Leadership Skills | Creating Safe and Fair Newsrooms
Objectives:
- To help students understand how the concepts of behavioral ethics — cognitive biases, social and organizational pressures, and situational factors — enable sexual harassment to continue in news organizations
- To help students understand organizational factors that contribute to unethical behavior such as networks of complicity, problematic newsroom policies and practices, and toxic newsroom cultures
- To familiarize students with sexual harassment law
- To prompt students to think about how they would respond if they were to see someone being subjected to unethical or illegal behavior in a news organization
- To prompt students to think about how to create a newsroom that is a safe and fair workplace in which journalists can do their best work
Module Overview:
News organizations must create safe and fair workplaces in which everyone can do their best work. Though it might seem counterintuitive, understanding why and how unethical behavior persists and creates unfair and unsafe workplaces is a prerequisite to understanding how to create safe and fair workplaces.
