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New
Study Shows Journalists Have Highly Moral Character
By Jeffrey Neu
Recent polls and studies indicate the American public believes
journalists are ethically challenged. Whether it is the CBS-Dan
Rather controversy that resulted in four dismissals or Jayson
Blair's fiction published as fact in the New York Times, ethical
lapses have given the public reason to distrust journalists. However,
a new book-length study by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher
found that journalism is one of the most morally developed professions
in the country, ranking behind only seminarians, physicians and
medical students.
Lee Wilkins, journalism professor in the Missouri
School of Journalism, and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State
University, administered the Defining Issues Test, which measures
moral development, to 249 reporters from print and broadcast newsrooms
from across the country. The test, according to Wilkins, has been
given to at least 30,000 professionals over the past 30 years;
however, it had never been given to journalists.
They found that journalists scored fourth
highest among professionals tested, above dental students, nurses,
graduate students, undergraduate college students, veterinary
students and adults in general. No significant differences were
found between various groups of journalists, including men and
women, or broadcast and print reporters. Journalists who did civic
journalism or investigative reporting scored significantly higher
than those who did not. When ethical problems were professionally
focused, journalists performed even better.
"Giving journalists the opportunity to
work through more ethical dilemmas, whether they are real, occurring
on the job, or hypothetical in seminars and workshops, bodes well
for the profession," Wilkins said. "Thinking like a
journalist involves moral reflection, done at a level that in
most instances equals or exceeds members of other learned professions."
Wilkins and Coleman were the first scholars
to include visual information — in this case a prize-winning
new photograph — as an element in the scenarios that journalists
were asked to evaluate. They learned that visual information boosted
ethical thinking.
However, Wilkins and Coleman were troubled
when they examined race as a factor in ethical thinking. When
they added photographs of different races to coincide with the
scenarios in the test, the journalists demonstrated significantly
lower levels of ethical reasoning when the people in the photos
were African-American than where they were Caucasian.
"Counteracting this apparently unthinking
human tendency is crucial, because race remains one of the most
enduring problems in America," Wilkins said. "The media
are responsible for racial portrayals that, by virtue of their
subtlety, are today even more sinister than was the overt racism
of the past."
Another group the researchers examined for
moral development was advertisers. With 65 professionals completing
the test, the researchers found that advertising professionals
do lack ethics, or at the very least choose not to exercise the
ethical reasoning abilities they have.
A summary of a portion of the book, The
Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics, which was
published in December, appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication
Quarterly in August.
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Last Update:
March 12, 2007
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