Lada Trifonova Price - The Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics

As deaths from COVID-19 steadily grew across Europe in March 2020, governments locked down their populations, in many countries permitting work-related travel only for those classified as key workers; in Spain and Britain, these included journalists reporting on the pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 put center stage the critical importance of the provision of reliable information and of stories told in words and pictures about the victims, villains, and heroes of the pandemic. These stories shamed some who flouted instructions to observe social distancing and honored others who risked their lives doing their jobs. They showed the vital work journalists do, albeit often imperfectly, to let us know about the reality of our daily experience and the directions in which truth and falsity lie.

This chapter argues for an approach to journalism ethics that foregrounds the centrality of truth-seeking practices, serving each person and the larger human community, and that cultivates values and virtues such as honesty, justice, and compassion. It can be argued that these practices and virtues are constitutive of journalism itself; without them the occupational practice becomes something else: propaganda, public relations, or show business. Journalism without ethics, in other words, is no longer journalism.

I first examine the subject of ethics itself, taking human action as its subject matter and recognizing that our judgments of it derive from the platforms of understanding constituted by variables such as gender, age, faith, education, and ethnic origin. Sweeping cultural, technological, and social changes have made us more alert to the imbalances in power and resources that have privileged certain ethical accounts over others. As fellow authors recount in this volume (). Nevertheless, I argue that one shared language (there may be others) that allows us to characterize and describe ethics in a way that makes conversation between us meaningful can be found in the virtue ethics tradition. I take it to be the ground upon which an ethics for journalism can stand in its emphasis on human agency and flourishing, truth-seeking and truth-telling, and orientation to the common good.

Second, I address a fundamental issue posed for journalism ethics, placed into sharp focus by the digital transformation of news and information curation and dissemination (see Van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2018). The institutional ethos of journalism advocated by liberal pluralists (see below) has been that of a journalism characterized by truth-seeking, free speech at the service of the public, and democratic values. However, this has long been seen by critical political economists as incompatible with the market business model within which journalists must largely work. For these scholars, media institutions, far from speaking truth to power, speak the truths of the powerful and ill serve the powerless because of the political economy by which they are structured (see Herman & Chomsky, 2010). The evident crisis of the news business model also underscores the increasingly problematic status of journalism as a practice that can serve the political ethos of democratic states (see Pickard, 2020), already undermined by citizens loss of trust in mainstream political leaders. Part of the remedy for this, I finally argue, lies in nourishing and teaching the values and virtues that constitute journalism through ambitious educational programs for all of us.