McGill on news media morality
As you may recall, I recently attended the 2006 Media Ethics Colloquium sponsored by the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. I co-wrote an essay for the meeting with Doug McGill, of the McGill Report, and Jeremy Iggers, food critic for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Doug has written a series of thoughtful essays, on his blog Local Man, about the colloquium. Each one is worth your time. Here’s a small taste:
In ten years as a reporter at The New York Times, and five as a bureau chief at Bloomberg News, I don’t recall a single newsroom conversation or meeting I ever attended that was called for the purpose of making a careful application of moral principles to a specific story.
Sure, we journalists have ethics codes, and we make quick reference to one or another item on the list when a problematic story comes up. But usually, that’s the extent of the process — a cursory scan of a very small list, then choosing one item from the list to wield thereafter not as a light to guide deeper moral inquiry, but rather as a shield against the complaints and fiery emails and threats of lawsuit that may follow publication.
Now go read the whole thing.
After you complete that assignment, listen to the Rhetorica Podcast of the Whalen Symposium on Media Ethics.
