Disrupting Journalism Ethics
Disrupting Journalism Ethics sets out to disrupt and change how we think about journalism and its ethics. The book contends that long-established ways of thinking, which have come down to us from the history of journalism, need radical conceptual reform, with alternate conceptions of the role of journalism and fresh principles to evaluate practice. Through a series of disruptions, the book undermines the traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and just the facts reporting. It proposes an alternate philosophy of journalism as engagement for democracy. The aim is a journalism ethic better suited to an age of digital and global media.
As a philosophical pragmatist, Stephen J. A. Ward critiques traditional conceptions of accuracy, neutrality, detachment, and patriotism, evaluating their capacity to respond to ethical dilemmas for journalists in the 21st century. The book proposes a holistic mindset for doing journalism ethics, a theory of journalism as advocacy for egalitarian democracy, and a global redefinition of basic journalistic norms. The book concludes by outlining the shape of a future journalism ethics, employing these alternative notions.
Disrupting Journalism Ethics is an important intervention into the role of journalism today. It asks: what new role should journalists play in todays digital media world? And what new mindset, new aims, and new standards ought journalists to embrace? Its aim is to persuade and provoke ethicists, journalists, students, and members of the public to disrupt and invent.
Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist, author, and educator. He is Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics at the University of British Columbia, founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, USA, and former director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. He was a war correspondent, foreign reporter, and newsroom manager for 14 years and has received a lifetime award for service to professional journalism in Canada. Ward is the author of nine books on journalism and media ethics, including The Invention of Journalism Ethics (2006) and the award-winning Radical Media Ethics (2015).
Disruptions: Studies in Digital Journalism
Series editor: Bob Franklin
Disruptions refers to the radical changes provoked by the affordances of digital technologies that occur at a pace and on a scale that disrupts settled understandings and traditional ways of creating value, interacting and communicating both socially and professionally. The consequences for digital journalism involve far reaching changes to business models, professional practices, roles, ethics, products and even challenges to the accepted definitions and understandings of journalism. For Digital Journalism Studies, the field of academic inquiry which explores and examines digital journalism, disruption results in paradigmatic and tectonic shifts in scholarly concerns. It prompts reconsideration of research methods, theoretical analyses and responses (oppositional and consensual) to such changes, which have been described as being akin to a moment of mind blowing uncertainty.
Routledges new book series, Disruptions: Studies in Digital Journalism, seeks to capture, examine and analyse these moments of exciting and explosive professional and scholarly innovation which characterize developments in the day-to-day practice of journalism in an age of digital media, and which are articulated in the newly emerging academic discipline of Digital Journalism Studies.
Native Advertising
Lisa Lynch
Geographies of Journalism
The Imaginative Power of Place in Making Digital News
Robert E Gutsche Jr. and Kristy Hess
Disrupting Journalism Ethics
Radical Change on the Frontier of Digital Media
Stephen J. A. Ward
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Disruptions/book-series/DISRUPTDIGJOUR
First published 2019
by Routledge
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2019 Stephen J. A. Ward
The right of Stephen J. A. Ward to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ward, Stephen J. A. (Stephen John Anthony), 1951 author.
Title: Disrupting journalism ethics: radical change on the frontier
of digital media / Stephen J. A. Ward.
Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2019. | Series:
Disruptions: studies in digital journalism | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025193 | Subjects: LCSH: Journalistic
ethics. | Online journalism. | Ethics.
Classification: LCC PN4756 .W365 2019 | DDC 174/.907dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025193
ISBN: 978-1-138-89574-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-17937-7 (ebk)
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Why disrupt?
This book examines how we think about journalism, and how to change it. It asks: what new role should journalists play in todays digital media world? What new mindset, new aims, and new standards ought journalists to embrace?
The italicized words should, ought indicate that this is a book about journalism ethics. Journalism ethics is not difficult to define. Journalism ethics is the responsible use of the freedom to publish; it is the study and application of the norms that should guide responsible, public journalism. That is the easy part. The hard part is saying what responsible means in general what principles and stances? and, what it means in particular how to apply these norms to complex situations in daily journalism. Saying what the ethics of journalism should be is doubly difficult because of rapidly changing media, new practitioners, new values, and new practices. Today, journalism ethics is a problem , a zone of contention.
Why start with how we think? Because, as a philosophical pragmatist, I am interested in the consequences of beliefs, i.e., how we think and arrive at decisions, and what difference that makes in the world. To trace the consequences, one must be able to identify the beliefs. One must be a philosophical detective, noting that certain ideas are at work below the surface of our actions and thinking, as unstated assumptions.