This issue features an eclectic group of articles that explores the nature of moral obligation among media professionals and how such obligations can either be misdirected, misunderstood, or simply not carried out. They also make clear the importance of recognizing various cultural, institutional, and individual dimensions of professional duties. In journalism and public relations, the sectors focused on in this issue, those duties are numerous and often conflicting.
Karen L. Slattery offers an insightful analysis of the recent revision of the ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists and suggests it reflects a “morally pluralistic” expression of journalistic duties, virtues, and goals. She identifies several subtle yet significant shifts in language that suggest greater effort to articulate journalism as a profession, while at the same time reflecting an effort to respond to technological and economic challenges for responsible news work. Burton St. John III and Yvette E. Pearson challenge the corporate-conscience role often urged on public relations practitioners, suggesting that this notion may limit crisis-communication effectiveness. Offering up an analysis of the handling of a tragic 2013 death of a 13-year-old girl by hospital officials, St. John III and Pearson suggest that public relations specialists should focus on advocating a shared responsibility for ethical decision making and promoting robust and widespread moral deliberation. H. Denis Wu and Cheryl Ann Lambert explore the yawning gap between professional journalistic standards and the reality of the Taiwanese news media. A host of powerful corporate, external, and market forces serve to systematically emasculate journalistic autonomy and ultimately promote self-censorship in what has been described as among the freest media systems in Asia. Finally, despite the fact that transparency has been a hot topic in media for several years now, Michael Koliska and Kalyani Chadha suggest that it has been reduced to various technical features in online news production that have little connection with opening up the decision-making processes of journalists to public scrutiny. This “digital outsourcing” is great for corporate image construction, but does not demonstrate a genuine commitment to truly transparent engagement, they argue.
This issue also features our Cases and Commentaries section, edited by Ginny Whitehouse.