The Angel Cosplays As The Devil

This isn’t right.

This is the correct move to make.

How could I do this?

I’m glad I did this.

It’s a war in my head. It’s a war in my nervous system. It’s a war in my emotions. And it’s a war with myself. Everytime the pen scratches the paper as I etch words into the lines, I change my mind.
Scritch. This is justice.
Scratch. This is unfair.
I believe myself to be a fair and ethical journalist. Fresh into the industry, I held my morals on the highest pedestal available. Now, I watch as each day a new crack appears on the trunk of it. I ask myself now – What IS ethics in actuality? Is it the distinctions between virtue and vice (Day, 2000)? Is it making the decision between what is right and what is wrong using the values as basis of human behavior (Seib and Fitzpatrick, 1997)? Speaking as a journalist, ethics takes the face of ‘the forerunner of justice’ (SPJ, 2005).

But justice is subjective. To put it in simple terms, what may be right or ‘virtuous’ for me, might be wrong and offensive to you. It is, when viewed quite practically, impossible for one to satisfy all and everyone simultaneously. Louis A. Day (2000) articulates this predicament accurately when she says, ‘ethics and codes is relative to what is deemed as virtue or vice in the respective country and culture.’

Let me give you an example, in Europe, reporting of the Shari’ah law (a system based on Islamic beliefs) may be represented as a threat to the dominant ‘white’ way of life (Livesey and Blundell, 2019). In this way, representation of one group can be misperceived as discrimination. The funny part? There is also the problem of over-representation. In the UK news, reporting of black ethnicities occur in ‘binary opposition’, i.e. they are seen as victims of famines as well as perpetrators of corruptions (Livesey and Blundell, 2019).

To keep my conscience clear, I like to think that, although my work is ethical, audience perception is ‘perverse’, much like Staiger (2000) argues. She critically states that the consumers use media in their own way for their own meanings (Livesey and Blundell, 2019). In other words, no matter how objective and righteous a journalist, news can always be misunderstood.

Still, as this debate about who’s to blame goes on and on incessantly, I sit and I wonder – Is the Devil wearing a halo or did the Angel grow horns?





Reference List
• Day, L., 2000. Ethics in media communications. 3rd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

• Seib, P. and Fitzpatrick, K., 1997. Journalism ethics. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publ.

• Spj.org. 2022. SPJ Code of Ethics - Society of Professional Journalists. [online] Available at: <https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp> [Accessed 12 April 2022].

• Livesey, C. and Blundell, J., 2019. Cambridge International AS and A level sociology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.226-227, 236.