Tag Archives: You-Be-The-Editor

| Media, Opinion

Star runs You Be The Editor quiz

The Toronto Star, still looking for some holiday filler, has produced a journalism ethics quiz which it invites readers to answer on its website. (via J-Source)

The Gazette did something similar a while back.

Editors deal on a regular basis with tough ethical decisions, and must choose between publishing something or holding it back. The Star gives some examples, at least some of which were based on actual events which were published in the paper and got complaints.

Most are unfortunately a bit too easy to answer for me.

As holiday filler for this blog a public service, here are my answers to the quiz and the explanations for them:

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| Media

As an editor, you apparently only have two choices

You Be The Editor, Peter Cooney’s favourite occasional series at the Gazette, has another edition today. Ten questions about journalistic ethics, and you have two diametrically opposed options on what to do with them.

The irony of the series is that the decisions are already made for you. The details of the Picton trial aren’t discussed, giving us no way to judge whether or not they’re appropriate. And an image of a woman’s naked breast appears only in its sanitized form, so we can’t tell whether the original is really pornographic or not.

That aside (plus the horrible formatting of the web page), some of the questions are quite tough, and they’re all based on events that actually happened. How would you decide?