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23rd Annual Silha Lecture
Raise Your Hand if You're a Journalist: Does Responsible Reporting Need a Legal Defense?
Featuring Siobhain Butterworth
Monday, October 6, 2008, 7:00 p.m.

Cogi-tations: A program of the Minnesota
Coalition on Government Information
Featuring Patrice McDermott
Monday, June 9, 2008, 5:00 p.m.

Silha Spring Ethics Forum
Journalism from the Frontlines: Remaining Independent When Covering Politics and War
Featuring Edward Wasserman
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

New Media, New Standards?
Ethics in Online Journalism
Monday, February 25, 2008, 7:00 p.m.

2008 Silha Fellowships available

22nd Annual Silha Lecture
"The Kids Are All Right: Violent Media, Free Expression, and the Drive to Regulate"
Featuring Robert Corn-Revere
October 1, 2007

When Tragedy Strikes, What is the Media's Role?
Featuring Linda Walker, mother of the late Dru Sjodin
April 24, 2007

Digital Privacy is Not Anonymity: You Can't Hide from the Data on Your Computer
With Stephen Cribari, Mary Horvath and Dick Reeve
March 1, 2007

Without Fear or Favor: Objectivity Revisited
The UBS Forum at Minnesota Public Radio
Featuring Stephen Ward
February 26, 2007

Judges in J-Schools
Featuring Judge Rick Distaso
Prosecutor, The People v. Scott Peterson
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
SJMC Conference Center
Click here to view photos of this event

21st Annual Silha Lecture
The Freedom of the Press v. The National Security
Featuring Geoffrey Stone
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
7:00 p.m.
Cowles Auditorium
Hubert H. Humphrey Center

The Customer is Always Right: The Assault on Media Impartiality from the Empowered American Consumer
Featuring Seth Mnookin
Monday, May 1, 2006
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Coffman Memorial Union Theater

Your Email is Not Yours: Government Survelliance and Digital Privacy
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
1:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Murphy Hall Conference Center
View Photos from this Event

Forum on Truth Telling
in Campaign Advertisements
with Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Cowles Auditorium

The End of Journalism? Why News Still Matters
Monday, February 20, 2006
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Coffman Memorial Union Theater

View photos from the 20th Annual Silha Lecture featuring Floyd Abram (2005)
Click here to listen to the 20th Annual Silha Lecture featuring Floyd Abrams

View photos from the Silha Center Spring 2005 Ethics Forum on Confidential Sources
featuring David Kidwell of the Miami Herald

View photos from the Silha Center Spring 2005 Forum on the Constitution and Privacy in the Digital Age

View photos from the
Silha Center Fall 2004 Forum featuring
Paramount Studio's Barry Allen

View photos from the
2004 Silha Center Lecture
featuring Geneva Overholser

A New Kind of Warfare Demands
A New Kind of Journalism:
Rethinking Journalists’ Wartime Ethics
Read the Bulletin story about the 2003 Silha Spring Ethics Forum with Peter Sussman

View photos from the
2003 Silha Center Lecture
featuring Ken Starr

View photos from the
2002 Silha Center Lecture
featuring Anthony Lewis

View pictures from the
2002 Spring Silha Forum
featuring MSNBC.com Ombudsman Dan Fisher

Listen to the audio from the
"Terror! Media Coverage of
Sept. 11 and the Aftermath" event

      

  Welcome!

The Silha Center
for the Study of Media Ethics and Law

The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law was established in 1984 with an endowment from Otto and Helen Silha. Under the leadership of Silha Professor and Silha Center Director Jane Kirtley, the Silha Center is located within the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and serves as the vanguard of the School's interest in the ethical responsibilities and legal rights of the mass media in a democratic society. The Center focuses on the concepts and values that define the highest ideals of American journalism: freedom and fairness. It honors the importance of these ideals by examining their theoretical and practical applications and by recognizing the interdependence of ethical and legal principles.

Several major projects worthy of sustained, programmatic effort on the part of faculty and students have been identified. These include:

  • Media Accountability
  • Points of convergence of media ethics and law
  • Libel and privacy

More

  Silha Bulletin - Lead Story

Spring 2008 Bulletin

Top Story:
‘Preferred Position?’ The Reporter’s Privilege
in the 21st Century and Beyond

Is there any institution the American public loves to hate more than the news media? Depending on your point of view, the institutional press is either irredeemably liberal or cravenly conservative, a toothless watchdog or a godless traitor, willing to do anything to sell newspapers or raise viewership ratings. News consumers marvel at the media’s fixation on the latest peccadilloes of a drunken starlet or a straying senator at the sacrifice of stories that “matter.” Anyone who has been the object of media attention “knows” that reporters are sloppy, arrogant, imprecise, agenda-driven, fixated on the negative, and, of course, biased. How could they be anything else, when no minimum education requirements, no licensing system, no mandatory ethics code, no disciplinary body can be used to keep the incompetents and undesirables out? And that’s just the mainstream media. What about those bloggers – the infamous geeks in pajamas, spreading rumors throughout the Internet and railing at anything and everything in cozy anonymity from their shadowy basement lairs, accountable to no one?

more...
 

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