I found the reading for week 3 pretty interesting as my elective for this semester is documentary studies, so I’ve been thinking about the topic of ethics in media in relation to the documentaries I have seen recently. Last week I watched ‘The Thin Blue Line’ by Errol Morris and after researching it, was interested to find that Morris was involved in a legal battle with the subject of the film, Randall Adams over Adams rights to his story. Adams had felt that Morris had claimed exclusive rights to his life story. Could this be seen as an ethical violation?
Documentaries are constructed representations. The way things are represented, and whether they are truthful are completely up to the filmmaker so they are always going to be involved in ethical discourse through the production of a film.
