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12: The Law - Rights and Responsibilities of Journalism

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    While both ethics and laws share similarities within a society, they are different in important ways. Ethics are moral principles and values that guide an individual's sense of good and bad actions or inactions, often shaped by society but chosen by individuals to enact. Law consists of a system of formal, mandatory rules enforced by an external authority to regulate societal behavior.

    Laws are, at times, enforceable mandates of what one cannot do in the society. In an example of American law, for instance, a journalist is not allowed to break-and-enter into a private space to gather news information.

    Laws, at other times, are mandates of what one can do, or have afforded to them, in the society. The Bill of Rights is a very good example of those mandates.

    In this chapter, we will look at the laws that both empower journalists, as well as those that contain journalistic activities to certain set of actions. We will start with the concept of the reporter's privilege and then the American Journalism Handbook will walk us through the details.

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    12: The Law - Rights and Responsibilities of Journalism is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael Humphrey, Johnson County Community College.