Ethics Newsline®

At issue: News media’s fine line between helping and hyping; a name change designed to protect pork producers that may confuse public; the ethics of seeking medical care versus toughing it out alone

VARIOUS DATELINES
While the difficult ethics decisions about who will receive scarce vaccine or gain access to overburdened health care facilities during a possible swine flu pandemic have entered the journalistic mainstream, some emerging moral dilemmas began to blink on the media’s radar last week. Among the top stories:

• Media hype, fueled by the desire to boost ratings, Web clicks, and newspaper sales may be spreading faster than actual cases of the flu, according to Reuters ethics and news standards columnist Dean Wright. In an opinion piece titled “Flu Outbreak: Walking the Fine Line Between Hyping and Helping,” Wright argues: “There’s nothing like a disease outbreak to highlight the value of the media in alerting and informing the public in the face of an emergency. There’s also nothing like it to bring out some of our more excessive behavior, essentially shouting “Run for your lives! (but, whatever you do, stay tuned, keep reading the website and don’t forget to buy the paper!).” Wright contends that many media outlets are acting responsibly and providing thoughtful coverage and analysis, but he also writes that it won’t hurt for newspeople everywhere to stop and “take a deep breath.”
• The decision by U.S. federal and state officials to use the technical name H1N1 instead of “swine flu” has fueled some ethical debate on the propriety of the name change. Minnesota Public Radio reports that U.S. pork producers lobbied for the change, saying meat sales had plummeted over fears that you could contract swine flu from eating or handling pork. But the report also notes that some scientists insist that swine flu is an accurate name from a biological point of view. The news media are dealing with an ethical dilemma, too, with some switching to the new technical term while others keep the old terminology. Ethicist Jane Kirtley, who directs the Minneapolis-based Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, tells Minnesota Public Radio that she doesn’t want the media to abandon the original name. “Had this disease not been labeled ’swine flu’ at the outset, I would feel very comfortable saying we should be using some other term,” said Kirtley. “But the fact is, for most people that you were to ask on the street, ‘What’s the virulent virus that’s going around right now?’ they would say ’swine flu.’ And we need to make sure that the public knows what we’re talking about.” Incidentally, Minnesota Public Radio is sticking with the term “swine flu,” at least for now, on the ground that H1N1 isn’t a very radio-friendly term.
• Ethics considerations often underlie individual decisions about what someone should do if he or she is sick. Philosophy professor Janet Stemwedel, who writes a blog on ethics and science, notes that there is an ethical component to such mundane decisions as whether to seek medical help or tough it out in bed. By traveling for medical help, a swine flu victim may be serving an ethical duty to help one’s self and also provide health authorities with data on the spread of the disease. But at the same time, traveling to a doctor’s office may expose others in the waiting room, or on public transportation. Stemwedel contends that a thoughtful individual should contemplate these scenarios.

Sources: , Apr. 30 — , Apr. 30 — , Apr. 30.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 27 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 9 — Related Newsline story, May 27, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 12, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 5, 2007.