News War

Media ethics can range from what is right to what is wrong when it comes to the actions  taken by people working in the field of journalism and mass communications. When individuals think about media ethics, their first instinct is to get angry or impatient with news networks, but it isn’t about the news networks themselves, but the standards of the actions taken by workers in the media. When taking journalism classes, the first thing one learn’s is about the ethics of what you put on paper. You have a duty to not only yourself to be true, but to others as well. 

This piece was about the ethical decisions made during the Bush Administration’s claims regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, otherwise known as W.M.D. The piece reiterates the advantage the government has when it wants to sell a specific point of view. This idea was fueled by the Nation’s leading newspapers, which at the time included the New York Times. It was a “conscious loop” of information being funneled from the government to journalists, to being published and then nonchalantly referenced by elected officials in public interviews. The downside of this began when journalists began realizing that their sources were feeding them false information, so not only were news outlets producing what we call today “fake news,” but it was also being preached by the White House as well. Some tried to rest their case by saying they were only as good as their sources, but that in itself is not an ethical statement. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong, but the real question was, did these reporters and these officials know that the information they were receiving was false? 

This is where the two main ethical emphases come into play. There is communitarian ethics and libertarian ethics. Communitarian ethics, in basic terms, are ethics that would improve society by sublimating personal concerns to community wishes and cooperatively making decisions that are designed to eliminate friction. Libertarian ethics  would improve society by stressing self-improvement and individual decision-making. In this case, the New York Times, their reporters and the Bush Administration were practicing libertarian ethics; they were reporting to the public in hopes to benefit themselves and profit off of what they were reporting. The reasoning behind these unethical practices was to try and justify the claim of W.M.D in Iraq that was made by President Bush. Months after this claim there were still no weapons to be found and people were beginning to question that. This is when Bush stated in his State of Union Address that Sadam Hussein had requested a large amount of uranium from the African country of Niger to further his argument about the existence of W.M.D in Iraq and even when proven false, his administration failed to correct the record. Bush’s instinct, which is the first step of moral progress, was not to stay true to the people, but to defend himself and also throw the C.I.A under the bus because he said he got his information from Central Intelligence. His custom was what was right for him, as mentioned above. The third and highest general level of morality is based on conscience, which is conduct that appears right is that which is approved by the agent’s own personally developed judgment of what is right or wrong. The conscience is developed by the person’s own reasoning, building on custom and instinct. His conscience was incorrect and immoral, unethical and as mentioned in the piece, the Bush Administration was amongst one of the most secretive, some compared his term to that of the Watergate scandal. 

Bush falls closely under the teleological ethical theory. This theory says that the person trying to decide what to do attempts to predict what the consequences will be if A is done instead of B. The object is to choose the action that will bring the most good to the party the actor deems most important, and in this case he was an egoist. 

Julian Assange

Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006; he is also recognized as an editor, publisher and activist. WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and highly classified media content that is provided by anonymous sources; so one can see how this event could cause many problems, and it did. WikiLeaks truly made its international debut in 2010 when it supplied leaks given by a U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and Cablegate. After all of these intense leaks, without any surprise, the U.S. Government launched a criminal investigation on WikiLeaks and Assange himself in hopes of prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. The Espionage Act was intended to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment, to prevent insubordination in the military, and to prevent the support of United States enemies during wartime. While they investigated both Manning and Assange, they found chat logs, allegedly between the two, but Assange denied it being him on the other end and Manning insisted that she acted alone. Fast forward to 2013, Assange’s case was still in question and U.S. officials deemed it unlikely that he would be indicted for publishing classified documents, because they would have to do the same to other sources that did the same such as: The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. 

Assange was being investigated by several government agencies, including the F.B.I. So, he was stuck. The United States urged other allies to open criminal investigations against him as well. The question at hand here is: was Assange doing anything wrong as a journalist under the first amendment? Under the Obama Administration, we saw this question illuminated. The Department of Justice could not find any valid evidence that would prove his actions differed from the job description of a  journalist. That trend ended quickly once Trump took office and Mike Pompeo reopened the Assange pursuit. So, in 2017, U.S. officials decided to formally make charges against Assange, which led them to start looking for witnesses; all which said the case was a form of government overreach. 

Julian Assange is facing an 18-count indictment and is being accused of soliciting and publishing classified information to try to crack a Defense Department computer password; all of these charges come up under the Espionage Act. To outline the history of this act’s use, it has never been used against a media organization since it has existed as a United States law. Although Assange has been in the business of gathering information and such documents since the founding of WikiLeaks in 2006, yet the government only cares when the information could possibly be detrimental to their reputation? Seems fishy. To give you some perspective on what type of information Assange brought to the public’s attention, one of the videos that was leaked included the U.S. Apache helicopters slaughtering dozens of people in Iraq in 2007, which contradicted claims that had been formally made by the United States. So, I guess you could say the government got their feelings hurt a little bit. The use of the Espionage Act to indict Assange raised concerns by many journalism groups that the government’s decisions were politically motivated.  

Civil War, Lincoln and The Press

During the Civil War, President Lincoln wanted to prevent those who sided with the Confederacy from leaking information to the South. The way in which he made sure this did not happen was that he forced Union generals to stop papers from publishing battle plans. He hoped that this would lead to the North wining the war, but many did not really agree with his actions and accused him of infringing upon their constitutional rights (Holzer, 2014, p. 33).

Good Night, and Good Luck.

In America, a common staple used to describe our country is “FREEDOM.” Those freedoms include: speech, press, assembly, of/from religion, etc. American’s pride themselves on a supreme law that dictates and defends its people’s rights. Many of us, though, have not taken the time to dissect the constitution since it was ratified in 1788. What most have not paid much attention to, is that small amendments have been made to our constitution overtime by supreme court rulings that must be abided by, by law. 

We spend most of our time in the classroom learning about the more “popular” amendments, for example: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (Cornell, 2020).” This item is the first amendment. Although Americans, for the most part, are allowed to say whatever they please, the Supreme Court has since noticed that someone else’s tongue can be your own worst enemy. With that being said, our speech can be seen as a catalyst that defines our actions. Those actions have the heavy possibility of being harmful. In result, the Supreme Court decided it best to regulate our speech so harm is prevented ahead of time; snaps for proactivity.

There are many, many examples that could be discussed about little loopholes in the first amendment, such as: Schenk v. United States, Brandenburg v. Ohio, and Gertz v. Robert Welch, but this movie reminds me very closely of Julian Assange's situation.


I believe the most interesting part of Assange’s prosecution is that he, personally, did not steal the information, but simply published it. So, the charges raised against him are based on actions that investigative journalists participate in on a daily basis. The First Amendment clearly states not only an American citizen’s freedom of speech, but also their freedom of press. So, where did Assange go wrong? Is he seeking attention from the American people or is he a campaigner of bringing justice to the truth? This idea is where the little loopholes of the First Amendment come into play.

This movie in particular brings attention to the government's sensitivity to its nasty secrets and it also brings like to the justice that journalists want to bring to the American people, no matter what kind of damage it brings to themselves and their workplace. To reference a specific scene in the movie, when the two Colonels came to visit Fred Friendly and basically tell him he is roaming dangerous waters if he goes through with the story; this scene alludes to The Chilling Effect. This effect is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction. The most suppressed right by the chilling effect is said to be the First Amendment, which we clearly see in this film.

This movie brought light to how powerful journalism truly is and how impactful it is not only on the American people, but on the journalists themselves, as we saw at the end of the movie.