Reporting on a civil war, a journalist encountered evidence that refug

Reporting on a civil war, a journalist encountered evidence that refugees were starving because the government would not permit food shipments to a rebel-held area. Government censors deleted all mention of the government’s role in the starvation from the journalist’s report which had not implicated either nature or the rebels in the starvation. The journalist concluded that it was ethically permissible to file the censored report because the journalist’s news agency would precede it with the notice “Cleared by government censors.”

Which one of the following ethical criteria, if valid, would serve to support the journalist’s conclusion while placing the least constraint on the flow of reported information?


(A) It is ethical in general to report known facts but unethical to do so while omitting other known facts if the omitted facts would substantially alter an impression of a person or institution that would be congruent with the reported facts.

(B) In a situation of conflict, it is ethical to report known facts and unethical to fail to report known facts that would tend to exonerate one party to the conflict.

(C) In a situation of censorship, it is unethical make any report if the government represented by the censor deletes from the report material unfavorable to that government.

(D) It is ethical in general to report known facts but unethical to make a report in a situation of censorship if relevant facts have been deleted by the censor unless the recipient of the report is warned that censorship existed.

(E) Although it is ethical in general to report known facts, it is unethical to make a report from which a censor has deleted relevant facts, unless the recipient of the report is warned that there was censorship and the reported facts do not by themselves give a misleading impression.