Two national ethicists team up on Everyday Ethics Podcast

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., July 28, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Poynter Institute media ethicist Kelly McBride and medical ethicist Art Caplan this week launched the twice-weekly podcast Everyday Ethics, where they will explore the moral dimensions of the serious and not-so-serious issues that pervade our daily lives. They've already discussed whether children should be allowed to play football, whether school dress codes are fair and if Chris Christie is a bully. Their most recent efforts provocatively examine the value of Wikipedia, the morality of using Redskins as a nickname and whether Dr. Oz has a conflict of interest.

McBride is the vice president for academic programs at The Poynter Institute, a global leader in journalism. Caplan is the director of the division of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center. Both are widely quoted in news media on a variety of ethics issues.

McBride and Caplan have known each other professionally for more than a decade. They have taught together at Poynter, where Caplan once served on the advisory board. They hatched the idea of the Everyday Ethics podcast over breakfast last fall.

"Art can go on an amazing rant about the hot-button issues people are talking about and put them into a perspective that's both smart and entertaining," McBride said. "I wanted to be in those conversations." Caplan said that to him, the podcast sounded like fun. "I have this theory about work. There's so much of it, that whenever we can, we should do that work that is the most fun. So here we are."

Craig Kopp, of NPR affiliate WUSF, hosts and edits their conversations. The show is recorded at WUSF Public Media studios in Tampa, where McBride contributes to the Poynter-hosted weekly segment on WUSF, "Making Sense of Media." Caplan joins in from his office in New York.

"We all are looking for answers to difficult questions and helping Kelly and Art unpack these issues is downright revelatory," said Kopp. "In this age of pundits, it's a blast hearing them actually call out the silly stuff that cable news and its ilk try to turn into serious debates."

The podcasts are available:
On iTunes under podcasts.
On a web browser at http://everydayethics.libsyn.com/ 

For more information about the Everyday Ethics podcast contact Craig Kopp at [email protected]

About The Poynter Institute

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is an international leader in journalism education, and a strategy center that stands for uncompromising excellence in journalism, media and 21st century public discourse. Poynter faculty teach seminars and workshops at the Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., and at conferences and organizational sites around the world. Its e-learning division, News University, www.newsu.org, offers the world's largest online journalism curriculum in 6 languages, with more than 400 interactive courses and 290,000 registered users in more than 200 countries. The Institute's website, http://www.poynter.org, produces 24-hour coverage of news about media, ethics, technology, the business of news and the trends that currently define and redefine journalism news reporting. The world's top journalists and media innovators come to Poynter to learn and teach new generations of reporters, storytellers, media inventors, designers, visual journalists, documentarians and broadcast producers, and to build public awareness about journalism, media, the First Amendment and protected discourse that serves democracy and the public good.

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