agency, about business ethics and interaction with the media.
“There is a need to reinvigorate ethics across the board,” Drake said. “We need to take a deeper, more critical look at journalism and the media, in advertising and marketing. That’s what I hope to shine a light on.”
His speech focused on the ethical principles that guided his 30-year career, raising ethical issues including privacy on the internet, truth in a persuasive mode and transparency.
Donald Burnett, dean of the UI College of Law, and Lisa McGrath, a social media attorney, also made presentations.
Burnett spoke about the relationships between journalists, judges and lawyers, and whether their ethical standards are converging or diverging.
McGrath gave a presentation about new media, including online papers and social networking sites, and how the law applies to this new branch of media.
A panel discussion preceded the final keynote address by Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.
The panel covered media ethics and how they play into the current digital age as well as verification and professional versus citizen journalism.
A focal point of discussion was objectivity and whether it still exists with online content and the importance of separating blogs from newspapers and other professional media outlets in relation to objectivity and ethical expectations.
Speakers also addressed plagiarism in a rapidly evolving media landscape, with respect to how credit can be given to an original source with blogs, Twitter and other social networking sites.
The keynote address by Schaffer is based on a recent publication by J-Lab “Rules of the Road,” and covered online news, the new dilemmas it raises and how to handle them.
“There are ethical mine fields surfacing,” Schaffer said. “The rules for stepping around these mine fields don’t always lend themselves to the hard, fast dos and don’ts.”
She said that with the new media formats, the threshold for news has decreased. Now even the smallest news will live on forever in Google, which is changing the rules for what makes news.
“We are in search of what the new normal will be,” Schaffer said.