Media Ethics Teaching in Century 21: Progress, Problems, and Challenges

Abstract

What is the status of media ethics as a specialty in the journalism and mass communication (JMC) programs of North American colleges and universities at the turn of the century? This article is the fourth in a series in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator that addresses major parts of that question-the current goals, content, and key issues in media ethics instruction. The article also reports on classroom practices and summarizes the research and creative activities of media ethics teachers.1 More broadly, the series of articles has sought to serve as a continuing progress report on the academy's search for ways to develop applied ethics as a liberal arts component in the education of journalists and mass communicators. An important aspect of that effort is the status among JMC units of the separate course in media ethics. A new measure introduced in the current survey compares the perceptions that media ethics teachers and JMC administrators have of the standing of media ethics instruction and research and of the relationship of that academic specialty to the practice of journalism. The proximate audience for this fourth article is the readers of JMCE and the more than 400 journalism educators who have participated in the National Workshop on the Teaching of Journalism & Mass Communication, as well as readers of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics and Media Ethics, the Magazine Serving Mass Communication Ethics. It also is intended for the members of the Media Ethics Division and sister divisions within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)1 plus the small, but vitally important group of editors and reporters who seek to connect themselves actively with the ethics teaching movement in the academy. Literature Review The scholarly and professional work that most closely informs this and the earlier articles spans the twentieth century. A concern for the moral health and effectiveness of a democratic press infused Walter Lippmann's earliest books. In his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, Lippmann articulated the difference between news and truth and argued that neither the press nor major institutions of society-as then constituted-were offering the public the quantity or quality of knowledge which a democratic theory of the press demanded. Institutions were implored to interpose form of expertnoss between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is ontangled.2 Seven years later, his A Preface to Morals drew upon philosophy, history, and the then nascent social sciences. The book reflects, among other goals, Lippmann's personal and passionate search for an ideal of journalism that would reverse the decline of journalistic standards brought on by the Jazz Age reporting of the 1920s. In an age when secularism seemed to be gaining new strength, he argued that the when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. Then he penned the following lines in his 1929 book, which some would say could have been written as easily for media ethicists working in our own pluralistic context of the early twenty-first century: The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach. The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is.3 Christians noted that the book went through six editions in the first year, and described it as a rallying point... against the nihilism and despair usually associated with the twenties.4 Between the two Lippmann volumes at either end of the decade, professors of journalism themselves contributed to the national conversation about the press. Nelson Crawford outlined ethical standards and guidelines for journalism students; Leon Flint developed case studios of ethical decision making for the classroom. …