Ethical Orientation and Judgments of Chinese Press Journalists in Times of Change

Abstract

Against the background of media and social transformation, this study examines Chinese press journalists' ethical orientation and tolerance for ethically controversial practices. The former captures journalists' theoretical conception of ethics along a consequentialist versus absolutist spectrum; the latter speaks to journalists' ethical judgment in relation to concrete practices. Analysis of a survey of press journalists (N = 2,109) found that a substantial minority of the respondents were subscribing to ethical relativism. Different types of controversial reporting practices were tolerated to different extents. Multivariate analysis shows that those working in online newsrooms, those who perceived substantial commercial influences on news work, and those who valued the advocacy role of the press exhibited a stronger relativistic orientation, whereas respondents who valued the information dissemination role of the press exhibited a stronger absolutist orientation. But there are mixed findings regarding the impact of other predictors, which hint at the complexities of the evolution of journalism ethics in China.

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NOTES

Notes

1. As media reform in China has led to an increasing need on the part of media organizations to attract advertising revenue, and yet the party organs also need to retain their function as the mouthpiece of the government, many “press groups” were formed, typically comprised of a local Party newspaper and one or more market-oriented newspapers. The advertising revenues generated by the latter can be used to subsidize the operation of the former. This can be considered as a special kind of media conglomeration aiming at consolidating resources and management, while keeping the Party newspapers in operation.

2. Method-wise, there are two sources of biases which may undermine the sample's representativeness of press journalists in China. The first is the purposive sample of news organizations. While resource constraints have forbidden the study to target a randomly selected set of news organizations, the study has tried to alleviate the problem by including a geographically diverse range of news organizations. The second is that not all invited journalists participated in the survey. This problem of non-response bias may be compounded by the fact that we contacted each journalist only with an email. Hence participation was particularly dependent on the journalists' own initiatives. While the response rate of 60% is reasonably high, strictly speaking we cannot ascertain whether the sample is representative of journalists in the news organizations. Nevertheless, the size and geographical diversity of the sample should make the results valuable and illustrative.

3. RMB5000 roughly equals US$800. The average wage in China varies across regions. In 2012, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, the average income is between RMB4000 and RMB5000. In second-tier cities, the average income is between RMB2000 and RMB4000 yuan. According to the statistics by Zhilian, a local human resource agency, the average wage of a white-collar worker in Shanghai and Beijing RMB7214 and RMB6947, respectively.