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Chapter 14
The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy
In this chapter, we examine the changing news landscape and definitions of journalism. We will:
• Explore the values underlying news and ethical problems confronting journalists
• Investigate the shift from more neutral news models to partisan cable and online news
• Study the legacy of print-news conventions and rituals
• Investigate the impact of television and the Internet on news
• Consider contemporary controversial developments in journalism and democracy—
specifically, the public journalism movement and satirical forms of news
I. Modern Journalism in the Information Age
A. What Is News?
1. Characteristics of News
B. Values in American Journalism
1. Neutrality Boosts Credibility—and Sales
2. Partisanship Trumps Neutrality, Especially Online and on Cable
3. Other Cultural Values in Journalism
4. Facts, Values, and Bias
II. Ethics and the News Media
A. Ethical Predicaments
1. Deploying Deception
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2. Invading Privacy
3. Conflict of Interest
B. Resolving Ethical Problems
1. Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham and Mill
2. Developing Ethical Policy
III. Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism
A. Focusing on the Present
1. Getting a Good Stor
2. Getting the Story First
B. Relying on Experts . . . Usually Men
C. Balancing Story Conflict
D. Acting as Adversaries
IV. Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet
A. Differences between Print, TV, and Internet News
1. Pretty-Face and Happy-Talk Culture
2. Sound Bitten
B. Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics
C. Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism
D. The Power of Visual Language
V. Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake News”
A. The Rise and Decline of the Public Journalism Movement
B. The Shifting Meanings of “Fake News” and the Rise of Satiric Journalism
VI. Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role
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A. Social Responsibility.
B. Deliberative Democracy.
C. A Lost Generation of Journalists
Global Village: News Bias around the Globe
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Telling Stories and Covering Disaster
Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism
LECTURE IDEAS
I. Modern Journalism in the Information Age
• American journalists generally think of themselves as information gatherers and follow
commonsense criteria for determining newsworthiness. Define this set of criteria, and give
examples of news according to the “What Is News?” discussion in the text.
• Consider how the first suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing were described as dark-
haired, bearded men of Middle Eastern heritage. The idea that a horrible bombing could have
been perpetrated by white Americans was difficult at first for the media to grasp, and not
surprisingly, such reports made hate crimes against Arab Americans and Muslims soar after
the blast.
• Here’s what Jim Lehrer told Columbia Journalism Review Daily’s Liz Cox Barrett about
objective news reporting on June 6, 2006:
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I don’t deal in terms like “blatantly untrue” . . . that’s for other people to decide. . . . I’m not
in the judgment part of journalism. I’m in the reporting part of journalism.
• Brent Cunningham, Columbia Journalism Review’s managing editor, offers a pertinent
discussion of the principle of objectivity in “Re-thinking Objectivity” (CJR, July/August
2003). A failure of the press, Cunningham writes, is “allowing the principle of objectivity to
make [journalists] passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and explainers
of it.” He argues that the principle of objectivity can become an obstacle on the way to
finding “truth” for several reasons:
• It excuses lazy reporting. Most reporting ends when a reporter has “both sides of the story,”
in a he said-she said fashion, leaving the reader alone to decide who’s right and who’s wrong.
• It makes reporters hesitant to inject into the news issues that aren’t already there.
• It often fails to cut through the omnipresent spin because nearly every word a reporter hears
from an official source has been shaped to the proper effect.
• It fails to fill the vacuum left by a weak political opposition.
• Here is the full text of what “fake” reporter Rob Corddry said to Jon Stewart on The Daily
Show on August 23, 2004:
Corddry: I’m sorry, my “opinion”? No, I don’t have “o-pin-i-ons.” I’m a reporter, Jon,
and my job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating
the other. Little thing called “objectivity”—might wanna look it up some day.
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Stewart: Doesn’t objectivity mean objectively weighing the evidence and calling out
what’s credible and what isn’t?
• Former New York Times reporter Doug McGill writes eloquently about the objective method
and its drawbacks in his blog, The McGill Report. Quoting from his essay, McGill writes,
“Some reporters, including me in my early days, actually wear their ignorance as a badge of
honor. ‘Give me any subject and I can write a story within minutes,’ they crow as, I said, did
I. But of course, that just means they can paint-by-numbers really well. They can take a
bunch of facts and press them into the daily journalism mold that makes a story, really fast.
But as for nuance, as for complexity, as for truth?” You can find McGill’s entire essay at
http://www.mcgillreport.org/objectivity.htm.
II. Ethics and the News Media
• Discuss the use of deceptive, invasive, and ethically conflicting practices that plague
American journalism.
• Discuss absolutist and situational ethics as they relate to media as well as to school and life.
How do they differ? What are their uses? Relate them to the Society of Professional
Journalists’ Code of Ethics (Figure 14.1 in the textbook).
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of truck driver Reginald Denny, as videotaped by a helicopter news crew. Although it was
not often mentioned in the 1992 coverage, race-related riots have a long, ugly history in the
United States, including brutal violence in East St. Louis and elsewhere in 1917; in Chicago,
Charleston, Omaha, and Washington, D.C., in 1919; in Mobile, Beaumont, and Detroit in
1943; in Los Angeles in 1965; all over the country in 1967; and several times in the 1980s in
Miami.
• A National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission)
studied racial violence and its media coverage after widespread rioting in 1967. The
commission found that (1) news coverage doesn’t create more violence, (2) coverage tends to
overemphasize law-enforcement activities and minimize the underlying grievances, and (3)
the press refers to “blacks” and “black problems” but frequently does so as if blacks weren’t
part of the audience. The same problems resurfaced in the coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles
riots.
• Here are some examples of joumalism’s integrity problems:
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• Some reporters, often spurred by raw ambition, but sometimes also simply
overwhelmed by pressure, have either invented stories or plagiarized the work of
others. Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass are probably the most notorious perpetrators.
thereafter, the Times was shaken by another ethical scandal when it came to light that
forty-three-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg had relied on the reporting of a
stringer for a 2002 feature story on oyster fishermen in the Florida panhandle and had
failed to give the stringer credit. Bragg was suspended and later resigned. His first
project after leaving the Times was to write the authorized biography of Jessica
Lynch. The scandals were taken very seriously by the Times, which created a new
position, “public editor,” to provide readers with a “watchdog” over the paper’s
reporting. (Refer to the many issues raised by the paper’s public editors at:
http://www.nytimes.com/column/the-public-editor.)
• Stephen Glass was a twenty-five-year-old associate editor at the New Republic who
had a reputation for being a whiz kid with the ability to track down the most unusual
stories. But he was forced out of his job in 1998 when it was revealed that he had
elaborately fabricated dozens of stories written for the New Republic, George, Rolling
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Stone, Harper’s, and Policy Review, inventing quotes and characters to make his
stories more interesting. To cover his made-up work, Glass carefully created phony
phone messages, voice mails, fax numbers, notes, and letterheads to get past
magazine fact-checkers. After Glass was fired, he enrolled in law school at
Georgetown University (“Why waste his lying skills?” quipped media critic John
Sutherland of the Guardian in London). In the same week in May 2003 that Jayson
Blair’s years of lying were exposed, Glass’s semiautobiographical novel, The
• Newsweek writer Joe Klein put himself in an ethical predicament by writing the
“anonymous” novel Primary Colors (1996), which was then heavily promoted by
Newsweek, along with stories that attempted to guess the author’s identity.
Newsweek’s editor lied, along with Klein, about not knowing the book’s author. Klein
now writes for Time.
• The blurring of the lines among PR, government, and journalism jobs also poses ethical
questions. Pete Wilson, who used to be the spokesperson for the Department of Defense in
the George H. W. Bush administration, joined NBC. Susan Molinari, a congresswoman from
New York, accepted in 1997 a job to work on air for CBS. George Stephanopoulos, President
Clinton’s former aide, became a commentator for ABC. In 2003, Victoria Clarke, known as
Torie, joined CNN as a political and policy analyst after having been the Pentagon’s
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spokeswoman during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Clarke was instrumental in developing the “embeds” program, which allowed
journalists to join combat troops on the front lines in Iraq. Before working at the Pentagon,
Clarke was general manager in Washington for Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm.
Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has continued to appear
on Fox News as a political commentator.
• In the summer of 2011, a long-simmering cell-phone-hacking scandal involving British
tabloid News of the World, a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire (which in
the United States includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post), sent
shock waves through Great Britain and beyond. The scandal stretched over several years and
several cases, going back at least to 2002, when days after the disappearance of thirteen-year-
old Milly Dowler, News of the World began intercepting the girl’s e-mail messages. Here is a
rough time line of events:
• In 2005 and 2006, the tabloid reported information from voice-mail accounts of the
royal family, and in 2007, a newspaper editor and a private investigator received jail
time for intercepting hundreds if not thousands of voice-mail messages.
• In July 2009, the Guardian reports alleged that World had paid £1 million to suppress
evidence of the phone hacking.
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• In January 2011, new allegations and revelations of phone hacking led police to
reopen their investigation of World.
• In April 2011, World admitted to phone hacking and posted a public apology on its
Web site.
• On July 10, 2011, News of the World published its final issue.
• On July 13, 2011, in the resulting storm of controversy and opposition from
Parliament, Murdoch withdrew $12 billion bid for BSkyB, the largest pay-TV
broadcaster in Britain.
• On July 14, 2011, the scandal crossed the Atlantic. The FBI launched a probe into
allegations that News Corp. hacked the phones of victims of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. Rupert Murdoch and his son were also personally summoned to
appear before a parliamentary committee back in London.
• On July 15, 2011, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton announced his resignation, and
Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International (the company that runs News
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Corp. papers in Britain), stepped down (she was editor-in-chief at World during the
phone hacking of Milly Dowler).
• On July 17, 2011, Brooks was arrested in connection with the scandal. Allegations of
bribery and other corruption of police by the News International organization
dominated the headlines, leading Sir Paul Stephenson, the head of Scotland Yard, to
resign his position.
• On July 19, 2011, Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and Brooks appeared at the
parliamentary hearing. They denied to Parliament that they knew about the phone
hacking.
• By August 4, 2011, thirty-five individuals had filed invasion of privacy lawsuits
against News Corp.
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• Arthur Hayes, a scholar of media ethics and law, points out that we now have and need a
“fifth estate”: professionals, academics, and even comedians who serve as press critics and
watch over whether journalists are doing their job as watchdogs over the government. Hayes
refers to Stephen Colbert’s comedic skewering of President George H. Bush—as well as the
press who covered his administration—at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006.
Colbert told the elite assembly of politicians and journalists: “Here’s how it works. The
President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions,
and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em
through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife.
Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid
Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction.”
(You can show Colbert’s comments to your class: http://www.c-
span.org/video/?c4519958/stephen-colbert-white-house-correspondents-association-dinner.)
III. Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism
• Explain, with examples, the reporting rituals in modern American journalism, including
focusing on the present, relying on experts, balancing story conflict, and fostering an
adversarial relationship with public figures and institutions. Explore the limitations of the
principle of objectivity. Also explain how television news has changed some of those rituals
and whether Internet journalism changes them further.
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• Refer to Neal Gabler’s commentary on the 2016 presidential election, and ask students to
evaluate his assessment critically. Gabler states:
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to
be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media,
boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as
media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white
America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide
between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of
information—a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already
believe. (Neal Gabler, “Farewell, America,” Moyers & Company, November 10, 2016,
http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america.)
• Here is a quote from a memo to Wall Street Journal staff titled “A Matter of Urgency” sent
on May 19, 2010, from managing editor Robert Thomson: “The scoop has never had more
significance to our professional users, for whom a few minutes, or even seconds, are a crucial
advantage whose value has increased exponentially.”
• When CNBC reported that eBay and Yahoo! might merge in March 2000, CNBC’s reporter
Steve Frank was relying on sketchy information at best and was trying to be first with the
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exciting announcement. Although the merger didn’t happen, Frank’s story had real-life
implications: eBay’s stock rose $20 a share in twenty-four hours, and Wall Street was in a
tizzy in after-hours trading. The next day, the story was deemed hardly worthy of a mention
in the Wall Street Journal. This mistake points to the extreme competition for business
news—especially on cable and the Web— that has put an extra premium on being fast and
first.
They were not subjected to censorship but were forbidden to move around without their unit,
to interview soldiers off the record, or to talk to Iraqis without official authorization. Many
critics warned that the so-called embeds would face ethical dilemmas when having to report
on the people with whom they were traveling over a period of several weeks and who were
guaranteeing their protection. “Embedding is a way to kill the press with kindness,” said New
York University media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller to AlterNet. “You absorb
reporters into the advancing military unit, and they’re psychologically inclined to see
themselves as part of the military operation.” In fact, embeds have essentially provided two
types of stories: the human-interest stories about the soldiers’ lives and the narration of troop
movements. In this case, although they might have provided interesting insights into
particular skirmishes, embeds, of course, lacked the bigger picture and couldn’t report on the
overall progress of the war.
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• Many media critics argue that one of the most troubling developments in current U.S.
journalism is a diminished adversarial relationship between journalists and the important
leaders and institutions they cover. These critics contend that it is far more comfortable for a
journalist to act as a stenographer—recording the official statements from the White House
or Congress—than it is to question the veracity of such statements or provide context for
those statements. These critics believe that, as a result, mistruths have permeated the news
unchallenged, among them the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the
2003 invasion or a definitive link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
Believe None of the Three
Believe One or More
Fox
20%
80%
CBS
30
70
349
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activists throughout Newark. The book is a model for any student interested in long-form
investigative journalism or reading a good “story.”
IV. Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet
• Discuss how the Internet’s role in spreading news and images can, in a sense, last forever and
be a double-edged sword.
• Between 1968 and 1988, the length of the average sound bite declined from forty-three to
nine seconds (see Hallin, 1992). Here are examples:
• ABC World News Tonight, October 4, 1988:
ABC reporter Barry Serafin: Under criticism even from some Republican Party elders for
not talking enough about issues, and seeking to blunt Democratic charges of callousness,
Bush unveiled a new proposal called YES, Youth Engaged in Service, aimed at enlisting
wealthy kids to help poor ones.
Bush: The end result, I hope, is that citizen service will become a real and living part of
every young American’s life.
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Serafin: But by the second stop of the day . . . the vice president was back to the tried and
true, the one-liners that in California, for example, have helped him erase a double-digit
deficit in the polls. On crime:
According to Daniel Hallin, today’s television journalists treat words more as raw materials
to be edited, shifted around, combined with sounds and images, and reintegrated into a new
narrative. Besides words, accompanying visuals have also become shorter and are used more
often. Instead of letting the interviewee dictate the interview’s content, journalists take more
control of the story (another reason the use of “experts” has increased). Consequently, the
news is now much more centered around journalists than it was in earlier decades. The
journalist, writes Hallin, “not the candidate or other ‘newsmaker,’ is the primary
• Here’s some information about how online journalism is changing journalism practices:
• Many newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Miami Herald, are now fully
integrating their online news divisions with their print divisions. The Herald and the
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Times both have a “Continuous News Desk” that operates 24/7, continuously
updating stories.
New York Times in many ways leading the way toward full integration. Journalists at
the Times are now expected to develop multimedia and adapt stories for online
publication. These developments speak volumes about the kinds of reporters
newspapers will be hiring in the future: reporters who are versatile; who understand
good reporting, good writing, and good video editing; and who can easily jump from
a podcast to an interactive multimedia narrative to an in-depth investigative print
story.
• Here is part of a memo that executive editor Tom Fiedler sent out to the entire Miami Herald
staff in 2006:
We are beyond being satisfied with incremental change and giving a polite head nod toward
of the newsroom; it’s a fundamental product of the newsroom.
