Purpose Behind The Nyt's Statement On Ethical Journalism

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The SPJ has a code of 4 main principles that encourages and helps guide journalists to as ethical of a career as they can. The first of their four principles is to “Seek Truth and Report It" which essentially states that they want to make journalism “as accurate and fair” as possible. Another principle that is mentioned is “Minimize Harm” which essentially means that one needs to treat everyone with the respect that they deserve as well as making sure that the journalist is aware of the potential harm that the report can cause in certain situations. The third principle that is brought up is called “Act Independently”. The gist of this principle is that the journalist mainly serves the public as an individual journalist. Two of the most important parts of this principle are to avoid any potential conflicts of interest, whether they are …show more content…

I believe that the main audience for this article that they released is the average reader that is interested in learning more about the NYT and their credibility/relevance when it comes to topics. The biggest difference that I find to exist between this article and SPJ's code is that SPJ has a much more open-ended code that they feel most journalists should follow while NYT's statement feels like its mostly about themselves. This makes NYT's statement a bit more restrictive than SPJ's code. I do feel like Gettleman somewhat followed the NYT's "code", but there are a few points that I feel like he missed out on such as their code on impartiality in relationships. One of the big reasons why there are so many impermissible behaviours is because they want to upkeep an image of impartiality and fairness which would be a false representation if a journalist were to show one of these