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When We're Good, We're Very Very Good The conventional wisdom on journalistic ethics is wrong, says a new study. “How much worse can it get for ethics in journalism and credibility?" muses Casey Bukro, ethics chair of the Chicago Headline Club. Actually, it could get a lot worse. What if journalists didn't think about ethics at all? Instead, they brood, none more than Bukro. That's why the Association for Women Journalists panel discussion this month is "As Military Music Is to Music: Journalistic Ethics in a Changing Media Environment." It's why Chicago has an Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists, a joint project of the Headline Club and Loyola University that was Bukro's idea. The other day he announced that the AdviceLine is now easier than ever to take advantage of: it can be reached by phone at 866-DILEMMA (toll-free) or online at ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org. If you're a reporter lost in an ethical thicket, help is at hand. Bukro's announcement makes it clear that in his view help is direly needed. He laments, "Four CBS News producers and executives are fired for failing to meet basic journalistic standards in preparing a '60 Minutes' report on President Bush's National Guard service, and issuing a series of misleading statements in defense of the story. Tribune Media Services cancels Armstrong Williams' syndicated column for taking $240,000 in government money to promote a Bush administration education program. With each new report of ethics bungling, tensions between journalists and the public they serve grow worse. Journalists need ethics advice more than ever." Let's say that journalists do. The larger point is that journalists know they do. That's because journalists, by and large, are righteous people whose moral development is significantly above average -- or so we're told by The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics, published in January. The book, by journalism professors Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University, discusses their recent survey of 249 journalists across the nation. A summary of their findings appeared in last fall's issue of the Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly. They write, "Thinking like a journalist involves moral reflection, done at a level that in most instances equals or exceeds members of other learned professions. There is some irony in this result; public opinion would not support such an assessment of journalists as sophisticated moral thinkers. As is frequently the case, conventional wisdom is not always supported by empirical evidence." Wilkins and Coleman sat down with journalists, asked them to describe themselves and their jobs, and quizzed them on a series of hypothetical situations in which there was no clear course of action. Some of these situations were journalistic, some weren't. What the journalists decided should be done was less important than the reasons they gave for their decisions: for instance, choosing to not run a story based on the harm it might do outweighed not running it because some readers might cancel their subscriptions. Journalists were given a "P score," which measured the percentage of the time they were guided by "universal ethical principles." Their average score was 48.68 -- placing them well behind seminarians and philosophers and slightly behind doctors and medical students. Yet journalists were ahead of every other group Wilkins and Coleman found P scores for. In descending order they were dental students, nurses, graduate students, undergrads, accounting students, veterinary students, enlisted navy men, orthopedic surgeons, adults in general, business professionals, business students, high school students, and prison inmates. At rock bottom, with a P score of 20.0, were junior high school students. Unsurprisingly, Wilkins and Coleman tell us that "journalists in this study did significantly better on dilemmas in their field than other types of ethical problems." Those dilemmas are the ones they study in J school, chew over in bars, and learn about from experience. The authors found that moral development advances with age, education, and on-the-job autonomy, and that investigative reporters are more reflective than average reporters. "It has been shown," they write, "that investigative reporters make moral decisions regarding wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for the public good, serve as moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of reporters." In other words, they act on their own authority. The two most interesting correlations Wilkins and Coleman brought out were these: "For every one-point increase in religiosity, there was nearly a two-point decline in moral development scores. . . . For every one-point increase in importance of the law, there was nearly a two-point decrease in moral development scores." Wilkins and Coleman are suggesting that people who leave the big decisions to a higher authority are less morally developed. Reviewing past studies of other fields, the authors write that "religion has been positively correlated with moral development to a point. More fundamental or conservative beliefs are correlated with lower levels of moral development. Some theorize that a higher ethical orientation requires critical reasoning that may be opposed to fundamental religious beliefs." One other result: the study found broadcast journalists to be just as ethical as print journalists, despite "professional opinion" to the contrary. Wilkins and Coleman were examining how journalists think about what they do, not what they do after they're done thinking. "The disconnect between attitudes and behavior is well documented," they write. I asked Wilkins if the journalistic disconnect might be greater than in some other fields. "I don't think so at all," she said. "We're all people." |
