Ethics

Historical Background

The rights and responsibilities of journalism and the possibility of regulating journalistic conduct have been debated in Western societies since the oldest known newspaper was published in Germany in 1609. But the abuses of the press were not explicitly linked to ethical principles until the end of the 19th century. During the 1890s, a transition occurred from everyday commentary about news reports to a more reflective period, with criticism of various kinds beginning to develop into a systematic ethics. Several examples from this decade can be listed: Sensationalism had been a problem from the beginning, 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. Gifts to journalists and free travel to sports events and meetings (freebies and junkets, as they were called) scourged by media critics during the 19th century were now treated more explicitly in the context of big business accountability. Telling the truth as a moral principle was extracted for the first time from the practice of accurately reporting facts. Invasion of privacy entered the ethics agenda also, based on Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “The Right to Privacy” in the December 1890 Harvard Law Review. In addition, 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’s Newspaper Ethics (1926), and Albert Henning’s Ethics and Practices of Journalism (1932). Inspired by Abraham Flexner’s “Carnegie Reports” on professional training in a university context, a key impetus behind the creation of the early educational programs in journalism was the perceived need to enhance its respectability. Including ethics helped meet that goal.

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 collapse of ethics in the face of an antithetical worldview called scientific naturalism. After Henning’s 1932 book, the term ethics and its cognates disappeared from mass communications book titles for 40 years in North America. Instead of ethics, advances in the physical sciences became the ideal as academics— including those in journalism—promoted its methods and principles. The period from the 1930s is typically described as the social scientific phase of journalism 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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