ABSTRACT
The media are full of information: reviews, listings, features, profiles, forthcoming events, sports, advertisements and news. Media consumers expect this information to follow ethical norms and yet sometimes it doesn’t. Why is this? In order to understand some of the temptations that lead journalists, on occasion, to behave unethically, and particularly to distort and twist the truth, we need to know what it is that makes something newsworthy and therefore attracts the journalist’s attention in the first place. What is it about an event that makes it stand out as newsworthy when there are scores of other events or pieces of information that someone, somewhere, would like a journalist to use on the news? Until we know what a newsworthy event is, it is very difficult to understand the problems, both practical and ethical, facing the journalist who wishes to report newsworthy events.
