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JOURNALISM ETHICS AS TRUTH-TELLING IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | We look to journalists to be our eyes and ears about important events. We avail ourselves of journalistic expertise in collecting and interpreting facts that are vital to our own decision-making or that inspire our interest. The information presented by journalists is generally so important to our lives that we expect journalists to the best of their abilities to write and speak the truth. Journalism, like science and history, is about truth-telling, although not all truth-telling is newsworthy. The fact that readers and audiences depend on the accuracy of news reporting in deciding what to do is the source of moral obligation in journalistic ethics. The enterprise of gathering and presenting the news is pervaded by experienced judgment in which professional, moral and market considerations mostly coincide but sometimes collide. As in any sphere in which individual or collective human judgment is called upon to decide the merits of specic actions and general policy, journalism like other professions out of necessity has developed a particular ethics. As Alia, Brennan, and Hoffmaster (1996) emphasize, journalistic ethics, whether implicit or encoded, guides the decisions that journalists and consumers of the news must make. There are conflicts of interest that arise daily for practicing journalists, and these conflicts, between the facts the public needs and wants to know, and the profit motive, reporters' personal, political, religious, and other biases, create tensions that are reected in the moral choices about whether and how to report certain facts as news that journalists must repeatedly make. The problems affecting practicing journalists in this respect are well-documented in the recent literature especially by Seib (1997), Olen (1988), Knowlton and Parsons (1995), and Fink (1995). The problems to be explored in the discussion to follow feature the question of a general principle of journalistic ethics in the unifying expression of a professional moral imperative, explaining the moral rights and responsibilities of working journalists. Directly associated topics ranged around this central theme in turn emphasize the challenges of maximally relevant truth-telling in the public interest and for the public good, and hence of avoiding deliberate and unintentional falsehoodsand of responding appropriately when these occur in reporting the news. The difculty of properly judging relevance and of the sorts of information that are or are not in the public interest for journalists to convey to their readers and audiences is illustrated and critically examined in light of a particular recent case study in developing the general theme of the relation between abstract moral journalistic ideals and the concrete realities of actual journalistic practice. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203869468-28&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 266 |
| Page Count | 10 |
| Starting Page | 257 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780203869468-28 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2009-10-20 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Cultural Studies Decision Making Readers and Audiences Reporting the News |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
