Ethics Assignment

I went to the session over the NSA and how it is ethically involved with the media. The major topic of conversation was over how the NSA has made is harder for journalists to trust any form of digital communication.        

A lot of what was discussed was applicable to bloggers because anything they put on the web can be seen and controlled by the NSA. They talked about how the NSA can manipulate phones and turn them into recorders so they can listen in to conversations without letting people know. If the NSA can do that to a phone then what can they do to a blog? They could skew your posts into portraying something out of context that you didn’t mean to post. In the basic form they are able to control the people right to freedom of speech. They’re able to restrict your ability to speak your mind so I think this has a major roll on bloggers.

I think the strongest part was how he talked about what loops journalists have to jump through now to avoid the NSA. I didn’t find a weak point in their discussion; it was all very valuable information.

I also went to “covering horror.” It was about how journalists have to cover horrific scenes of violence and trauma and how they deal with it. I don’t think this is applicable to bloggers because very few bloggers cover events first hand. I think that most bloggers if they are covering news relay the news given to them by other news sources or by the original journalists who covered it.

 I think its strongest point was show casing that being a journalist comes with a lot of challenges and it’s not always easy or fun. Its weakest point I think was that they didn’t articulate what benefits came from covering that story other than gathering news.