Ethical Perspectives On Data-Journalism About The COVID-19 Epidemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global development issue and a vital concern for society.Thus,updates on the spread of the virus have attracted extensive social attentions.During such a public health emergency,the timely publishment and transparency of data are at the core of control measures.Data-Journalism can quickly integrate information,enhance communication efficiency,and meet the needs of the public to obtain information related to the epidemic.It further helps to increase public awareness and curb the spread of the epidemic.After the outbreak of the epidemic,the transparency,openness,and availability of data have made it possible for Data-Journalism to rise and its production cycle to be greatly shortened.Data-Journalism emerged in a variety of forms: short videos,animation,geographic information maps,etc.These Data-Journalism focusing on the pandemic embeds research value because of their quantity,diversity,quality,as well as their roles in responding to current social concerns.This paper examines the Data-Journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic,from the perspective of journalism ethics.It analyses the ethical issues regarding China's Data-Journalism reporting,their impacts and reasons behind these issues.Moreover,this paper explores possible solutions to these issues and suggests a theoretical framework that aims to promote the healthy development of the Data-Journalism industry in the new media era.Based on this,this study selected 15 media as sample sources,analysed their Data-Journalism related to the pandemic in 2020,and built a comprehensive scientific Data-Journalism ethics and health dissemination ethics assessment framework.After a thorough analysis of the data,this paper found that the Data-Journalism related to the pandemic has the following issues: It lacked information and proper source referencing;It contained unclear risk description and insufficient data;It used jargons that reduced news readability and created reading obstacles for the audience;It leaked personal information and made it difficult to enforce data security;Moreover,it could create secondary damage and real ethical issues such as stigmatization.In response to the above problems,this paper proposes corresponding measures to improve the China data journalism environment from the perspectives of government,media,and reporters.These measures are expected to provide a reference for the theoretical research and practice operations of journalism ethics.