IBM, a major advertiser on X, has pulled its spending from the social media platform, whose employees are grappling with what to tell its other advertisers, according to internal messages.
To be clear: Musk endorsed a tweet which used a false antisemitic conspiracy theory to tell people why “Hitler was right”
That’s a overly reductive. News organizations have a public duty that goes beyond just throwing out facts and letting society sort through the mess.
what duty is that?
Journalism is inherently a public service.
but what does that entail? What were you hinting at earlier?
There’s a responsibility to consider the impact of your reporting. See for example the SPJ code of ethics under “minimize harm”
https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
Journalism ethics is a very broad topic, but it’s more than just about reporting facts. It’s about serving your purpose as the fourth estate.
this assumes a moral authority, which can be dangerous
This barely even means anything. What do you really mean?
moral authority, or rather thinking you have the moral right to do something is the cause of all strive. Was the cause of the religious wars… even Hitler thought he had a “moral duty” to eradicate people from the gene pool to make a better society. You can’t assume moral authority; you will end up hurting people. It happens again and again, everything from an abusive spouse who thinks his wife is bad quality X and should be beat into a better person, to parents abusing their kids to have them “learn” otherwise they won’t be tough enough for the world, to the horrible recidivism rate in countries where prisoners are considered subhuman because they’re “immoral”, to every serial killer feeling justified to torture people in their messed up fabric of how they think the world works. Morality is a trojan horse for criminality. It treats others as subhuman, abdicates their ability to choose, and then causes arrogance in the “ruling elite” which then ends in slaughter of their own people, starting with the minorities until society realizes, “wait, how did we get here?”
This is more text, I’ll give you that, but it’s still not clear how it relates to professional ethics codes of journalists.
Surely you are not trying to say that professional ethics codes in and of themselves lead to wife beating, serial murder, prison abuse and genocide?