Journal Entry

Photojournalism Ethics

I found this article very interesting. The information in the article is not new to me because I have taken the media law class here at UWM and have had this discussion many times in that class. Each time I think about this topic, I find it hard to always come to the same conclusions. I do think that there are certain situations where privacy has to be upheld, but I think that people need to be more aware of the fact that if they are in public and in plain view they have no expectation of privacy. I agree that journalists to overstep their boundaries in a lot of situations, and I think that more solid rules need to be put in place and those actions need to be stopped by the courts. After reading the article, I think that the author could have done a little better job talking about the areas of privacy law. From my experience from the law class, we learned that it is very difficult for the courts to rule against the media because of the way the laws are written. For example, in false light privacy, the court would have to prove that the journalists acted "with reckless regard". I still haven't figured out how to prove that.