To Publish or Not to Publish? Assessing Journalism Ethics in News about a Terrorist Attack

ABSTRACT

This article compares how the Swedish public and journalists assessed the ethical aspects of harmful exposure and dissemination of unverified information in news reporting of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. The analysis derives from comparable web surveys with 1092 journalists and 3881 citizens who answered identical questions about the attack. Focus is placed on ethics as an expression of journalistic practice and the influence of situational factors on ethical assessments. The findings demonstrate an overall similarity between the public’s and journalists’ assessments of ethical judgments made in the news reporting, but also notable differences. Furthermore, significant differences were found between journalists who had personal experience of reporting on the terrorist attack and those who did not. One conclusion is that the public assesses ethical decisions based on information aspects more than do journalists, while the opposite is true for considerations of personal integrity. The main contribution of this study is that it adds to previous research on the influence of organisational and individual factors by demonstrating the additional influence of situational factors on journalists’ ethical assessments.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism ethics
• journalism practice
• crisis communication
• situational factors
• journalist roles
• panel survey

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Grant # 2017-2860 from the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by The Swedish Civil Contingency Agency.