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Christchurch attacks provide a new ethics lesson for professional media
Two basic rules of media ethics apply to the coverage of terrorism: avoid giving unnecessary oxygen to the terrorist, and avoid unnecessarily violating standards of public decency.
- Denis Muller
- The Conversation
The way to do this is to apply a test of necessity: what is necessary to publish to give the public a sufficiently comprehensive account of what has happened?
Significant elements in the Australian media – mainly commercial television, the online platform of News Corp and that company’s…