Picture map of Europe with pins indicating European capital cities

Open Access research with a European policy impact...

The Strathprints institutional repository is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde's Open Access research outputs. Strathprints provides access to thousands of Open Access research papers by Strathclyde researchers, including by researchers from the European Policies Research Centre (EPRC).

EPRC is a leading institute in Europe for comparative research on public policy, with a particular focus on regional development policies. Spanning 30 European countries, EPRC research programmes have a strong emphasis on applied research and knowledge exchange, including the provision of policy advice to EU institutions and national and sub-national government authorities throughout Europe.

Explore research outputs by the European Policies Research Centre...

Strathprints

Hacking into tragedy : exploring the ethics of death reporting in the social media age

Newton, Jackie and Duncan, Sallyanne (2012) Hacking into tragedy : exploring the ethics of death reporting in the social media age. In: The Phone Hacking Scandal. Arima. ISBN 9781845495565

[img]
Preview
 PDF
Hacking_into_Tragedy_exploring_the_ethics_of_death_reporting_in_the_social_media_age_Strathprints_version_1_.pdf - Preprint
Download (458kB) | Preview

Abstract

The phone-tapping scandal blew up with the revelation that murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked, seeming to demonstrate that the public are much more concerned with the feelings of bereaved families than with the reputations of celebrities or politicians. Therefore any regulation that arises from the UK hacking scandal is likely to include the area of contact between journalists and the grieving. This paper considers whether families actually need more “protection” from journalists and, drawing on evidence from interviews with bereaved relatives, argues that what they actually need is informed access to the media. It also considers “hacking” and lifting material from social media sites, which, while being legal, similarly prompts many ethical concerns. Journalists’ attitudes to using these sites in covering personal traumatic events will be explored using data collected from questionnaires mostly from reporters of five years or less experience. In particular the paper will examine whether journalists consider “virtual door-stepping” to be more or less intrusive than traditional approaches and whether they use these sites to limit contact with the bereaved. It will attempt to assess the benefits and harms of a probable increased usage of social networking sites in the intrusive reporting process.

Item type: Book Section
ID code: 35810
Keywords: journalism , phone hacking, social media, death reporting , journalism ethics, Books. Writing. Paleography, Ethics, Literature and Literary Theory
Subjects: Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Books. Writing. Paleography
Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > Ethics
Department: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > School of Humanities > Journalism
Depositing user: Pure Administrator
Date deposited: 15 Nov 2011 16:40
Last modified: 21 Sep 2017 14:37
Related URLs:
URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/35810
Export data:
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)