Ethical Issue of Disinformation

The media has a strong impact on its users. People who use the media to gain some information usually seek for reliable sources and reliable journalists. Be it printed media or digital one, truthfulness is the top priority for those who deliver information. Biagi (2013) insists that “truthfulness means not misrepresenting the people or the underlying motives of a story to readers and viewers, as well as not reporting disinformation.” Nevertheless, some journalists violate the demand of truthfulness for some reasons. Sometimes, they fabricate facts on purpose, and that is called disinformation. Politics often use the tools of disinformation to cause harm to their political competitors.

Disinformation can reach a global scale as in the case with Russia. This country has been caught spreading false news about Ukraine for the last three months. According to the US State Department (2014), “Russia continues to spin a false and dangerous narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine.” As stated in the article “Russia’s fraudulent news reports exposed” (2014), one of the most unbelievable stories is related to children. In particular,

journalist Ermina Kotadzhjan… Published a photograph of what she said was an 8-year-old boy who had been badly injured in a Donetsk shootout on her Twitter account. It was later picked up by another Russian news source. In reality, the photograph was of a wounded child from Syria. (“Russia’s fraudulent news reports exposed,” 2014)

Moreover, another piece of fabricated news was spreading through digital media. These were the reports of a train accident in Quebec, with Canada being featured as Slovyansk, and a morgue in Mexico being described as a morgue in Slovyansk. Disinformation policy and propaganda damaged both the image of Ukraine and Russia on the world arena. It shows that disinformation can have extremely negative consequences for the country’s reputation.

This material presented here is prepared by Jaime Bradley is a talented writer at the source where everyone can buy movie review. Whose hobby is to transfer his thought to the paper sheets.