Ethical Problems in Mass Media

Virtuous decisions of photographers Publishing photographs that show personal tragedy and are questionable in their moral standards with those concerning privacy and those about inflicting additional harm on victims can be supported by Aristotle's Virtue Ethics. This should be supported because, as a news organization, photographing what is seen shows the magnitude of the situation and documents as it happened. The publication of graphic material such as was seen in the Bakersfield Californian. Photographer John Harte snapped eight frames after he responded to a call on the police scanner reporting a drowning. He arrived at a lake northeast of Bakersfield, California to the scene of divers still looking for a drowning victim. When the body of five-year-old Edward Romero was brought to shore a few minutes later, Harte went against what most of the other photojournalists and television crew did, which was opt out, and took photographs of the body while the family members, who were on the lake shore, began to grieve. His editor, Robert Bentley, made the decision to run the photograph. The ethical question that surfaced when the public reacted to the photograph was to run personal tragedy photographs and exposing more grief on family members of the boy. Aristotle's cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and courage support what Harte and Bentley did when they ran the photograph of the boy. Harte's decision to take the photograph shows courage because he did it to the best of his own moral standing. This isn't the first time photographs that have been graphic and showing personal tragedy have been published. In "A State of Emergency," photojournalist Gabriele Stabile took photographs in March 2009. "That month, a wave of spring thunderstorms flooded Gaza's unpaved streets and blew down relief tents for families displaced by Cast Lead" (2011). The reason why the photographs were published and defended through the virtue theory is because "people