The media is always constantly looking to be the first to report any breaking news there could be and often, some of the first sources to come out, often do not have all of the correct facts. In the example I will be using to show this, I chose to use Kobe Bryant’s death. Kobe Bryant was a hall of fame basketball player who suddenly passed away in a tragic plane crash with his daughter and others. As soon as news broke to the media that Kobe Bryant’s helicopter had crashed, the first articles were stated that his whole family was in the helicopter, which turned out to be very false. During the course of my blog posts, I will be taking a look at articles that described what on that day and what could’ve been different.
Starting with the Boston Globe article, that is titled, “How did the media report Kobe Bryant’s death? With confusion and misinformation, to start,” I believe was the perfect place to start. The first paragraph of the whole article is what stood out to be the most. It states, “Monitoring the media coverage in the aftermath of Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash Sunday has provided yet another reminder of the importance of knowing whom to trust and whom to dismiss in the chaotic real-time matters of major breaking news.” This stood out to me the most because it relates to Chapter 4, Loyalties, in our text so well. On page 98 in Media Ethics, it says that when reporters and journalists decide to take on a project or story, they are taking on all of the loyalties that come with it, which includes presenting the facts in a loyal way.
Throughout the Boston Globe’s article, it simply just goes through different news stations and how they reacted to the news, included tweets from various news articles, that had misleading information. Obviously, the ethical conflict with this issue is that many people were on social media and the internet as soon as the news broke out, and whatever they were to read, they were to believe it. This happening, caused even more panic because no one knew what to believe and people started any rumor they could make. The pro’s and con’s for this are a little hard to determine. Obviously a con would be that the public would have a misconception of what was going on and rumors could spiral out of control. A pro could be that if one the first articles that were to be released, had all the right facts, you could avoid the whole mess. A solution to this in my opinion could be simple but it’s not as simple as I make it out to be. My solution would just to be to wait until the main facts before anything was released or there would be punishments for misleading articles.
Carter Siedel's 487 Blog 