John P. Ferré

Grounding an ethics of journalism

This essay is a revision of “Rudiments of an Ethics of News Reporting,”; which won honorable mention in the 1985 Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii/ AEJMC Prize for Student Papers on Journalism Ethics. It argues that news reporting suffers from a misplaced faith in individual autonomy, a faith that resists a sense of social duty on the basis of negative freedom; therefore, journalism stands in need of a moral theory that recognizes community and personhood as fundamental human characteristics essential to ethical decision‐making.

Communication ethics and the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr

The growing interest in ethics among communication professionals parallels the declining credibility of communication institutions among the public. The preponderance of description of current practices and attitudes together with an emphasis on individual decision making indicate that communication ethics may serve the purpose of image enhancing more than of genuine moral change. Reinhold Niebuhrs concept of justice is applied to advertising as a preliminary case study to illustrate both the need and a reasoning method for normative social ethics in communication.

Book Review: The Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects, by W. Russell NeumanThe Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects. Russell NeumanW.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016. 369 pp.

advice. Furthermore, patients on these shows are more likely to be blamed if they are members of groups already stereotyped as irresponsible, including African Americans, the poor, and the young. These thematic trends in medical dramas contribute to the hegemony of personal responsibility, but Foss’s analysis suggests that the programs stop short of promoting patient empowerment. Although the personal responsibility model of health has led to government explicitly inviting patients to be more “active” in their health care, Foss finds that medical dramas portray active patients—who look up medical information on the Internet, for example, or seek out alternative therapies—to be annoying, and likely to interfere with doctors’ ability to provide effective medical care. Foss’s thematic analysis of these programs is carefully done and clearly written, and the significance of these themes is made clear through contextualization in the institutional and opinion context surrounding health in the United States. Foss draws on past research to demonstrate that medical shows have been shown, in the past, to influence attitudes and behaviors, but whether the emphasis on the personal responsibility model in these programs has had such an influence is not directly demonstrated here. Television and Health Responsibility in an Age of Individualism brings textual analysis into conversation with the dominance of the personal responsibility model in American health care. The specificity to the American context is something that might have been acknowledged. Broadening the lens for this project could include closer engagement with scholars who have theorized the rise of personal responsibility as it relates to broader shifts in governance, including health care, such as Deborah Lupton (The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body), Nikolas Rose (The Politics of Life Itself), and Rebecca de Souza (“Local Perspectives on Empowerment and Responsibility in the New Public,” in Health Communication). Readers could come away from the book with the impression that the personal responsibility model is solely the product of American commitments to individualism and the particular desire of American institutions to minimize their burdens. However, theorists have traced the rise of responsibilization across political formations broadly recognized as neoliberal. By engaging in dialogue with this critical, international work on health, Foss might have deepened this book’s theoretical contribution, and broadened the audience for its findings.

49.95 hbk.

By Ron Rapoport, ed.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017, 592 pp.Ring Lardner is remembered today for his short stories, especially the dark monologue “Haircut,” but he spent most of his lif...

The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner

To help students learn the concepts, personages, and events central to a course on religion and media, students were charged with designing a board game or a card game that employed this information. They drew from required books and documentaries, which the instructor chose for breadth and inclusiveness, focusing on both print and electronic media as well as on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The games were evaluated according to the appeal and educational value of the game design, the clarity and coherence of the written instructions, and the accuracy, significance, and comprehensiveness of the knowledge tested. The assignment helped maximize the time students spent thinking about key information in the course. It also provided the instructor with games that students in future classes can play to help them learn terms central to the study of media and religion.

All Work and All Play: Using Games to Teach Religion and Media

Most books about religion and popular culture fulfill one of the four objectives of media literacy. Books such as A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor decode elements of popular culture from fashion to sports by zeroing in on the commercial forces behind their production and consumption. Others analyze popular culture, as Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America does by showing how religious artifacts—bathtub Madonnas, say, or portraits of Jesus— can stimulate religious feelings and sensibilities. A third group evaluates popular culture, as Andrew Greeley’s God in Popular Culture does by arguing that much popular culture promotes positive theological values. Finally, guidebooks such as Dean Henrich’s Media Strategy and Christian Witness explain how to produce religious communications. But this latest addition to the religion and popular culture library, targeted to the key media literacy audience of high school students, does not explain how to decode, analyze, evaluate, or produce religious media. The goal of Jesus, Fads, & the Media is much more basic: It simply points out that Christianity can be found throughout popular culture. Michael Evans, a Fuller Theological Seminary graduate, who tutors writing in Pasadena, California, shows that Jesus permeates popular culture in the United States and Canada, appearing in movies—two of the book’s six chapters are devoted to movies—as well as television, popular music, print media, and the Internet, not to mention apparel, jewelry, and various accessories sold by Christian bookstores. At its best, the book explains both contemporary controversy and historical context, as it does in the first chapter, which focuses on Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie, The Passion of the Christ. After explaining Gibson’s desire to revitalize the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the chapter explains passion plays, stations of the cross, and changing images of Jesus, then discusses the praise the movie

Michael Evans, Jesus, Fads, & the Media: The Passion & Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Mason Crest Publishers, 2006. 112 pages.

(1996). Jack Fuller, News Values: Ideas for an Information Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 252 pp. Paper,

22.95 hardcover.

22.95. American Journalism: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 372-373.