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Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics explores the underlying complexities that journalists may face when covering difficult news stories. Reporting on issues such as suicide, sexual abuse, or migration is a skill that is often glossed over in a journalist's education. By combining theory and practice, this collection will correct this oversight and give journalists the expertise and understanding to report on these subjects responsibly and ethically.
Contributors to this volume are an international group of journalists-turned- academics, who share their first-hand experiences and unique professional insight into best ethical journalistic practice for reporting on sensitive topics. Drawing from a range of case studies, contributors discuss the most appropriate approach to, for example, describing a shooter who has killed a group of schoolchildren or interviewing someone who has lost everything in a natural disaster. Readers are invited to consider factors which have the potential to influence the reporting of these sorts of topics, including bias, sensationalism, conflict of interest, grief, vulnerability, and ignorance of one's own privilege.
Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics aims to support all journalists, from students of journalism and individuals encountering a newsroom for the first time, to those veteran journalists or specialist journalists who seek to better their reporting skills.
List of contents
Introduction,
Section One: Ethics, Responsibility and Self-Care 1. Journalism Standards on the Job 2. Learning to Cope with the Tough Times
Section Two: Reporting Sensitive Topics 3. Reporting Child Sexual Abuse 4. Reporting Suicide
Section Three: Reporting Violence 5. Reporting Mass Shootings 6. Reporting Urban Violence and Gangs
Section Four: Reporting Health 7. Reporting 'Critical' Health Journalism 8. Reporting on Drugs, Diets, Devices and Other Health Interventions
Section Five: Reporting Science and the Environment 9. Reporting Controversial Science 10. Reporting Climate Change 11. Reporting Natural Disasters in the Digital Age
Section Six: Reporting Cultural, Ethnic and Geographical Difference 12. Reporting on 'Other' Cultures 13. Reporting on International Migration, Conclusion: Further Hints and Tips
About the author
Ann Luce is a Principal Academic in Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK. She worked for nearly ten years in journalism in the United States. She is author of
The Bridgend Suicides: Suicide and the Media (2016), and editor of
Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media (2017). She currently sits on the World Media Task Force for the Reporting of Suicide.
Summary
Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics explores the underlying complexities that journalists may face when covering difficult news stories.
