Instructions
Identify and discuss the ethical and legal implications and potential risks involved in this fictional scenario. You should only use the detail you are given, and not assume or speculate about what is not stated. In writing your answer, please use case study examples and secondary reference materials to support your points. This means using the set text and recommended readings to back up your argument and analysis of media law and ethics as illustrated by this scenario.
The Scenario
1. Just after 8am at the Melbourne newsroom of FBS (Fictional Broadcasting Service), which produces a TV news bulletin as well as radio and online news, FBS reporter Doug Trench gets a call from an anonymous Brunswick resident. He tells Trench that police have taped off a laneway and are doorknocking locals about a missing woman. Trench calls the police Media Relations unit, and police PR’s Marcia Brady tells him that a woman has been reported missing and police suspect foul play because they found a woman’s handbag in the laneway. She gives the woman’s name as Trudi Braun, a researcher at Melbourne’s 3ZB Radio. Brady asks Trench to keep the woman’s name out of any news report, as the woman’s family in Germany have not yet been told that she is missing.
2.Trench files his story, and it is posted online without the name. But, much to his annoyance, Doug Trench sees that Channel 9’s morning news show not only uses Trudi Braun’s name but also a photo of her, and a shot of the house she shares with her husband, Karl. The report also says police hold grave fears for the woman’s safety.
Trench goes online, updates his story by adding the name of the woman and using the police quote he heard on Channel 9. He then heads out to Brunswick to get some interviews and footage of his own.
3. While he is out, the FBS news desk takes a call from Marcia Brady who says that police are hunting a man they saw with Trudi Braun on a CCTV video recording set up by a local jewellery shop. She says police will give the footage to FBS and other media outlets so they can enlist help from the public to find the man on the recording. But the CCTV recording was already uploaded to You Tube an hour earlier by someone called “Camera Spy”, who also uploaded a video of police talking to one of the Braun’s neighbours, with the caption, “Hidden camera never lies. What’s really going on with the missing Brunswick woman”? That night the CCTV footage is all over the media, along with Trudi and Karl Braun’s names, and a police comment about a woman’s handbag found in the laneway in Brunswick. Doug Trench’s on camera interviews with two neighbours and a co-worker of Trudi Braun’s at 3ZB form part of FBS’s package for its top story on its TV news bulletin that night. Only Channel 9 uses the “Hidden camera…” video from You Tube. Karl Braun takes a call from his wife’s parents in Germany, who saw the story on breakfast TV.
4. The next day police arrest a man who has a long criminal history that includes sexual assaults against women, and another serious assault on a man at Geelong only a few months ago. Police Media say the man has accompanied police to the spot where he says he dumped Trudi’s body after raping and strangling her — and they have found the body. At 12.30PM, FBS, Channel 9, and 3ZB all run with the story, naming the man as Mark Theodore Bundy and showing footage of him leading police to the roadside where they found the body, which they film by helicopter and with crews on the ground.
They describe Bundy as a violent rapist and murderer and give details of the laneway killing of Trudi Braun and her family’s reactions to the tragic news.
5. Bundy is charged at 7.45pm with the rape and murder of Trudi Braun and appears in court the next morning, entering a not guilty plea.
Social media has been abuzz since the bulletins the day before, with one site referring to Bundy a “murdering scumbag” and saying “hanging is too good for him as he’s clearly done it before” – the post attracts 835 Likes overnight.
On 3ZB, the afternoon drive show host remembers Trudi Braun as a great colleague and friend, and also reads out a list of Bundy’s prior convictions. He says the public has a right to know whom Victoria’s parole system lets out of prison too early.
Last Completed Projects
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