The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
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them in court. And, finally, meeting the deadlines for today’s newscast or tomorrow’s newspaper always seemed to take priority over the intellectual exercise of writing down their professional beliefs.
However, as Kovach and Rosenstiel’s research proceeded, it became clear that certain beliefs were widely and strongly held. These beliefs guided the authors to a definition of journalism’s primary purpose: “to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self‐governing.” They elaborated in The Elements of Journalism: “The news media help us define our communities, and help us create a common language and common knowledge rooted in reality. Journalism also helps identify a community’s goals, heroes and villains.” 4
An affirming statement of journalism’s purpose was crafted by Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, and Robert G. Kaiser, The Post’s managing editor, in their 2002 book The News About the News. Downie and Kaiser wrote:
Citizens cannot function together as a community unless they share a common body of information about their surroundings, their neighbors, their governing bodies, their sports teams, even their weather. Those are all the stuff of news. The best journalism digs into it, makes sense of it, and makes it accessible to everyone. 5
Kovach and Rosenstiel identified the key principles – which they called the “elements” – of journalism. Six of those are listed here:
Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. Although truth is difficult to define, there was unanimity among journalists that the first step is “getting the facts right.” Kovach and Rosenstiel concluded that “the disinterested pursuit of truth” is what distinguishes journalism from other forms of communication, like propaganda and entertainment. 6
Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens. The authors described “an implied covenant with the public” that the work is honest. The covenant, they wrote, “tells the audience that the movie reviews are straight, that the restaurant reviews are not influenced by who buys an ad, that the coverage is not self‐interested or slanted for friends.” This first allegiance to the readers, viewers, and listeners is the basis for journalistic independence. Journalists are most valuable to their employers if they put their duty to the audience ahead of the employer’s short‐term financial interests. 7
Journalism’s essence is a discipline of verification. This principle is the basis of techniques that reporters and editors rely on to get the facts right, such as “seeking multiple witnesses to an event, disclosing as much as possible about sources, and asking many sides for comment.” 8
Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover. Journalists are observers, not players. For their reporting to be trusted, reporters have to be detached from the people and events they cover. They must ensure there is not an appearance of a relationship that would conflict with their journalistic duties. 9
Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power. News media have a watchdog role, “watching over the powerful few in society on behalf of the many to guard against tyranny.” Essentially, journalism is a court of last resort when the systems of government and business break down. Kovach and Rosenstiel note that the media should report when powerful institutions are working effectively, as well as when they are not. 10
Journalists must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. The news media have an obligation to amplify the community conversation, allowing citizens a voice in comments on news websites, letters to the editor, op‐ed essays, and radio and television talk shows. Kovach and Rosenstiel caution that the journalist has to be “an honest broker and referee” who insists that the debate is based on facts, because “a forum without facts fails to inform and a debate steeped in prejudice and supposition only inflames.” 11
Defining ‘Social Responsibility’
For more than a century before The Elements of Journalism articulated them, journalism standards had been steadily improving. Underlying this trend was the news media’s growing acceptance of social responsibility – a concept that, in its application to commerce, imposes on business enterprises a moral duty to make their communities better. This is a duty that goes beyond merely obeying laws. Although social responsibility is not discussed here as a religious matter, a principle in Judaism known as tikkun olam seems to define it. Tikkun olam (pronounced tee‐KOON oh‐LUHM) is Hebrew for “repairing the world” – an obligation to fix the problems of society, including violence, disease, poverty, and injustice. 12
In the world of commerce, a company’s acts of social responsibility might involve contributing money and executive time to charities, hiring the disabled, or going beyond legal requirements to prevent pollution. A classic business example is the straightforward way in which Johnson & Johnson responded to the Tylenol tragedy of 1982. Someone tampered with containers of Tylenol on store shelves in Chicago, inserting cyanide that eventually killed seven people. Through the news media, the company immediately warned the public not to buy or use Tylenol until the source of the contamination had been found. Next, Johnson & Johnson recalled every container of the pain reliever. The company did not put the product back on the market until its containers had been made tamper‐proof. A lesser corporate response might have doomed the popular pain reliever, but Tylenol’s sales quickly rebounded. 13
In journalism, Adolph Ochs embraced the idea of social responsibility when he bought The New York Times in 1896 and immediately published a pledge “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.” 14 Eugene Meyer, who bought The Washington Post in 1933, similarly adopted a business plan based on journalistic independence: “In pursuit of the truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for public good.” 15
One impetus for social responsibility in the news media was commerce. America’s first newspapers were political organs, but in the 1830s that was changing, “stimulated by industrial growth, the development of larger cities, and technological innovations including steam‐driven printing presses.” Publishers and editors began aiming at a mass market, one in which it made economic sense to report the news neutrally instead of from a party perspective. 16 By the 1880s, the concept of neutral reporting was well established.
By the first half of the twentieth century, journalists’ aspirations for professionalism were growing. Better‐educated people were joining the workforce, and the world’s first journalism school was launched in 1908 at the University of Missouri. 17 Newly formed organizations of journalists quickly adopted codes affirming their responsibility to report the truth and to be fair. The first of these codes was the Canons of Journalism ratified by the new American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1923. 18
The Journalism of an Earlier Era
In spite of these signs of growing awareness of press responsibility, the historical record shows examples of journalism practiced through the mid‐twentieth century that would horrify today’s practitioners and news consumers alike.
Fabrication was not uncommon. In an article in Columbia Journalism Review in 1984, Cassandra Tate described one telling episode. The New York World established a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in 1913, and the bureau’s director noticed a peculiar pattern in the newspaper’s reporting on shipwrecks: Each story mentioned a cat that had survived. When the director asked the reporter, he was told:
One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat a feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck, there was no cat, but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take a chance,