The overwhelming element of surprise I experienced while reading about the Anuak people of a small village in Ethiopia, massacred in cold blood, has thrown me into a sea of question marks.
If the death of hundreds of innocent people is irrelevant to major news outlets, what is exactly worthy of precious airtime? What's the motive behind publishing a story, other than financial gain? what's really going on in our media?
Rawls' Communitarianism comes into play as a code of ethics when thinking of McGill's issue regarding the Anuak people. The feeling of responsibility to justice gave her the courage to publish a story she didn't encounter first hand. A story she heard of because a member of the community decided to talk. There is beauty in the irony that McGill had to teach her Anuak student English in her ESL class in order to understand the truth of his journey from Ethiopia to Minnesota.
In the quest for justice, I think this code of ethics helped justify the risk she has taken, of publishing news coming from a new breed of information sourcing: earwitnesses. As she relied mostly on the stories told by families and friends of those being massacred, she knew she would face some ethical issues surrounding the accuracy of her sources.
After extensive research, she felt it's her duty to publish this story and raise awareness, and rationality v. emotion comes into play here as well. It became a matter of life or death, literally for the Anuak people. McGill served as a small beacon of hope for their future, not a prosperous one, but one where they can somehow guarantee they would remain alive.
Rationality v. Emotion isn't helpful in this case, because the journalist is overcome by emotion, social responsibility and communitarianism. This story came from her student, a person to which she has made a connection. Though the rational in the manner in which she obtained her information is weak, her feelings about the issue were strongest, fed the drive in her to do something and fast.
William David Ross' Pluralistic Theory of Value can find a home in analyzing McGill's journey to uncover the truth. He recommends two important duties: "to tell the truth and to nurture, help others achieve some measure of self-worth." (Patterson, Wilkins, 13) McGill falls perfectly in those two categories. She aspires to do both, tell the world about the horrifying truth and uncertainty of the Anuak people's future and survival of their kind, and help the refugees in Minnesota feel a sense of community by helping the ones left behind.
Realizing the weakness of her information source at first, McGill made sure to conduct extensive research and interviewed many "earwitnesses" so to have a uniformed story. This proved to be helpful in remaining as ethical as possible in this unique situation.
It is unfortunate that even after she unveiled the truth about his small village in Ethiopia, no major news outlet was interested in her story. This is a sad recurring tradition in our media today, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, civilians that is, in the revolution against the regime, and yet minimal coverage has been provided to us. As we speak, hundreds of Syrian refugees in the Turkish and Lebanese borders are freezing to death.
Where is our human sensitivity? where is the social justice guaranteed by the UN? Not only are these children freezing to death, they have been without education for more than 3 years. It is a reality not to be forgotten or ignored, but it is surely less important than the impact a few cartoons has had on the world.
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