Journalism Ethics from the Public's Point of View

Abstract

This article uses the first independent and publicly available survey of Canadian attitudes about news media to raise two fundamental questions about how the public is related to the project of journalism ethics—the improvement of newsroom standards. The first question is conceptual: How should we understand and measure public attitudes about news media? The second question is practical: How should we go about reforming newsroom practices to meet those public expectations? The paper critiques current models for measuring public attitudes and argues for the adoption of a more adequate model, “ethical holism.” The paper also argues for a new approach to practical reform of news media, called “public participation ethics.”

Keywords:

• Journalism
• Journalism Ethics
• Ethics
• News Media
• Media Credibility
• Holism

Notes

1. This paper focuses on journalism ethics and media credibility in North American journalism. Similar surveys have found declining public confidence in news media in Europe.

2. Concepts have been defined in many ways, as abstract mental ideas, images, universals, prototypes, paradigms, linguistic entities, representations in a computational language of mind, the grasping of “family resemblances” among members of a class, and rules that anticipate future experience (Weitz, 1988).

3. There are many theories about conceptual schemes in current psychology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Minksy (1975), for example, thinks of schemes as symbolic structures called “frames.” Others think of them as “schemas” or “patterns of activitation” distributed over neuron-like units (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986). Bruner (1973) thinks concepts form mental “codes” that condense experience and anticipate future experience.

4. By “domain,” I mean any topic or practice that becomes a subject of inquiry. A domain could be an area of practice such as law or journalism, or a phenomenon investigated by science.

5. Details are available at www.canadianmediaresearch.org.

6. Most Canadian media research is commissioned by media organizations, and much of it is not made public. This survey was a project by the Canadian Media Research Consortium, with researchers from the University of British Columbia School of Journalism in Vancouver, the communication and culture programme at York University in Toronto, and the Department of Information and Communication at Laval University in Quebec. The lead investigator was Donna Logan, director of the UBC School of Journalism. Other investigators were Fred Fletcher of York University; Angus Reid of Angus Reid Communications, Vancouver; Colette Brin of Laval University; Mary Lynn Young and myself, from the UBC School of Journalism. The project director was Darlene Haber. The study consisted of telephone interviews with 3012 Canadians, conducted by the Mustel Group of Vancouver, in November and December of 2003. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

7. The code is available at www.spj.org.

8. For example, the technical definition of bias in journalism traced the etymology of the term, the forms and causes of bias, and the different senses of the term in the social sciences. It also showed how “bias” is related to concepts such as “stereotype.” The working definition simplified this technical discussion. It defined bias in journalism as follows: “Journalists are biased if they allow their personal interests, values and beliefs to distort their reports, making them unbalanced or untrue.”

9. I do not claim that every person conceptualizes ethical issues in this manner, on every occasion. I do claim that ethical holism is a plausible model for a substantial amount of ethical thinking.

10. For holism in biomedicine, see Lawrence and Weisz (1998). On holism and culture, see White (2002). For holism in environmental ethics, see Marietta (1995). On holism and literary study, see Craige (1988).

11. For example, to understand how a metal coin or piece of paper can have value as “money,” one must understand larger social and economic conventions.

12. For holism in social science, see Phillips (1976), James (1984) and Albert (1986).

13. See Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001).

14. But with one major caveat. My holism recognizes the validity of both atomistic analysis and holistic synthesis. Atomistic and holistic approaches are methodological strategies that should be used in varying degrees at varying times. What approach is called for depends on the problem being addressed, and the stage of inquiry.

15. The locus classicus of atomism in the philosophy of language is the work of Vienna Circle positivists in the early 1900s, and Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Mind of 1921 . Wittgenstein's early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1994 [1974]) is cited as a source of Russell's logical atomism, the view that one could clarify language by analyzing propositions into their fundamental logical elements.

16. On semantic holism, see Devitt (1996) and Woodfield (1982). For a criticism of semantic holism, see Fodor and Lepore (1992).

17. For the classical treatment of definition by essential features, or necessary and sufficient conditions, see Aristotle's On Categories and Posterior Analytics (Aristotle, 2001, pp. 38–61).

18. This is not an argument against attempting to clarify and define our concepts. It is an argument against overly optimistic expectations of definition.

19. For an analysis of logical contradiction and contrariness, see Aristotle's On Interpretation (Aristotle, 2001, pp. 38–61).

20. Frankfurt introduced the idea of “orders” in his ethical analysis of desires. He said people have first-order desires to perform particular actions, and second-order desires about what first-order desires they want, or should have (Frankfurt, 1988, p. 164).

21. In The Invention of Journalism Ethics (Ward, 2005a), I provide a holistic interpretation of objectivity in journalism.

22. By “structure” I mean the “macro” features of the media system—patterns of ownership and government regulation, the diversity of views, and the economic and technological basis of news media.

23. The American Association of Newspaper Editors has made enhancing media credibility a major project. See its speeches, conferences and writings on the topic at www.asne.org. Also in the United States, journalists have formed the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which conducts studies and seminars on ethical issues. See www.journalism.org. In Canada, credibility was the theme of a panel at the annual meeting of the Canadian Newspaper Association in 2004.

24. The survey was conducted for the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists by the Pew Research Center, March 10 to April 20, 2004. It surveyed 547 national and local American reporters, editors and executives (http://people-press.org).