MEDIA MATTERS: Who needs ethics training, anyway?
If there’s any doubt that education in media ethics should be a booming field, consider this from the New York Times: Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is “looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in…”Critical Issues in Journalism,” much of which deals with ethics.But how many newsrooms provide continuing ethics education in this rapidly changing profession? (For example: Are the rules different for blogs than for news stories? Or for online journalism vs. journalism in print?) The issues are meaty, interesting–and important. But I don’t know of one newsroom offering continuing education in the subject.Many editors probably would say, “Oh, they learned that in school.” In fact, many schools, even accredited ones, don’t require an ethics course (as if one course would be enough to take care of your needs for a liftetime; even doctors must take continuing education to keep up with medicine). Many that do combine ethics with a law-of-the-press course, cramming 10 pounds of education into a single five-pound bag. The j-school accrediting council, of which I’m a part, did recently shine a brighter light on ethics education, a good start.
But it’s up to the profession–a profession that decries the lack of ethics in government and business–to get serious about providing continuing ethics education for is employees.
The question, unfortunately, is not journalism ethics, but societal ethics. We live in a society which profits from the electronic age equivalent of medicine shows. We live in a society in which a political gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. It is unreasonable not to expect J-students and J-professionals to reflect the larger society. Indeed, the leaked memos from Fox News suggest that the generally accepted journalism ethic of neutrality and accuracy is very much in play. In a society in which we debate the propriety of O.J.’s book not to mention parsing the word “torture,” I cannot say that there are promising trends on the horizon.
Sam said this on December 4th, 2006 at 11:02 pm