Summer Media Internship

While this article is meant to touch base on what is ethical and what is not, we need to consider what is legal. People in this country have the right to write as they wish (for the most part..) and ethics only seem to apply when one cares about how they portray the people in their stories, or the type of reputation they maintain.

I honestly think that Kilgannon was being honest, genuine and respectful. Ramirez was the one who bashed a hole into the door to unlock it, clearly, Kilgannon was being given permission by Jones’ room-mate, Ramirez, to glimpse into his living space.

“But then friends and family began weighing in, saying that Kilgannon had painted a false picture of Jones as a recluse and had invaded his privacy by entering his bedroom and taking pictures without the family’s permission.”

It should be commonly understood that the life of a celebrity rarely stays private. Celebrities depend on their fans for their fame and success and their fans rely on their celebrities to tell them all about their life. While it may seem a bit ridiculous and while I do think that everyone is entitled to their privacy, celebrities are always in the public eye and people feel not only compelled to know about their lives but they feel like they [deserve] to know. Kind of like people felt they deserved to know whether or not Bill Clinton had slept with another woman, or whether or not the doctor was giving Michael Jackson an excess amount of drugs to keep him calm/help him sleep. When one enters a road to fame, it would be naive to think that their life would remain only their own; It’s a given that they will always be chased down, photographed and sought after. This is not to say that this is the way things should be, but it’s how they are.

“In the end, the blog post raised some big questions about reporting standards and ethics: Did Kilgannon cross that sometimes hard-to-define line between legitimate reporting and violating privacy? Did he put too much trust in a single source? Does The Times have lesser standards for online journalism than for print journalism? Did a journalistic device — what Kilgannon’s editor called a “snapshot” of one famous life — turn out to be misleading and unfair? How much can The Times satisfy our curiosity about a great artist before it is less like The Times and more like a gossip sheet?”

Now referring to the text above- While all of this raises a good question, it needs to be understood that information will vary per point of view. Everyone defines and witnesses reality differently, therefore everything is almost always subjective. However people [chose] to percieve Hank Jones after reading the article and seeing the pictures of his apartment, this is just one angle of a multifaceted man. It’s obvious that Hank Jones was not just a musician and that he did not just crack jokes all day (as one man explained him to be quite the happy man and not a recluse). People are like onions, and even though this was said by Shrek, it’s true. I think that too often people get caught up in silly, technical details. This is just one angle of a man’s life, not his entire biography.

I think that Kilgannon is pretty innocent in this matter.
Just as stated by Jamieson towards the end of this article, this is just a snapshot of one particular fagment of one man’s life, not the entire album.