Thinking about Journalistic Ethics

I think that ethics should be important to journalists because if they don't have ethics they can lose all their credibility, and nobody will ever want to talk to them about anything if they know they're going to be misquoted. I think trust is a key thing about being a journalist. You need to have trust between you and your editor, so he/she knows that you won't violate the code of ethics of the news publication, and you need to have trust between yourself and your sources, and since you will always have different sources you need to build trust by having a good reputation. You can have a good reputation by following a code of ethics.
Some rules of conduct a journalsit should observe are:
Having standards for the accuracy of their reporting - You shouldn't report a story that you don't have enough information on, your audience could get the wrong idea and whoever the story is about might start getting looked at differently.
Freedom of speech - Journalists have freedom of speech but they also need to be credible.
Reporting everything - Journalism should never contain any form of bias or stereotype. Journalists should report on events that are imprtant no matter the race, gender, or sex of the subject.
Privacy - anyone a journalist interviews has the right to privacy and this right should not be violated unless is absolutely necassary that the story gets out.
All these ethics can be found in the Canadian Association of Journalists' Statement of Principles:
http://www.caj.ca/?p=20
The journalist should also tell the subject a fair amount of the story, otherwise it's almost like lying to your subject. If you give them the impression that the story is going to portray them favourably then they will be more likely to talk to you. However, if the story gets out that you lied to them, your sources will be much less likely to trust you in the future.
Also, the relationship between a subject and a journalist should be strictly business. If you're more on the friendly side it starts to be a conflict of interest.
This is mostly what I have to say about journalistic ethics. THE END.

By B.L.