Douglas Birkhead

News media ethics and the management of professionals

Professionalism reduced to its central ideal involves the autonomy of an occupation to control its own practice. This ideal coincides with the most fundamental prerequisite of ethical behavior: the freedom to make ethical choices. This essay argues that professionalism has not provided journalists with the appropriate kind of autonomy for fully meaningful ethical behavior.

An Ethics of Vision for Journalism.

Journalism ethics is preoccupied with the efficiency of conduct and the cultivation of a decision‐making expertise. This essay argues that morality is a form of reality construction requiring a socially negotiated sensibility. Such a view is more harmonious with the essential interpretive task of the craft of journalism. The approach stresses the importance of moral imagination as an aspect of moral reasoning. Ethical action depends on an ethics of vision, a “seeing”; before doing.

The American Newspaper Columnist

Many of us who teach opinion writing are prone to treat the newspaper column as a personalized offshoot of the editorial. The column is an ambiguous journalistic form, and any account of its origins is highly speculative. This book chooses to highlight its democratic lineage. Journalism historian Sam G. Riley suggests the American newspaper column evolved from the published letters of numerous citizen writers, amateur and literate alike. In proposing a candidate for the nations first actual columnist, Riley has selected a largely symbolic exemplar of the craft: Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist and advocate of Indian rights who wrote weekly letters for a New York newspaper in the 1840s. Child is the first of 780 columnists from the Antebellum period to the present sketched in this fine reference work. Riley himself is included, if only modestly in the preface, having written a column of Southern Whimsy for several Georgia newspapers as a young journalism professor. The American Newspaper Columnist is the authors third book on the topic, having been preceded by an anthology and a biographical dictionary, all published by the Greenwood Publishing Group. The current volume is also mainly biographical, but the brief profiles are woven into chronologies within categories of column writing, such as humor, poetry, and politics. Separate chapters are devoted to general syndicated columnists and local pundits. A final chapter on minority commentators is an excellent historical catalogue ofmore than 130 columnists, beginning with Gertrude Bustill Mossell, an African-American schoolteacher from Philadelphia, whose first column appeared in 1885. Other pioneering practitioners include George Samuel Schuyler, W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, and Langston Hughes. The association of the column with the editorial comes with the rise of the political columnist, a specialist gaining prominence in American journalism primarily in the 20th century. But the figure who perhaps best exemplifies the history of the vVmerican column, capturing the essence of its identity as a native form ofdemocratic expression, is the humorist. As Riley suggests, humor is a barometer of freedom and equality. Long before these basic civil rights were extended to all Americans as citizens, they began to appear in the manners of society. Humorous writing over the course of the 1 9th century reflected the loosening of social restrictions and the lowering of class barriers. The style and content ofmany early newspaper humorists exalted folk wisdom. Journalisms lighter side helped incubate the nations