This column in Broadcasting & Cable is right on about Fox News. Fox sells, and that’s the big ethical problem news media face today – making money. Fox can sell its soul and rake in the bucks from the conservative public, MSNBC seems to be doing the opposite on the left, and CNN is somewhere in the middle. It’s not news, but the viewing public does not know that it’s not news. The cable news channels have gone to shouting heads, tweets, Facebook, etc., and constant injection of opinion. It’s entertainment and not news.

What’s needed is massive public education, which is not going to happen anytime soon. The pressure is on news media, and it’s all about money.

Somehow, SPJ, ASNE, APME, RTDNA, etc., must rise above the dollars and educate the public that real news has standards and is necessary to an effective democracy.

The changes we are seeing today in information distribution are similar in nature, if not format, to the changes seen in the advance of the penny press in the early 19th century. The printing press enabled mass distribution of information and hucksters, fakes, and politicians took advantage of it. Anyone with access to paper, ink, and a press could publish just about anything. Today, anyone with access to a computer – a much larger base – can publish just about anything. It took decades and organizations such as SPJ to bring sanity to news reporting.

We are in a period of change, and we will be for decades. We can’t throw up our hands, saying we’re better than they are. We have to educate the public and show that we are. And right now, the public does not have a very high opinion of news media. What are needed are a news media coalition and a grassroots campaign. Excuse the expression, but we need a giant public relations effort. The public does not care about checkbook journalism or doctors working for news media. It wants reliable information – the truth. And someone has to show the public the difference between noise and information. It will take decades, but it won’t happen unless we start now. Think big and be persistent.

Social media tools (especially Facebook and Twitter) have found a niche in the practice of journalism.

But is this an example of technology moving faster than careful thought?

There are pitfalls in sending out a knee-jerk tweet or stepping into someone else’s Facebook network to cultivate sources on deadline.

Here are new guidelines issued by the Radio Television Digital News Association.

I’ve been asked a few times whether SPJ has updated its code of ethics to keep up with social media.

I’m not sure we need to. The ethical principles in the code, for the most part, don’t pertain only to one form of communication. Fairness, accuracy, context and other fundamentals certainly can apply to BlackBerry or cell-phone texters, too.

But my position isn’t immutable, and the rest of SPJ’s Ethics Committee has a wide range of views, which might lead to some degree of change. The committee will talk about this soon as part of a broad review of the code of ethics, which hasn’t changed in 14 years.

(I’m not sure about this reference in The Washington Times, which seems to suggest SPJ recently updated the code to address social media.)

Does the SPJ Code of Ethics need new language to guide journalists on the ethical use of social media as part of their work? Please tell us what you think.

-Andy Schotz, chairman, SPJ Ethics Committee