Journalism Ethics

Arguments and cases for the twenty-first century

Roger Patching, Martin Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415656764
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317963738
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases for the 21st Century explores the major ethical dilemmas facing journalists in the digital age.

Engaging with both the theory and practice of journalism ethics, this text explains the key ethical concepts and dilemmas in journalism and provides an international range of examples and case studies, considering traditional and social media from a global perspective.

Journalism Ethics offers an introductory philosophical underpinning to ethics that traces the history of the freedom of expression from the time of Greek philosophers like Aristotle, through the French and American revolutions, to modern day.

Throughout the book Patching and Hirst examine ethically-challenging issues such as deception, trial by media, dealing with sources and privacy intrusion. They also explore continuing ethical fault lines around accuracy, bias, fairness and objectivity, chequebook journalism, the problems of the foreign correspondent, the conflicts between ethics and the law and between journalists and public relations consultants.

Concluding with a step-by-step guide to ethical thinking on the job, this textbook is an invaluable resource for students of journalism, media and communication.

Part I The Theoretical Framework for Arguments And Cases

1 Ethics and philosophy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315867458-2

Overview And Objectives

The following three chapters set out the theoretical framework for the practical discussions and cases that follow. The purpose of this part is to introduce a theoretical and historical context to our study of arguments and cases in journalism ethics.

The first chapter examines the philosophical principles and traditions on which journalism ethics has been built. Here we explore various ways in which ethics have been explained and explored over the past 2000 years. We make the point that ethics and philosophy have a close, and sometimes problematic, relationship with journalism. In our view, journalists are important public intellectuals who contribute to debate and inform our ideas of both history and philosophy.

The second chapter explores the historical development of ideas that inform our understanding of press freedoms. We show how the economic and political history of the last 300 years has shaped what we know today as ‘freedom of the press’. This chapter outlines how revolutionary change – the emergence of capitalism from feudalism – helped define, and was in turn defined by, the development of a commercial press and the emergence of journalism in the seventeenth century.

The final chapter in this part brings our historical review up-to-date by briefly describing the period of ‘industrial journalism’ that emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the Industrial Revolution. We then explain how the ideology of journalists today – a belief in the market system and the ‘fourth estate' role of the news media – is built on contradictions and fault lines that create the ethical dilemmas discussed in Parts II, III and IV of the book.

After reading the three chapters of this part you will have an understanding of the importance of philosophy, history and theory in any discussion of arguments and cases in journalism ethics, including:

• the philosophical foundations of several traditions that inform journalism ethics today
• the history of freedom of expression, free speech and press freedom and what they mean today
• the concept of ideology and its importance to the debate about journalists’ ethics
• the definitions of common terms: ethics, ideology, public interest, accuracy, balance, bias, fairness and objectivity
• the place of these concepts in a discussion of journalism ethics
• the importance of historical and contemporary debates among journalists, their supporters, and their many critics
• the role of journalists and editors as public intellectuals – with a role in the production and circulation of ideas.

Journalists: Philosophers of the Everyday

Philosophy gave me an insight into my madness. The madness of being a hack … For the last fifteen years I'd been thinking in an irrational way.

Graham Johnson, Hack

Former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson (2012, p. 293), says a chance encounter with philosophy saved his life. Johnson spent years as a tabloid journalist willing to do anything for a story; surviving by suppressing his own moral compass. Johnson's tale of ‘sex, drugs and scandal from inside the tabloid jungle’ reminds us that ethical dilemmas do not just happen in single remarkable moments. As Johnson's confessions demonstrate, some ethical fault lines can take years, or even decades to develop. We now know that the phone-tapping and bribery that came to characterise the NoW newsroom had been encouraged and sanctioned by a succession of editors and senior staff over many years, including those in charge when Graham Johnson was a loyal tabloid hack. Johnson's recovery is a timely reminder that journalists would be better if they discovered philosophy at the beginning of their career, not at the end.

It is not just in moments of quiet desperation, or Johnson's existential angst, that journalists come into contact with philosophy. Journalists are actually everyday philosophers themselves. Journalism is a key social force for the popularisation and dissemination of ideas and, broadly speaking, journalists can be described as the everyday intellectuals who provide the public with a means of understanding the world around them. So there is a strong link between philosophy and journalism, even if the deeply ingrained pragmatism of most journalists leads them to deny it. As J. Herbert Altschull notes, in a history of the ideas behind American journalism, most reporters ‘are reluctant to confess to holding a philosophy’. Altschull sums it up very well: journalists and editors do have a philosophy – even if it is only a belief in the shop-worn ideal of objectivity. Newsworkers arrive at their philosophical understanding of the world, ‘through the assimilation, usually unnoticed, of intellectual concepts that form the basis of Western civilization’ (Altschull 1990, p. 2). We will explore some of these foundation concepts in this and subsequent chapters as no journalist or editor can today ignore their profound and ongoing influence.

It is commonly accepted that journalists and the news media play a gate-keeping role; perhaps not telling us what to think, but certainly providing strong indicators of what to think about and how to go about thinking about these things. So, it is obvious that journalists themselves must think about things, in fact they are engaged in a form of mental labour (Hirst 2012a; Poulantzas 1978; Sparks 2006) that marks out their work as being intellectual in some sense. The thinking work of journalists is then presented as a series of factual accounts and opinion-inflected analyses of the world around us and, because the power of journalism is legitimised by its supposed public interest and professional motivations, it becomes a guide to social action. While not perhaps on the same publiclyrecognised level of intellectuals such as scientists, theologians, eminent scholars and literary figures, journalists deserve to be considered among the ranks of public intellectuals and, in many accounts that describe the history of public life, they are accorded that position. Journalists provide a ‘bridge’ between science, technology and specialist knowledge and the news consuming public (Simmons 2007, p. 10). There was also a time – though we would not call it a ‘Golden Age’ – when journalists and editors were much closer to contemporary philosophers, particularly during the period of the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century (Burns 2006; Daniel 2009; Stephens 2007). Today, the division of mental labour is much greater than it was even 20 years ago and the gap between journalism and philosophy seems much wider than it actually is. Nevertheless, it is possible to point to many journalists who have also become significant public intellectuals (thinkers and philosophers of the everyday) in their own right. The ‘father of electricity’, Benjamin Franklin is one; not only was he an inventor and a dabbler in science, he was a newspaper editor and writer, a diplomat and a participant in one of the most significant political revolutions of the modern age – the American war of independence against British colonialism. We could also add more modern figures like George Orwell to this list; his vast body of work collected in over 40 volumes encompasses fiction (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Burmese Days), science fiction/futurism (Nineteen Eighty-four, Animal Farm), numerous essays on imperialism (Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging), pamphlets on socialism, nationalism and war (Homage to Catalonia, The Lion and the Unicorn, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier) and hundreds of articles on literary criticism (Politics and the English Language). Orwell's work not only gives us an insight into the period in which he was an active journalist and author (roughly 1930 to 1950), it continues to provide insights and reflections that are relevant today.

George Orwell was one journalist who was not afraid to admit he had a philosophy of life, or world-view, which informed his writing. The twentieth century has given us a range of journalist-intellectuals who sit right across the political spectrum. Some are heroes, some are villains and in the end it perhaps depends on your own political, cultural and philosophical outlook how you would describe them. A brief list of some of our favourites would include Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn; John Reed, Louisa Bryant, Hunter S. Thompson; PJ O’Rourke, Ida Tarbell, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Fiske, Michael Moore, Susan Faludi, Naomi Klein and John Pilger. Whomever you might regard as a leading light on this list or your own version, the key point is that for more than 400 years, since the beginning of the Enlightenment in the sixteenth century, there has been a strong link between journalism, newsgathering, news-writing, opinion-forming, philosophy and the growth of democratic public discourse. A discussion of ethics must canvass all of these areas.

An Emotional Attitude

I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention … But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

(Orwell 1946)

Exposing official lies is an honourable and ethical ambition that continues to motivate the best journalists of the past and the present. In his 1946 essay, Why I Write, George Orwell says that most journalists and writers will develop a world view, an outlook on life from which they ‘will never completely escape’. Orwell calls this the ‘emotional attitude’ that is fabricated from all the social relationships that a person is involved in, including their working life. The term ‘emotional attitude’ is perhaps synonymous with what others have called the ‘world view’, or the working philosophy of journalists. It is an attitude that affects ethical thinking and decision-making (Cuillier 2009). We like to use the term ‘emotional attitude’ because it evokes the important idea that the way we think and what we think are very clearly linked to our human emotions. This is doubly important in a discussion about ethics, which involves important emotions like empathy, disgust, love, respect, hate, and fear.

The fault lines in emotional attitudes of journalism today centre on questions of ethics: the ‘right’ way to gather news; the values of ‘accuracy’ and ‘objectivity’; notions of ‘bias’ versus public service; the impact of ‘infotainment’ on news values; the pressures generated by broken business models and the rising tide of ‘user-generated news-like content’ (Hirst 2011). These are the fault lines, or what John Merrill (1989) calls the ‘antinomes’: the contradictory positions and ideas within journalism.

The emotional attitudes that reporters and editors hold, and which colour their view of news, are created in a dialectic: the interplay of opposing ideas (Merrill 1989) and opposing social forces (Hirst 2001). Thus we can talk about an ‘emotional dialectic’ (Hirst 2003): the fluid, contested, and challenging continuum of ideas, attitudes, and ideologies that reporters and editors hold and work within. The emotional dialectic is the process that determines a person's view of the world, builds their philosophical outlook and forms their consciousness. In news media, the ‘interplay’ of opposing forces – the emotional dialectic – carries over into the news agenda and into decisions about how and why a story should be reported. We call this the ‘dialectic of the front page’.

It stands to reason that reporters and editors, like every other citizen, have a range of opinions about many issues. In the case of journalists, the important additional point is that these attitudes have a direct bearing on the work they do. In order to fully understand and appreciate the emotional dialectic of journalism and its relationship to media ethics, we must understand the philosophical roots of the ideas and concepts that inform both the theory and the practice of news reporting. We must also understand how the news product is produced and the conditions of its production. Finally, we need to understand the social context in which the news is both produced and consumed, and the significance of embedded (ideological) meanings.

Philosophy And the News Industry

It's essential for young journalists to understand how our peculiar institution developed, and that it is not a natural kind – it can be changed and reformed.

(Romano 2009)

Carlin Romano makes a compelling case for why a philosophy of journalism is a good idea: young reporters need training in philosophical thinking to hone their ‘intellectual instincts and reflexes’ in the search for truth. It may not be quite so obvious as the link between philosophy and ethics, but there is a strong connection between philosophy and the news industry too. In part the link is very basic – without the circulation of ideas

through news and journalism there is very little material for philosophers to think about. Nor would we know of the work of philosophers without the popular media – journalism, magazines, books, etc. But at a deeper level there is a common historical element that becomes clear when the history of philosophical thinking and the history of news and journalism are placed side-by-side. The thesis that we will explore in this and the next chapter is that the development of modern journalism ethics – as exemplified by ethical codes and practices – arises out of the historical needs of the news industry from the fifteenth century onwards and its intersection with post-Enlightenment philosophies of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This does not seem such a far-fetched proposition if we simply remember that among the first uses of the Gutenberg printing press, invented in the 1450s, was the reproduction, on a mass scale for public consumption, of one of the most enduring philosophical tracts in human history: the Protestant Bible. Gutenberg's edition of the Bible was influential and sparked a challenge to the political dominance of the Catholic Church in European life. Gutenberg's Bible, published in vernacular language, not high Latin, created a religious schism in Europe that eventually helped break the hold of the Pope and his archbishops, led to the establishment of the ‘New World’ as a haven for religious dissidents and paved the way for breakthroughs in science that created the modern world. The scepticism and pragmatism of contemporary journalism is predicated on the scientific and social revolutions ignited by the sparks that flew from Gutenberg's printing press. For nearly 400 years, the fires of freedom were fed by generations of writers, publishers and editors, many of them the ancestral predecessors of modern journalists. It was their passion, determination and refusal to accept the censorship of clerics and kings that laid the foundation for modern news media ethics.

What is Philosophy?

Our study of ethical debates only makes sense with reference to first principles and a brief discussion of philosophy. There is a very clear and long-established link between philosophy and ethics; they are not exactly synonyms, but they are closely related. A sample of easily-accessible definitions of philosophy and ethics demonstrate the links between them

philosophy [fi-los-uh-fee] (noun):

• the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct
• the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, especially with a view to improving or reconstituting them
• a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs, or a system of values by which one lives
• a set of ideas or beliefs relating to a particular field or activity; an underlying theory.

ethics [e-thiks] (noun):

• the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation
• the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group; for example professional ethics.

In fact, ethics is often considered to be a branch of philosophy as Dictionary.com defines it:

Ethics: that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.

The more upmarket Oxford Dictionary agrees: ethics is ‘the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles’. We need not go...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of table and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I The theoretical framework for arguments and cases
• Part II Ethics in practice
• Part III Dealing with the law – ethically speaking
• Part IV The big issues in media ethics
• Bibliography