Dan Rather on media ethics and organizational responsibility

Leadership Letter

The author of this response has been asked to review a video relating to Dan Rather and his thoughts about media ethics. The questions and answers that will be addressed as part of answering to the subject of ethics will include why a company needs a code of ethics, how this code of ethics addresses the current challenges that employees face in the organization and, if implemented, what example may or should this document set for others in the news media industry. While a stated code of ethics is just words unless or until it is actually enforced and followed, it is a necessary starting point when it comes to using a guiding light of ethics for an organization.

The reason that a company needs a code of ethics is pretty simple. There has to be a stated and clear set of guidelines that a company or organization purports to follow and stick with. While stating those guidelines is one thing and sticking with them is another, the stated guidelines is one way of showing what sort of commitments and patterns a company has committed to sticking to. For example, a news organization could state that they are going to stay with real and "hard" news rather than injecting opinion and editorial ideas that are beyond just stating the "what," "where" and "when" of a story. Of course, many news outlets deviate from this all of the time and call it "analysis." Regardless, the stated values are a way for the organization to "connect" with society so that society can gather whether or not there is any authenticity and realism to what is being stated (Mazutis & Slawinski, 2015).

One main issues is that not all organizations are concerned about codes of ethics and the associated corporate social responsibility. However, this is something that is very real and needs to be taken seriously as this is the direction that the world is going when it comes to business. These sorts of questions are even being posed in countries like Iran (Soltani, Syed, Liao & Iqbal, 2015). As for the YouTube video suggested for this assignment, Rather is very specific about the toils and travails of the media and the transgressions of the media. He noted that news has gone from something where the "buck" stops with management to a situation where "fluff" and other blatant problems with news media have become the norm (Rosaryfilms, 2008).

Rather links up with a very important facet of doing a job and that is meaningfulness. Indeed, any person can be an accountant or some other sort of business or media person. However, there has to be meaning behind what is being done, why it is being done a certain way and so forth (May, Mencl & Huang, 2014). Indeed, how these choices are made or not made have varying levels of magnitude and gravity. Some choices have little to no obvious or immediate effect but others have a great amount of potential or actual effect. For example, a business issuing an ad that is full of lies and half-truths may not seem like a big deal to some people but dishonesty and other moral failings lead to a coarsening of the wider industry and it can victimize people that are doing the right thing. It can be discouraging to hurtful (and a drag on the bottom line) to go through things like this. This is why creating a code of ethics and holding people in the organization to it is important. When it comes to the news media, asserting a code of ethics and following it can be a clarion call for other organizations and groups and this can actually lead to a net gain in ethics as each organization and group sort of pushes the others to themselves do better and be a good example for the people that they serve in the populace.