The reading, Media-citizen Reciprocity as a Moral Mandate, this past week shone light on how journalists have moral duties and ethical obligations to keep. Yet, my question is, with cultural difference does these obligations change and if they do, is that okay?
Growing up in the Middle East and then moving to the U.S. to study journalism made me understand how different both of these cultures were, media wise.
Even though in the Middle East there would still be coverage of war, brutality, homelessness and other human interest aspects, there would rarely be an article that would stand up against the dictatorship or any corrupted power, if any.
However, journalists in the Middle East have to face so many difficulties and one of them is being capable of reporting the facts and at the same time not end up in jail or worse, killed.
I’d like to share with you an article that shines a bit more on the difficulty journalists have to go through in the Middle East to try to stick to their professional obligation and morals. The article also explained why journalists in the Middle East could be considered as courageous.
I hope this article provides you with extra information about journalists in a part of a world that not many are aware of.
Strategically Communicating 
Being a journalist in other parts of the world is pretty courageous, especially in the Middle East, but also places like Bangladesh where earlier this summer we heard stories of citizen-journalists being hacked to death. Imprisoned in Iran or Egypt. I think a 17-year-old kid is about to be murdered by the Saudis, simply for blogging.
There’s also scenarios where British or American journalists reporting on events in Israel are condemned and/or sued by extremist Israeli political organizations simply for reporting the news.
Is it okay to waffle on the the moral mandate? Well, you can’t easily report the news if you’re dead or imprisoned.
On a lighter note, sometimes if you can’t report the news, subversive hidden messaging in art is pretty cool. I’m aware of an Irishman named Gogarty who’d embed political messages into the first letter of each new sentence of his published pieces. So reading down the left margin, the first word of each sentence would have a anti-establishment message (acrostic poem).
By: MikeP on October 8, 2015
at 4:27 am