PressEthic

I found an interesting article written by two leading media ethicists and published back in 2001 in the U.S. State Department's Global Issues: Media and Ethics journal (Vol. 6, No. 1).

In "Media Ethics Codes and Beyond," Robert Steele and Jay Black analyze the ethics codes of 33 American Society of Newspaper Editors member newspapers in order to draw conclusions about the "most common and useful aspects" of this sample of ethics codes.

It's an interesting project, in and of itself. But it's especially interesting to review the article's findings now -- five years later -- with hindsight on our side.

First off, let's place this article in its proper historical context. When it was published in 2001, the 1998 Stephen Glass New Republic scandal would've been just a few short years in the past, but the scandals involving Jayson Blair at The New York Times (2003), Jack Kelly at USA Today (2004), and Mitch Albom (2005) had yet to occur.

Given this, one wonders if the article was published at a time when journalistic ethics still enjoyed a relative measure of innocence -- as compared with today's more cynical and, consequently, more cautious approach to ethics. Indeed, the authors note that fewer than 50% of the ethics codes in the sample address the topics of sources (confidential and otherwise), plagiarism, and deception -- topics that would soon receive all too much attention in the wake of the Blair, Kelly, and Albom scandals.

I was surprised by the article's reference to a "recent flurry of code writing" at US newspapers. Moreover, the article goes on to identify this trend as part of an increasingly serious approach to ethics issues that was taking root 2001. It's strange to imagine ethics in a nascent, un-codified state as recently as 2001, but this article certainly hints that this was the case.

The article identifies conflicts of interest as the most commonly included subject in the sample of ethics codes. That's not surprising, given that conflicts of interest are an age-old dilemma both in journalism and many other professions.

However, it's quite interesting to note the ethical issues that have been enabled by technological improvements since 2001, or which have become more relevant as business conditions in the newspaper industry have changed in the past five years.

For example, only half of these ethics codes covered the manipulation of photographs -- an ethical issue that received much recent attention when photographs of this summer's Israeli-Lebanese conflict were found to have been doctored to enhance their dramatic appeal. And less than 20% of the codes addressed "tensions between the editorial and advertising departments," an issue that has received increasing attention as advertising dollars and bottom line concerns have come to dominate the newspaper industry.

And the point of this walk down media ethics' own Memory Lane?

Rather than being set in stone -- as "thou shalt" and "thou shalt nots" -- ethics in journalism are constantly in flux and ever-evolving in order to effectively respond to the pragmatic realities of the journalism industry.