Here's an ABC News sidebar, which is not something you strap onto a motorcycle but a story that runs off to the side of a news story and explores a related angle. (What do you call the main story? The mainbar. What else? Illiterate? Well, yes, maybe so. But logical? Well, yes.) It's about Britney Spears' mental health issues. And here's an overnight story from MTV updating it.
Britney Spears aside, it raises issues of due process. Which is what I want us to focus on.
Read the story, and blog on these questions. How does the issue of legal due process become involved with the Britney Spears saga? (Hint: You did notice a second "t" in "statute," didn't you?) How are her rights protected by a 5150? How are yours and mine -- or how would they be if we were in California? Are they the same rights? How well, judging by the evidence in the news reports, would you say her rights are being safeguarded?
COMM 317 is also an ethics class, and this story has some ethical angles, too. Go to the Society of Professional Journalists' website and check out the SPJ Code of Ethics, too. Read it or review it (it never hurts to go back over the canons of ethics, right? You may want to keep a copy in the bathroom next to the "AP Stylebook," in fact). Then blog some more:
How, specifically, are the SPJ canons observed in the two linked stories? By ABC? By MTV? Is Britney Spears getting the break she deserves by the code of ethics? Is she getting the same break you and I would if we needed 5150 protection? By all means consider your own ethical standards, too, but part of what I want you to do is to think specifically about the SJP Code, the law and due process.
A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.
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January
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- COMM 317: Due process and ... Britney Spears? Yep
- Student blogs: COMM 317 and COMM 387
- COMM 317: In class today
- COMM 317: Facts, law ... and ethics
- COMM 317: It's party time! (legal parties, that is)
- Should every newspaper journalist journalism stude...
- COMM 209: First story, back-to-school
- Ursulines and formation of a journalist
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About Me
- Pete
- Springfield (Ill.), United States
- I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.
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