Ethics

History

Concerns over the press' weaknesses are at least as old as the country. Abuses of the press were first explicitly linked to ethical principles at the end of the nineteenth century. During the 1890s a transition occurred from everyday commentary to a more reflective period, with criticism of various kinds growing into a systematic collection of ethical precepts and several examples from this decade can be listed. Sensationalism had always been criticized through the century, but it took serious institutional form in the late 1890s during the circulation battles between New York Journal's William Randolph Hearst and the New York World's Joseph Pulitzer before and during the Spanish-American War. As telegraph and then telephone services were established, privacy became an urgent issue as sensitive diplomatic, military, and business information crossed multiple borders, especially in Europe. Gifts to journalists and free travel to sports events and meetings (freebies and junkets, as they were called) scourged by media critics since 1870, were now treated more systematically in the context of individual accountability. The groundwork was laid for the free press/fair trial debate.

The elementary work of the 1890s evolved into a more comprehensive effort during the 1920s as journalism education was established within university liberal arts programs. Four important textbooks in journalism ethics appeared in this period: Nelson Crawford's Ethics of Journalism (1924), Leon Flint's The Conscience of the Newspaper (1925), William Gibbons' Newspaper Ethics (1926), and Albert Henning's Ethics and Practices of Journalism (1932). They were similar in the topics they considered central: reporters and sources, economic temptations and conflicts of interest, national security, free press/fair trial, deception, fairness, accuracy, sensationalism, and protection of privacy.

However, the flurry of journalism scholarship in the 1920s, the growth of professional societies with codes of ethics, and individual journalists who made ethics a priority—even together these trends could not prevent the demise of ethics in the face of an antithetical worldview called scientific naturalism. After Crawford's 1932 book, the term “ethics” and its cognates disappeared from mass communications book titles for forty years in North America. Instead of ethics, advances in the physical sciences became the ideal as academics—including those in communications—promoted its methods and principles. Lawrence Murphy in 1924, for example, saw the scientific approach to news as the only safeguard against bias and amateurishness. Centered on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news were said to mirror reality. The period from the 1930s is typically described as the social scientific phase of communications study, and objectivity was a quasi-scientific method appropriate to it. Objectivity in journalism helped give the press legitimate status alongside the older and more prestigious professions of medicine and law.

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