Sandra L. Borden

Professionalism, Not Professionals

The proliferation of news and information sources has motivated a need to identify those providing legitimate journalism. One temptation is to go the route of such fields as medicine and law, namely to formally professionalize. This gives a clear method for determining who is a member, with an array of associated responsibilities and rewards. We argue that making such a formal move in journalism is a mistake: Journalism does not meet the traditional criteria, and its core ethos is in conflict with the professional mindset. We thus shift the focus from whether the person is journalist to whether the work satisfies the conditions that characterize legitimate journalism. In explaining those conditions we also look at mechanisms for enhancing the power of persons doing journalism, drawing upon lessons from the labor movement. We also consider a self-declaration model while urging increased literacy from all participants in the news gathering and consuming enterprise.

Communitarian Journalism and Flag Displays after September 11: An Ethical Critique:

This analysis suggests that neither objectivity nor descriptive articulations of civic-public journalism provide the best normative frameworks for evaluating journalistic flag displays after September 11. The core ethical problem was that journalists displayed an oppressive, nationalistic patriotism resting on hegemonic assumptions that neither perspective adequately addresses. Journalists are encouraged to adopt communitarian journalism as the philosophical foundation for constructing an alternative patriotism rooted in a broadly human conception of the common good.

Communitarian journalism and the common good: Lessons from the Catholic Worker

The US newspaper the Catholic Worker (CW) is an instructive example for developing a key concept in communitarian journalism theory: the common good. The principal question to be examined in this article is: how can communitarian journalists make constructive use of the inherent tension between particular common goods and the common good? To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the CW in negotiating two particular tensions: the tensions between spiritual/temporal and between Catholic/American. A secondary question to be explored is: how can communitarian journalism move beyond liberal tolerance in responding to difference in pluralistic societies? To answer this question, I will elaborate on the CW’s practices of hospitality, which have allowed staffers to remain faithful to the paper’s particular conception of the common good while actively engaging with, and learning from, their non-Catholic neighbors.

Mapping Ethical Arguments in Journalism: An Exploratory Study

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the potential of a cognitive mapping variant called argument mapping for representing the process of ethical reasoning in journalism. The assumption is that some ethical reasoning journalists do on the job may be observable in the ethical argumentation that takes place among peers in newsroom discussions about ethically problematic situations. After some background on cognitive mapping and the novel aspects of its application in this study, an extended example is presented to illustrate the usefulness and limitations of the argument mapping technique in this context.

Detroit: Exploiting Images of Poverty

The Journal of Mass Media Ethics publishes case studies in which scholars and media professionals outline how they would address a particular ethical problem. Cases are drawn from actual experience in newsrooms, corporations, entertainment arenas, and other agencies. We invite readers to call our attention to current cases and issues. (There is a special need for good cases in advertising and public relations.) We also invite suggestions of names of people, both professionals and academicians, who might write commentaries. This edition’s section examines the ways images of Detroit are exploited. The section was coordinated by Sandra Borden, a professor at Western Michigan University.

Janet Cooke in Hindsight: Reconsideration of a Paradigmatic Case in Journalism Ethics

Discourse produced in 1996 by journalists and journalism educators on the Internet was analyzed using a philosophical method called casuistry to see how they evaluated the Janet Cooke case fifteen years later. This analysis shows that these journalists, in reconsidering the Janet Cooke case, tended to favor scaling back tentative exceptions to the paradigm of journalistic lying that had emerged in response to the New Journalism of the 1960s and the Watergate investigation in the 1970s. This analysis illustrates the gradual refinement of moral concepts in journalism.

Deviance mitigation in the ethical discourse of journalists

This article describes two discursive strategies that allowed journalists at a small Midwestern daily newspaper to make sense of the perceived ethical predicament arising when journalistic principles and business imperatives conflict. By using narrative context and grammatical markers, the journalists were able to take away some of the stigma of advocating or reporting beliefs deviating from norms displayed in focus groups with coworkers. The findings provide insight into how professionals define admirable moral identities in peer discourse and how these identities, in turn, also may influence acceptance by ones peers. Although the data were obtained by observing journalists, the findings are relevant to other professions.

A Virtue Ethics Critique of Silverstone's Media Hospitality

Roger Silverstone (2007) proposed media hospitality as an important element of media ethics. I agree that media hospitality can make a valuable contribution to media ethics. However, I have doubts about grounding media hospitality in what has been referred to as the “deductive abstractions and absolutist language of much media ethics theorizing” founded on Enlightenment assumptions. Despite his own reservations about Enlightenment theorizing, I propose that Silverstones account ultimately suffers from these problems of abstraction and absolutism, as seen most clearly from the vantage point of Alasdair MacIntyres neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics.

A Transformative Vision of the Media

It has been almost 20 years since the game-changing book Good News (Christians, Ferré, & Fackler, 1993) shifted the conversation in media ethics from the conduct of individual journalists to the shared responsibilities of journalists in relation to their communities. Laying out for the first time a communitarian vision for journalism, the authors of Good News argued for a third way between collectivism and individualism, between local and global, between situated moral propositions and authoritative abstract principles. Their landmark work went on to inform debates about the public/civic journalism movement (see, e.g., Black, 1997) and to inspire a generation of media ethics scholars (myself included) to generate critiques, refinements, and alternatives to their communitarian theory (e.g., Borden, 2009; Coleman, 2000; Plaisance, 2005). In the meantime, the authors themselves have continued to develop their framework, teasing out its implications for normative press theories, citizen participation, media accountability, and global understanding (e.g., Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009; Christians & Traber, 1997; Fortner & Fackler, 2010).