Legal and Ethical Issues

Slander: When a person has made a statement that is untrue and could/has harm/ed another persons reputation.

Libel: Where a person has published a work that is false causing harm to another person or their reputation.


Slanderous examples:





Living with Michael Jackson'  presented by Martin Bashir, it is unethical because Michael Jackson had agreed to an eight-month long interviewing process with Martin Bashir, hoping to educate his fans about many mistaken assumptions his life. When Michael Jackson saw the finished product of "Living With Michael Jackson" on the air, he realized that Martin Bashir had betrayed his trust in order to produce a obscene thriller that just made more puzzling questions for Michael Jackson instead of him answering his questions for the public. The real dispute hung around a young 13-year old boy who Bashir interviewed without his mothers acknowledgement and within this interview Bashir asked irrelevant questions that made Michael Jackson look perverted, for example: Bashir asked, if Gavin Arvizo (13-year old boy) had ever slept in Michael Jackson's bedroom. 


Another example of a documentry that has been accused of being slanderous is "fahrenheit 911". Michael moore created another controversial documentary. this documentary was accused on many occasions of being slanderous by a variety of people that described that what he was saying and displayed on the documentary made george bush look like he was part of the 911, he went to evade iraq because he wanted to win power to all the oil that country has. in the documentary he portrays george bush to be a liar and a fake person. he basically criticizes everythng that george has ever said and basically calls him a liar. so in a way Michael moore has portrayed to the public a different view on george bush and Michael caused allot of controversy just because of this documentary, allot of people 
started to look at george bush in a different way.




Ethics are a very important and serious thing when it comes to documenting, ethnics is an arrangement of morals within different cultures, and within a documentary they have to respect these different cultures and morals, or the documentary would be classed as unethically correct.

Ethical examples:


For example, the Jimmy Saville case of him being an alleged Pedophile, this is unethical because the makers of the documentary didn't take into consideration that his family and his victims would be dramatically affected by it, because Jimmy Saville is dead now and all the attention and focus goes onto his family and victims. This is unethical, the producers of the documentary done it all for an affect and didn't look forward foreseeing the potential damage it could cause thats why its is unethical. 

Another documentary that is potentially unethical is "Cry wolf". This documentary explores and investigates the controversial decision that the Alberta's government have ignored. they have ignored the threat that the rapid industrial expansion is the alberta tar sands region has caused on its surrounds environment and communities. instead of resolving the problem the government insisted on killing thousands of innocent wolves, they did this so that in the public eye they appear to be doing something to save the dwindling woodland population and wildlife. the interviews with the "experts" in the documentary  prove the myth of Canada's "ethnical oil" is further exposed as oil industry greenwashing. to me this documentary is very unethical as they are under-minding the public telling them lies and trying to prove they are "apparently" doing something to protect the surround environment, where as they are actually doing nothing at all just killing the innocent wildlife that is still living there, it is argued that they have done this to hide the fact that this oil industry is causing a number of problems with local communities and the harm it is doing to the wildlife that lives around this industry.