The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
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continues, they will automatically make the right decision and so do not need this course. If they are not honorable, no college course is going to straighten them out. As an esteemed editor remarked to a college audience, “If your mom didn’t teach you right from wrong, your college teacher is not going to be able to.”
Although there is truth to that statement, it misses the point. The authors of this textbook assume that you did learn honesty and propriety in your early, formative years. In fact, this course is intended to build on your own sense of right and wrong and to show how to apply that sense to solving ethics problems in the profession.
Sometimes journalists have conflicts in values that their fellow citizens do not. For example, your mom would instruct you to always go to the aid of someone in need. However, journalists might have to weigh intervention to help one person against their duty to inform the public about thousands of other people in the same sort of adversity. If they intervene, they destroy the story’s authenticity – and they fail to inform the public.
Another flaw in the critics’ argument is the presumption that honorable journalists will reflexively do the right thing. Your mom may not have taught you a decision‐making procedure. As you will discover, “the right thing” is not always obvious. You will see that sound decision‐making goes beyond instinct and carefully considers – in a process called critical thinking – the pros and cons of various courses of action.
Honing Skills Through Cases
The case‐study method gives you a chance to work through difficult decisions in the classroom without consequences and without deadline pressure. The experience will prepare you for making on‐the‐spot ethical decisions in the real world. Each of the case studies selected for class discussion is intended to teach an important nuance about news media ethics.
In addition to explaining the principles of journalism ethics and teaching a decision‐making process, this course in journalism ethics gives you two valuable opportunities:
You can study the thinking of academics and experienced practitioners on recurring problems that journalists face. You can draw on the trial‐and‐error efforts of people who have gone before you in the profession.
You can practice your decision‐making technique in a classroom setting where no one is hurt if a decision proves to be flawed. Just as a musician, an actor, or an athlete improves through practice, you benefit by thinking through the courses of action you might take in the case studies. You should emerge from the course with a deeper understanding of the challenges of the profession and with more confidence about your own decision‐making.
You should also keep in mind that an applied‐ethics course prepares you for a career in which you will be dealing with people who want to influence the way you report the news. Because journalists work for the public, it would be a betrayal of the public’s trust to allow themselves to be diverted from the truth. The ethicist Bob Steele describes the manipulators:
You will be stonewalled by powerful people who will deter you from getting to the truth. You will be manipulated by savvy sources who do their best to unduly influence your stories. You will be used by those with ulterior motives who demand the cover of confidentiality in exchange for their information. You will be swayed by seemingly well‐intentioned people who want to show you some favor in hopes that you, in return, will show them favoritism in the way you tell their story.5
A cautionary note is in order. Although ethical considerations may occasionally cost you a story, being an aggressive reporter and being ethical are not mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that your job is to inform your audience, and that means being a good, resourceful reporter who gets the story on the web, on the air, or into the newspaper.
Given the real‐life problems you will study in this course, it could be easy to conclude that the ethical choice is simple: Decide against publishing, broadcasting, or posting any news story that is the least bit questionable. But such a choice would itself be unethical. It would signify a failure to fulfill the journalist’s mission of informing the public.
Journalists in the United States would be rightly criticized if they climbed into a fountain to engage in a public protest. But they have the right to work unfettered by government regulation and protected by the First Amendment.
Photo by David Swanson, courtesy ofThe Philadelphia Inquirer..
A Revolution in Journalism
This textbook is intended to help prepare aspiring journalists to cope with the ethics issues of the digital age. Given the profound changes that occurred in the profession when consumers began getting their news on the internet, reviewing how those changes came about is worthwhile.
The global computer network known as the internet dates to the 1960s, but it did not become a part of everyday life until a technological breakthrough nearly three decades later. In 1989 the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Switzerland, created the World Wide Web – a name chosen over “the Mine of Information,” among other suggestions.6 The web allowed computers everywhere to retrieve information being stored in computers that would, in the new parlance, be called servers. The creation of the web was soon followed by the emergence of browsers, the software applications that simplified the computer connections. Berners-Lee developed the first browser in 1990, but Mosaic in 1993 was the first browser to become popular with the public.7 Collectively these developments launched an era of wireless world communications. Ordinary people soon would exchange messages, play games, shop for merchandise and services, watch sports events and videos, and enjoy other educational and recreational opportunities that could only be imagined before.8
Digital journalism rapidly gained in popularity among consumers of news. And no wonder: The internet matched radio and television’s speed; it could far exceed newspapers’ depth of content; and it added the unique dimension of an instantaneous conversation with the audience.
Consumer surveys confirm the increasing popularity of digital as a source of news (Fig. 1.1), mostly at the expense of print. In 2018, the Pew Research Center’s Journalism & Media Project found that 34 percent of US adults preferred getting the news online, second only to television (44 percent) and well ahead of radio (14 percent) and print (7 percent).9
Students reading this textbook have grown up with digital journalism, and that is how their generation predominantly receives the news. But, in the context of 400 years of journalism history, the digital era is a blink of the eye.
The internet’s most obvious effect on journalism has been to speed the way news is covered. In retrospect, the pace of newsgathering in the twentieth century seems almost casual. Newspapers had only a few daily deadlines, and for morning papers those deadlines were at night, hours after most of the news events had happened. Broadcast reporters usually worked toward a few scheduled newscasts. The only reporters who had a deadline every minute were those who worked for the wire services, whose far‐flung client newspapers might be going to press at any time of the day or night. Now, in the digital era, everybody is on deadline all the time.
The emphasis on speed, conveying an implicit invitation to skip crucial verification steps, is not without cost. A 2013 survey showed that three-fourths of US journalists thought “online journalism has sacrificed accuracy for speed.”10 To compound the problem, there are fewer journalists to cover the news today. Newspaper staffs, historically larger than those of broadcast outlets, have been hardest hit in the economic fallout resulting from news consumers’ migration to digital. So far, increases in digital jobs have only partly offset the steep declines in newspaper employment. The Pew Research Center estimated that net employment in US newsrooms declined from 114,000 to 88,000