Journalistic Ethics

I see from a link that The Worst of Perth will be reading material for a Latrobe University journalism unit. DILEMMAS IN JOURNALISM: LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES, taught by ex JJJ man Lawrie Zion.

The link has been removed for some reason. UPDATE August. It’s now back. Mr Zion assures me that The Worst of Perth will have it’s chance to be considered unethical or illegal when the time comes. I can’t think of anything better than if students are forced to read my blog.

The post with “6PR’s Barra, Fat Wog Cunt” would be the one to examine I think. Or perhaps can you take a shot of a bloke’s crack on the street?

About AHC McDonald

Comedian, artist, photographer and critic. From 2007 to 2017 ran the culture and satire site The Worst of Perth
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28 Responses to Journalistic Ethics

  1. Come here youngsters and I tell youse of the olden days when cranky old men ( and cranky old woman or two ) used to rule the roost of the media before the golden enlightenment of the Intertubes begun. Study these cranky old fools closely for an example of what not to do . In any case they all went extinct . Hooray ! Ya Tim Blairs , ya Andrew Bolts, ya Howard Sattlers , ya Nurries , all dead as dodos. Sanity and light now prevail.

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  2. Frank Calabrese says:

    http://www.latrobe.edu.au/journalism/dij2008/DIJwebpage.htm

    That link doesn’t work :-) And re Journalistic Ethics, does that include Limpwrist posting distressing and offensive photographs on the front page of Teh West ?

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  3. The link has been removed for some reason. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be public. I know they had a 2 hour lecture followed by a 2 hour tutorial, without a tavern break in the middle.

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  4. Snuff says:

    So Clay Shirky was right after all, Bill ?

    http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

    I love Clay’s work, but I must admit I had my money on Nicholas Carr’s darker vision.

    http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/05/gilligans_web_1.php

    Indeed, there were many occasions when I even had to agree with cranky John Dvorak, if only because of prose such as the following …

    “The self-esteem movement in education has fostered underachievers who are now out in the world of business, taking on jobs as clerks and cashiers. They can’t add. They can’t spell. They have no idea where Chicago is located on a map. They can’t read a map, in fact. They are seemingly stupid and mostly incompetent. But hey, they think they are winners just because they’ve been told they are winners. It was drummed into them.

    These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones). You wonder when some Nigerian is going to fleece them. I have no idea what is going to happen when it dawns on this crowd that they are useless boneheads.”

    … which I’ve quoted from here >

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2307211,00.asp

    Anyway, all’s well that ends well, Bill.

    p.s. For those of you from the YouTube generation with us, and others with an interest, you’ll find an excellent video presentation by Clay Shirky of his latest work here >

    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001122.html

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  5. Cookster says:

    Ahhh, Tavern breaks * reminisce * I remember an evening creative writing unit at Curtin with old Lizzy Jolly (RIP) where I initiated a Tavern break that morphed into a pre-lesson, mid-lesson, free for all… the juices did flow. Creatively.

    I failed that unit.

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  6. Sunili says:

    The boys joke-nominated our Civil Procedure lecturer for the highly prestigious “Lecturer of the Year Award” last year because he used to let them have 1/2 an hour in the middle of each lecture to have a couple of pints at The Orient in High Street (the best thing about Notre Dame: you could roll back to the classroom from there if you managed any more into you). In the last class we had ever, they just bought an esky in and a good time was had by all. He won the award, too.

    Slightly off topic: Did anyone read the Rattler’s post about Pell’s population proposal? It actually kinda made sense and I felt all weird and strange and confused. This week has been all down hill since then. What has the world come to?

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  7. I slightly confused here Snuff , I lost your point. On the one hand the glorious Internet full of information , different viewpoints etc on the other some tired old whingeing dickhead ?

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  8. Rolly says:

    Isn’t “Journalistic Ethics” somewhat of an oxymoron?

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  9. Snuff says:

    Fair enough, Bill. Presuming that it’s John Dvorak whom you’re referring to as “some tired old whingeing dickhead”, he can certainly live up to his cranky geek trademark, especially out of context. That’s why I linked to the full article, which I think at least raises some interesting points about the internet, media, and education. Honestly, he was just thrown in as an admittedly extreme counterpoint to Clay Shirky’s optimism.

    Once again, I love Clay’s voluminous work, and his video presentation which I linked to is brilliant, yet personally, I still often find myself splitting the difference between he and the likes of Dvorak, which usually lands me somewhere around Nicholas Carr again.

    p.s. Did you catch Shirky’s response to Carr’s “Gilligan’s web” blog entry, by the way ? It’s the 12th one down, in case you missed it. And then there’s Nick’s response to him at comment 20, and comically, at 21.

    p.p.s. Mary Ann

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  10. David Cohen says:

    yet another haiku:

    We prefer Facebook
    The Gen Y students complain
    High distinction please.

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  11. CK says:

    Er, actually, despite the pisstakes, this seems to be a topic worthy of discussion (Oh good heavens, DC, I’m an AJA member bwahahaha…

    ) There you go. Misplaced outlier parentheses just for fun.

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  12. Snuff I must admit I didn’t do me homework. By ” dickheads ” I meant little timmie , shotties , nurries et al. In my original missive “Sanity and light now prevail.” was ironic , however what the Internet has done is to ratchet up the discourse a little and has subjected the media to more scrutiny which is a good thing.

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  13. Cookster says:

    Smoking herring
    Grease on the rod
    Salt lakes foaming on the wind

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  14. Snuff says:

    No worries, Bill. I certainly got the irony, and now I get the slight confusion. I was just having some fun running with your conceit that we were happily looking back from brighter days ahead.

    Having so successfully made crankiness his trademark, I hope John Dvorak won’t think too unkindly of me presuming that it was he whom I thought you were referring to as … well, you know. That description could never be applied to the often effusive Shirky, and few would dare to hang it on the elegantly contrarian Carr, for fear he’d punch their intellectual lights out. So, Dvorak was the only other contender, in my misunderstanding. All good, then. If you’re interested, and have a few free moments over the weekend, you could probably do worse than check out the links over a coldy or two.

    Speaking of Sattler, I’m reminded now of one afternoon when he addressed an auditorium of Journalism students at Murdoch Uni. Not only were we required to attend, which I didn’t mind, we had to write a report on his visit. After 45 minutes of him rambling on about how he was god’s gift, albeit misunderstood, we woke up for the Q and A. It didn’t improve much, as he ignored the questions and continued with his riveting elaborations on how he was actually all things to all people, until …

    “In your opinion, was land tenure fixed and heritable in Australia in 1769 ?”

    After I’d repeated the question, at his request, the smoke started streaming out of his ears and he bellowed, “What, this Mabo rubbish ?” You can guess the headline for every assignment submitted.

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  15. Surprised no comments on Lawrie Zion. Anyone read his
    “The Impact of the Beatles on pop music in Australia”?
    If in In 2006, he worked on the Crowded House Farewell to the World DVD, there must be some worst worth examining.
    CK, you’re an AJA member? What about The Naturists or Raelians?
    Speaking of journos, how about the worst place to be caught selling ice?

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  16. Snuff Sattler is to journalism what Barra is to thin anglo pricks.

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  17. “you could probably do worse than check out the links over a coldy or two.” Done , tho never mix drinking and thrinking.
    ” In the course of human history , contrary to popular opinion, things can improve” Shakespeare.

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  18. Snuff says:

    Agreed, TLA. It’s an injustice to even put his name in the same sentence as journalism.

    As for Barra, although I’ve never heard or read a single one of his words, I’m incapable of any other action than to cut him an irrational degree of slack, such is my unfathomable affection for the game wherein he went all right.

    Speaking of injustice, TLA, your comment so reminds me of fellow expat Bob Studley Hughes’s classic following the 4 years of legal ugliness resulting from his almost fatal prang near Broome. Without rehashing the sordid details with which everyone is familiar, (and if they’re not, it’s all available on the public record), notwithstanding that he was probably feeling slightly less than cheerful when he stated that, “West Australian justice is to justice what West Australian culture is to culture”, he may have been onto something.

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  19. Snuff says:

    Cool, Bill. I hope you enjoyed them, but who said anything about thrinking ? You may, however, need another drink after this excursion from the sublime to the hairdiculous. Cheers.

    http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=8mYff4RPXt4

    Although, I’ve heard worse than this one.

    http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl-ai9HuR60

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  20. Snuff says:

    Hi there again, Bill. I might be getting right off topic here, (in which case I’m more than happy for TLA to punt me elsewhere), but if you, or any others, found the Sharky~Carr discourse I posted interesting, you might like to check out their, (and a host of other contributors’) latest discussions of Carr’s Atlantic Monthly cover story “Is Google making us stupid?” in the Brittanica blog.

    Personally, I thought I was doing a fair job of that all by myself.

    http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-the-internetthe-nick-carr-thesis/

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  21. Snuff LA can file this one under Nietzsche or is it Nitschke. That article could be retitled ” How google turned me into a teen zombie” , film out shortly .
    Songs that go with the film
    ” I’ve got an arts degree and that’s enough for me” ( tune I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts.)
    “I’ve never seen a number I didn’t dislike” ( some country and western tune)
    EB is miffed that Wikipedia does as good a job as it does it – see
    Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/438900a; Published online 14 December 2005
    Google scholar creams ( Academic speak for excitement) other scholarly search tools despite its limitations.

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  22. Snuff says:

    These days I’m more optimistic than ol’ Friedrich, (and possibly Philip, for that matter), although I’m not sure why, yet I suspect Nicholas may be onto something.

    Thanks for the Nature tip. I’ve been following with vague interest EB’s issues with the hoi poloi, and I’ll check it out sometime.

    While we’re on movies and tunes, Bill, they don’t come any better than this …

    http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=0xOEJ-VuvLM

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  23. You might want to check out this Snuff. 2001 tremendously predictive as ever , with each unit Dave is unlocking presumably being a cortical column of HAL. His mental network decays with the removal or disconnect of each column , a phenomena not unknown to humans,and so he ends up singing ” I’ve got a lovely arts degree”.

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  24. The link is back up MINUS the worst of perth.

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  25. Frank Calabrese says:

    [The link is back up MINUS the worst of perth.]

    I wonder if it’s because hang shit on TWAT, The Worst and Teh Paul Nurray ? :-)

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  26. I’ve got a wealth of discussion topics. can you post a picture of someone else defammatory material. barra fat wog cunt?
    can you take a shot of a guy’s crack?
    I think the point of the thing was discussing how far you can go. Yeah Chaser, but a bit of an obvious choice.

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  27. I think the gay potato is what done it.

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  28. Mr Zion contacted me and assured me that The Worst of Perth will be considered for any unethical qualities for this unit. ie, it’s back in.

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We can handle the worst