Search for A Global Media Ethic

A Special Issue of the journal of Mass Media Ethics

Jay Black, Ralph D. Barney, JMME

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780805895988
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000149807
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Computer Science

Less than two months after the September 11 tragedies, a group of scholars gathered at Washington and Lee University to advance ideas on whether there can be a universal set of moral values toward which media professionals may look for guidance. Those conference scholars, whose works appear in this special issue, both challenge and reinforce conventional wisdom. An entertaining and useful centerpiece launches the discussion, suggesting four standards that tend to be universal, but need discussion to attach themselves to journalism. This is followed by a look at the ambiguity of codes relative to those who use them. In a more abstract approach, the September 11 attacks are seen as creating the need for a commitment to global communitarianism to align powerful western media and the rest of the world. The next article examines the aftermath of a code drafting program for Central American journalists, declaring that long-term effects have been minimal. An excerpt from the keynote speaker concludes the conference texts, citing the relationship between listener and radio and posing the choice for the listener as one between ignorance and freedom.

Journalism After September 11: Unity as Moral Imperative

Dennis D. Cali
East Carolina University

□ Following the terrorist attacks of September 22, 2001, journalism in the United States changed. Journalistic norms of objectivity and distance opened to a participatory mode of reporting. A communitarian journalism emerged in which journalists became “at one” with their subjects as they lived the story they were reporting. Chiara Lubich of Italy presents a philosophical foundation for this journalistic approach, proposing “unity” as the ethic that should guide mass media communicators. In this essay I review Lubich’s moral perspective and consider its implications for media ethics.

Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” quaked on September 11, 2001, as terror attacks on New York and Washington ignited a new awareness of multi-layered discord in the global community. Televised reports of those atrocities, together with continual reports of terror across the world, were graphic reminders of deep fractures in the human family. But equally graphic were media portrayals of an emergent post-9/11 unity. Especially in the first days after September 11, the mass media lionized ordinary heroism within America’s national family, giving ubiquitous and unprecedented attention to public and private acts of compassion and solidarity.

This new, unifying journalism has persisted since September 11, 2001, leading journalists to reflect on changes that have occurred in journalistic norms. This essay identifies those changes as communitarian and considers the moral theory formulated by Chiara Lubich of Italy as a philosophical foundation for them. For more than 60 years as leader of the Focolare Movement, an international communitarian organization that promotes civic and religious unity, Lubich has urged people in religious and civic structures to live for one another and to make themselves one with their neighbor. (Focolare, which is Italian for “hearth,” conveys the sentiment of unity felt when people gather around the family fireplace.) Lubich poses her communitarian moral ethic as a normative ethic capable of guiding communication practice across the globe and of helping to unite the global village.

Journalism’s “New Normal”

In the days immediately after September 11, 2001, a shocked and grieving media devoted extensive attention to the goodness with which Americans reacted to the terror attacks on New York and Washington. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, ran a story about an ironworker’s voluntary decision to take his tools to Ground Zero to help remove tons of steel (Fuoco, 2001). News magazines rushed out special issues featuring sobering yet heartwarming photographs of ordinary people helping each other through the carnage.¹ ABC News’ Bill Blakemore (2001, para. 2) characterized the hastily arranged National Day of Prayer and Remembrance as “an act of national unity.”

In the months following the attacks, the news media institutionalized its initially visceral and reactive coverage. The New York Times, for example, began a daily feature called Portraits of Grief (2001) describing the lives of people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.² Howell Raines, executive editor of The Times, called the feature the “purest example of good journalism also providing a kind of glue to a community and perhaps a nation” (Raines, 2001). Magazines analyzed “the new normal,” with Newsweek’s report of “the Mets embracing the Braves at Shea Stadium” and a “’60s radical… flying Old Glory” (Gates, 2001, p. 54) and U. S. News & World Report’s story on a psychologist who has changed the way she treats her patients since September 11 (Simon, Howe, Reese, Huriash, & Neusner, 2001). The media also ran frequent updates on the progress of those who survived—and the families of those who didn’t.

Larry King Live, for example, kept track of the pregnancy of Lisa Beamer, widow of Todd Beamer, one of the passengers on Flight 93 believed to have fought back against hijackers and forced the plane down in Pennsylvania. Biographical coverage that once would have been the softest of soft news has become an ongoing commitment of news organizations’ hard-news staff.

This unprecedented and continuing coverage of the lives of ordinary people and the positive outcomes of the September 11 tragedy has caused media professionals to muse publicly on how news and journalism have changed since the “day the world changed.” In the week following the attacks, media critic Howard Kurtz (2001) wrote,

To look at anything published before Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. … is to realize how suddenly, dramatically, unalterably the world has changed. And that means journalism will also change, indeed is changing before our eyes, (pp. Cl, C3)

Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC News and PBS, saw “overnight” change:

The focus of news seemed to change overnight from escapist fixation on celebrities, stars, gossip, and the super rich to a seriousness of purpose, a concern for the truly significant news of the day, and, interestingly, a renewed appreciation for ordinary working people as the pillars of society—the firemen, policemen, emergency workers and others who became the new, larger than life heroes and victims of the day. (Grossman, 2002, para. 3)

A seismic shift in journalism since September 11.

Citing Robert Lichter, president of the Center of Media and Public Affairs, columnist Fred Barnes (2001) contemplated historic changes in the press:

For a generation now, the type of reporting practiced first in Washington and then nationwide has been adversarial, cynical, and highly negative. … Since it was the experience of covering the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate that helped create this sort of reporting, might the trauma of September 11 propel the press toward a more positive, dispassionate, and ideologically impartial style …? Robert Lichter thinks so. “There’s been a seismic shift in journalism since September 11,” he told me. “The idea of the journalist as critical outsider has been blown to smithereens.” (p. 2)

Journalists were living the story, not just reporting.

How could the news not have changed? Most of those who produce national news live and work in New York or Washington and so were not just reporting the story—they were living it. And every one had a story to tell, like the Time, Inc., executive who described her son fleeing his office in the World Trade Center while Time’s employees braved a potentially collapsing Rockefeller Center to turn out a 48-page special issue. (Kadlecek, 2001, para. 6). The horror of “homeland” terrorist attacks forced journalists to live the story even as they reported it. Although some reporters (such as war correspondents) routinely carry such a burden, most news staffs were unprepared for a tragedy that made the usual journalistic norms of objectivity and self-imposed distance seem irrelevant and even unobtainable.

As personally significant coverage becomes a new normal—fueled by atrocities such as the February 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan—journalists must begin to work out the philosophical underpinnings of new journalistic norms. Veteran reporter Haynes Johnson (2001), chiding the news business’s tendency toward “fragmenting of the audience,” called for “a better job of reporting” and “a better job of celebrating the best in us”:

We’ve got to put aside our illusions and we’ve got to sort of unite, not just in a flag-waving moment, which is fine, but that could be a temporary moment. … We won’t resolve all the hatreds, but does it mean forging new coalitions? Yes. [Does] it mean a worldwide effort in common interests? Yes, it means that. (para. 19; brackets in original)

Reporting his first visit to the former site of the World Trade Center, Johnson said that witnessing young people cheer and pass water bottles to police officers and firefighters made him feel enormously hopeful because the young people “were united with everybody else at the moment” (Johnson, para. 20).

Even before September 11, theorists about journalism were discussing—with some urgency—the news media’s role in promoting unity in society. Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon’s (2001) study of the media, for example, offered the concept of good work—work that exhibits both excellence and ethics—as a way for journalism to assist in strengthening the human community. Now, as Gardner noted in a recent interview (Potier, 2001), “September 11 has given journalists a new lease on what they should be doing. Whether in the long run, that will re-align the domain, it’s way too early to say.” Journalists looking for a philosophical justification for their new or revitalized sense of being at one with their subjects may find what they’re searching for in communitarianism, the “line of thought that offers the notion that the individual is interdependent with the group” (Coleman, 2000, p. 43).

Toward a Discourse of Community

Heralded by Nietzsche’s cataclysmic announcement of the death of God, a pervasive grand narrative of the 20th century was anomie—a fundamental feeling of separation—from God, from others, from oneself. The term culture of separation was coined to describe the times (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 277). Individualism was said to under-cut the public life on which the “sacredness of the human person and the inviolable order of human rights” is realized, bifurcating the self from the communities that at least partly constitute the self (Grasso, Bradley, & Hunt, 1995, p. 3). Collectivism—the identity politics of viewing oneself in terms of one’s membership in a certain community or social group—did not resolve the self-society split. Instead, it often amounted to tribalism, wherein one group jockeyed for its own advancement often in competition with other groups or the common good (Bidinotto, 1996).

Concurrent with the separatist turn, and perhaps as a response to it, a discourse of “community” emerged. Connection (or interconnection) frequently surfaced as a theme in feminist and environmentalist rhetorical theories, with metaphors such as “bridge” and “web” (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986). The literary, philosophical, and rhetorical worlds witnessed interest in consensus, “an awareness or understanding that agreements are held” (Farrell, 1999, p. 144) as a legitimating epistemological standard. Habermas (1981/1984) theorized that participants would “harmonize their individual plans of action with one another” to reach such consensus (p. 294). Even in the religious realm, solidarity joined the ranks of other cardinal virtues as “a key virtue needed to address the problems of our world” (Hollenbach, 1995, p. 150).

Communitarianism … aims to recover the self-society union.

The field of journalism, too, responded to fractures in the social fabric, by tapping into the discourse of community. Coleman (2000) traced journalism’s response from the individualist’s rights-based paradigm to the recommendations of the Hutchins Commission in 1947 and its ensuing Social Responsibility theory. The rise of investigative journalism, initiated at the turn of the 20th Century and reaching peak moments during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, intensified the journalists’ sense of responsibility to the public good, understood better through Habermas’ (1987) ruminations on “the public sphere.” Journalists would immerse themselves in community so as to obtain first-hand (rather than third-person) perspective on reality, even sponsoring citizen input to discuss current affairs. This practice reached its height with a new journalism, in which the reporter (e.g., Tom Wolfe) was the story. The 1970s also saw the founding of the American News Service, which was devoted to news about community-building and concerned itself with the participation of “ordinary people” in democracy (Gardner et al., 2001, pp. 192–193). Throughout the 1990s, and continuing today, Civic Journalism (also called Public Journalism) sought to reinforce community solidarity (Gardner et al., p. 202). But communitarianism, the philosophy that views humans as communal beings, presents the most determined alternative to fragmentariness, individualism, and collectivism, because it aims to recover the self-society union.

The communitarian paradigm coheres around three operative principles. First, the communitarian’s view of the individual is of the embedded self. From widely diverse perspectives, communitarians endorsed the notion that “[p]ersons are fundamentally connected, with each other and with the world they inhabit” (Frazer & Lacey, 1993, p. 102). Communitarians endorsed a social constructionist notion that “people are constituted by the social bonds within which they live” (Daly, 1994, p. 79). That social bond included the stories and myths embedded in particular communities (MacIntyre, 1994a). “Individual integrity and social decency go together,” wrote Elshtain (1995), adding that society “is not a giant personification of a sepa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Universal Ethical Standards?
• A Universal Code of Journalism Ethics: Problems, Limitations, and Proposals
• Journalism After September 11: Unity as Moral Imperative
• The Search for Ethical Journalism in Central America and the Failure of the New Orleans Declaration
• Either Ignorance or Freedom
• Cases and Commentaries
• Book Reviews