This module will help you understand how to define ethics, and support you to create your own ethical framework for use throughout the course. It explains why, as media creators, we need rights, why they are important, and how they inform our practice. Alongside this, it explains the responsibilities we have when publishing stories, especially with regard to public interest cases.

Having thought about what ethics mean to us, and how we might become ethical thinkers, we now move to think about how we can gain trust with our audiences and the public. Acting ethically as a journalist or content creator is one of the main ways we can gain trust from our audiences, so understanding what we can do to achieve this is crucial to this course. Here, we will learn what the public need from the media to gain trust, and think about how we can navigate subjectivity, objectivity, and bias to be trusted information providers.

Having thought about how we gain trust among our audiences, we will now examine the principles and behaviours media creators should embody to produce truthful content. This module considers ethical principles of truth, such as the importance of accuracy, examines the behaviours that media creators need to enact to be accurate, such as attribution, copyright, and providing a right to reply, and the consequences of what happens when we deviate from truth, namely, when we make untrue allegations about a person (vis a vis defamation).

This module introduces some of the latest technologies and ethical issues, influencing what we write, produce, share or publish.