BAB 1 (Hal 16-48,50)
BAB 1 (Hal 16-48,50)
BAB 1 (Hal 16-48,50)
Clifford G. Christians
Research Professor of Communication,
University of Illinois–Urbana
The playful wit and sharp mind of Socrates attracted disciples from all across
ancient Greece. They came to learn and debate in what could be translated as
“his thinkery.” By shifting the disputes among Athenians over earth, air, fire,
and water to human virtue, Socrates gave Western philosophy and ethics a
new intellectual center (Cassier, 1944).
But sometimes his relentless arguments would go nowhere. On one occasion,
he sparred with the philosopher Hippias about the difference between truth and
falsehood. Hippias was worn into submission but retorted at the end, “I cannot
agree with you, Socrates.” And then the master concluded, “Nor I with myself,
Hippias. . . . I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.”
Socrates admitted to being so clever that he had befuddled himself. No wonder
he was a favorite target of the comic poets. I. F. Stone likens this wizardry to
“whales of the intellect flailing about in deep seas” (Stone, 1988).
With his young friend Meno, Socrates argued whether virtue is teachable.
Meno was eager to learn more after “holding forth often on the subject in
front of large audiences.” But he complained,
You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me
under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. . . . You are exactly like
the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact
with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing you seem to be doing to me
now. My mind and my lips are literally numb.
xv
xvi Foreword
of this book will not encourage those who ridicule philosophy as cunning rhe-
toric. The issue at stake here is actually a somewhat different problem—the
Cartesian model of philosophizing.
The founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, preferred to work
in solitude. Paris was whirling in the early 17th century, but for two years
even Descartes’s friends could not find him as he squirreled himself away
studying mathematics. One can even guess the motto above his desk: “Happy
is he who lives in seclusion.” Imagine the conditions under which he wrote
“Meditations II.” The Thirty Years’ War in Europe brought social chaos every-
where. The Spanish were ravaging the French provinces and even threatening
Paris, but Descartes was shut away in an apartment in Holland. Tranquility
for philosophical speculation mattered so much to him that, upon hearing
Galileo had been condemned by the church, he retracted parallel arguments of
his own on natural science. Pure philosophy as an abstract enterprise needed
a cool atmosphere isolated from everyday events.
Descartes’s magnificent formulations have always had their detractors, of
course. David Hume did not think of philosophy in those terms, believing as
he did that sentiment is the foundation of morality. For Søren Kierkegaard,
an abstract system of ethics is only paper currency with nothing to back it up.
Karl Marx insisted that we change the world and not merely explain it. But
no one drew the modern philosophical map more decisively than Descartes,
and his mode of rigid inquiry has generally defined the field’s parameters.
This book adopts the historical perspective suggested by Stephen Toulmin:
The philosophy whose legitimacy the critics challenge is always the seventeenth
century tradition founded primarily upon René Descartes. . . . [The] arguments
are directed to one particular style of philosophizing—a theory-centered style
which poses philosophical problems, and frames solutions to them, in timeless
and universal terms. From 1650, this particular style was taken as defining the
very agenda of philosophy. (1988, 338)
The 17th-century philosophers set aside the particular, the timely, the local,
and the oral. And that development left untouched nearly half of the philo-
sophical agenda. Indeed, it is those neglected topics—what I here call “prac-
tical philosophy”—that are showing fresh signs of life today, at the very time
when the more familiar “theory-centered” half of the subject is languishing
(Toulmin, 1988, p. 338).
This book collaborates in demolishing the barrier of three centuries between
pure and applied philosophy; it joins in reentering practical concerns as the
legitimate domain of philosophy itself. For Toulmin, the primary focus of
ethics has moved from the study to the bedside to criminal courts, engineering
labs, the newsroom, factories, and ethnic street corners. Moral philosophers
Foreword xvii
are not being asked to hand over their duties to technical experts in today’s
institutions, but rather to fashion their agendas within the conditions of con-
temporary struggle.
All humans have a theoretical capacity. Critical thinking, the reflective
dimension, is our common property. And this book nurtures that reflection in
communication classrooms and by extension into centers of media practice.
If the mind is like a muscle, this volume provides a regimen of exercises for
strengthening its powers of systematic reflection and moral discernment. It
does not permit those aimless arguments that result in quandary ethics. Instead,
it operates in the finest traditions of practical philosophy, anchoring the debates
in real-life conundrums but pushing the discussion toward substantive issues
and integrating appropriate theory into the decision-making process. It seeks to
empower students to do ethics themselves, under the old adage that teaching
someone to fish lasts a lifetime, and providing fish only saves the day.
Media Ethics: Issues and Cases arrives on the scene at a strategic time
in higher education. Since the late 19th century, ethical questions have been
taken from the curriculum as a whole and from the philosophy department.
Recovering practical philosophy has involved a revolution during the last
decade in which courses in professional ethics have reappeared throughout
the curriculum. This book advocates the pervasive method and carries the
discussions even further, beyond freestanding courses into communication
classrooms across the board.
In this sense, the book represents a constructive response to the current
debates over the mission of higher education. Professional ethics has long
been saddled with the dilemma that the university was given responsibility
for professional training precisely at the point in its history that it turned away
from values to scientific naturalism. Today one sees it as a vast horizontal
plain given to technical excellence but barren in enabling students to articu-
late a philosophy of life. As the late James Carey concluded,
[h]igher education has not been performing well of late and, like most American
institutions, is suffering from a confusion of purpose, an excess of ambition that
borders on hubris, and an appetite for money that is truly alarming. (1989, 48)
In the past decade, media ethics has been asked to do increasingly heavy
lifting. The realities of consolidating ownership, the relentless and shifting
requirements of computer and platform adeptness, and the ongoing per-
sonal toll as our work meets with increased skepticism and borderline
hostility are but three factors that demonstrate why sound ethical thinking
is the core of excellence. We believe thinking ethically makes you a better
person and a more valuable professional. It also helps you in other aspects
of your life—being a parent, a community member, and a self- aware
human being.
In its 10th edition, this book continues to begin and end with theory—
moral philosophy and moral development, respectively. However, in
response to our readers, we have subdivided the other chapters into two
sections: foundations and applications. The foundation chapters focus
on philosophy spanning all elements of the field. For example, strategic
communication professionals lead the privacy discussion, and the role of
documentary film is examined as part of truth telling. That philosophical
foundation adds feminist ethics to classical theory and joins the concept of
social justice with democratic functioning.
The application chapters examine some professional niches such as indi-
vidual decisions in strategic communication or visual thinking, as well as
institutional questions such as those raised by media economics or the perva-
sive role of art and entertainment.
In this edition, our bedrock assumption remains that the media and
democracy need one another to survive. If there is a single animating idea
in this book, it is this: No matter what your job, it is made easier in a func-
tioning democracy. Whether your focus is news, entertainment, or strategic
xix
xx Preface
Preface xxi
No matter your professional niche in mass communication, the past few years
have been nothing short of an assault on the role you play in a democratic
society, on the business model that supports your organization and pays
your salary, or whether your job might be better done—and certainly more
cheaply—by a robot or an algorithm.
Consider the following ethical decisions that made the news:
• “Don’t make us write obituaries” read the headline in the Notre Dame
student newspaper in early fall 2020, as the university administration
wrestled with decisions about online versus in-person learning as part
of its pandemic response. Dozens of college journalists helped news
organizations, such as the New York Times, report on the impact of
COVID-19 on campus. After months of a contentious relationship, the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Native American
Journalists Association, and the Student Press Law Center wrote to
1
2 Chapter 1
risk and had threatened to prohibit it from operating in the United States
unless it were sold to a US buyer. Oracle’s purchase announcement
came just minutes after Microsoft, also making an offer, announced that
TikTok’s parent company had rejected its bid. As of this writing, the sale
has yet to be completed.
• Scientific American endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election,
the magazine’s first endorsement in its 175-year history. The first part
of that editorial reviewed the missteps of the Trump administration and
statements by President Trump himself on the lethality of COVID-19
and the potential impact of public-health measures on its spread. The
magazine’s editors concluded with this: “Joe Biden, in contrast, comes
prepared with plans to control COVID-19, improve health care, reduce
carbon emissions and restore the role of legitimate science in policy-
making. He solicits expertise and has turned that knowledge into solid
policy proposals.”
• Despite the news media’s insistence on truth telling, academic studies
found that the profession was a major source of disinformation in the
2016 and 2020 elections. A Columbia University Tow Center for Digital
Journalism study found that “news organizations play a major role in
propagating hoaxes, false claims, questionable rumors, and dubious viral
content” (Silverman, 2015). Why? Because journalists’ routine methods
of gathering and editing news mean that false claims are reported as
news, particularly if they come from an authoritative source and are only
subsequently fact-checked. A study by the nonprofit media watchdog
Media Matters found two-thirds of the media’s retweets of President
Trump’s false claims were passed along without noting that the claims
were false.
• In December 2020, the New York Times retracted the core of the reporting
for its hit podcast Caliphate, which reported on terrorism and how one
person had been radicalized into terrorist activity. The podcast had won
multiple awards, which the Times returned, and also had garnered new
subscribers and listeners for the paper. The newspaper reassigned its star
terrorism reporter, Rukmini Callimachi. “We fell in love with the fact
that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the
caliphate and would describe his crimes,” New York Times executive
editor Dean Baquet told National Public Radio (NPR). “I think we were
so in love with it that when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabu-
list, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn’t
listen hard enough.” However, the Times’s decision became controversial
when, less than a week later, NPR also reported that the Times’s reporter
writing the story about the podcast had asked well-known journalists not
to call it a “retraction.”
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 5
• Suicide, racism, bullying, mean girls, jock high school culture, and a host
of other issues became the focus on the hit Netflix series 13 Reasons Why,
which was based on a 2007 novel. The popularity of the series (now in
its fourth season) prompted junior high and high school administrations
to buttress their counseling services; colleges were affected as well. The
series also was widely criticized, particularly for the focus on teen sui-
cide without accompanying information about how to detect it and what
to do if a friend or loved one exhibits signs of potential suicide.
Ethics takes us out of the world of “This is the way I do it” or “This is
the way it’s always been done” into the realm of “This is what I should do”
or “This is the action that can be rationally justified.” Ethics in this sense is
“ought talk.” The questions arising from duty and values can be answered a
number of ways as long as they are consistent with each other. For example,
a journalist and a public relations professional may see the truth of a story
differently because they see their duties differently and because there are
different values at work in their professions, but each can be acting ethically
if they are operating under the imperatives of “oughtness” for their profession.
It is important here to distinguish between ethics, a rational process
founded on certain agreed-on principles, and morals, which are in the realm
of religion. The Ten Commandments constitute a moral system in the Judeo-
Christian tradition, and Jewish scholars have expanded this study of the
laws throughout the Bible’s Old Testament into the Talmud, a thousand-page
religious volume. The Buddhist Eightfold Path provides a similar moral
framework.
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 7
However, moral systems are not synonymous with ethics. Ethics begins
when elements within a moral system conflict. Ethics is less about the con-
flict between right and wrong than it is about the conflict between equally
compelling (or equally unattractive) alternatives and the choices that must be
made between them. Ethics is just as often about the choices between good
and better or poor and worse as about right and wrong, which tends to be the
domain of morals.
When elements within a moral system conflict, ethical principles can help
you make tough choices. We’ll review several ethical principles briefly after
describing how one philosopher, Sissela Bok, says working professionals can
learn to make good ethical decisions (see below).
BOK’S MODEL
The concept of ethics comes from the Greeks, who divided the philosophical world
into separate disciplines. For them, aesthetics was the study of the beautiful and
how a person could analyze beauty without relying only on subjective evaluations.
Epistemology was the study of knowing, debate about what constitutes learning and
what is knowable. Ethics was the study of what is good, both for the individual and
for society. Interestingly, the root of the word means “custom” or “habit,” giving ethics
an underlying root in behavior that is long established and beneficial to the advance
of society. The Greeks were also concerned with the individual virtues of fortitude,
justice, temperance, and wisdom, as well as with societal virtues such as freedom.
Two millennia later, ethics has come to mean learning to make rational decisions
among an array of choices, all of which may be morally justifiable, but some more
so than others. Rationality is the key word here, for the Greeks believed, and modern
philosophers affirm, that people should be able to explain their ethical decisions and
that acting ethically could be shown to be a rational decision. That ability to explain
ethical choices is an important one for media professionals whose choices are so
public. When confronted with an angry public, “It seemed like the right thing to do
at the time” is a personally embarrassing and ethically unsatisfactory explanation.
8 Chapter 1
Second, seek expert advice for alternatives to the act creating the ethical
problem. Experts, by the way, can be those either living or dead—a producer
or editor you trust or a philosopher you admire. Is there another professionally
acceptable way to achieve the same goal that will not raise ethical issues?
Third, if possible, conduct a public discussion with the parties involved in
the dispute. These include those who are directly involved, such as a reporter
or their source, and those indirectly involved, such as a reader or a media
outlet owner. If they cannot be gathered—and that will most often be the
case—you can conduct the conversation hypothetically in your head, playing
out the roles. The goal of this conversation is to discover: How will others
respond to the proposed act?
Let’s see how Bok’s model works in the following scenario. In the section
after the case, follow the three steps Bok recommends and decide if you
would run the story.
The Analysis
Bok’s first step requires you to consult your conscience. When you do so,
you realize you have a problem. Your responsibility is to tell the truth, and
that means providing readers with all the facts you discover. You also have a
larger responsibility not to harm your community, and printing the complete
story might well cause short-term harm. Clearly, your conscience causes you
to be of two minds about the issue.
You move to the second step: alternatives. Do you simply run the res-
ignation release, figuring the person can do no further harm and therefore
should be left alone? Do you run the whole story but buttress it with board
members’ quotes that such an action couldn’t happen again, figuring that you
have restored public trust in the agency? Do you do nothing until after the
fundraising drive and risk the loss of trust from readers if the story circulates
around town as a rumor? Again, there are alternatives, but each has some cost.
In the third step of Bok’s model, you will attempt to hold a public ethical
dialogue with all of the parties involved. Most likely you won’t get all the
parties into the newsroom on deadline. Instead, you can conduct an imaginary
discussion among the parties involved. Such a discussion might go like this:
Publisher: “And if it doesn’t run, we don’t keep our promise to the community.
Is that fair?”
Needy Mother: “Fair? You want to talk fair? Do you suffer if the donations go
down? No, I do. This is just another story to you. It’s the difference in me and
my family getting by.”
The conversation could continue, and other points of view could be voiced.
Your imaginary conversations could be more or less elaborate than the one
above, but out of this discussion it should be possible to rationally support
an ethical choice.
There are two cautions in using Bok’s model for ethical decision-making.
First, it is important to go through all three steps before making a final choice.
Most of us make ethical choices prematurely, after we’ve consulted only our
consciences, an error Bok says results in a lot of flabby moral thinking. Second,
while you will not be endowed with any clairvoyant powers to anticipate your
ethical problems, the ethical dialogue outlined in the third step is best when
conducted in advance of the event, not in the heat of writing a story.
For instance, an advertising copywriter might conduct such a discussion
about whether advertising copy can ethically withhold disclaimers about
potential harm from a product. A reporter might conduct such a discussion
well in advance of the time she is actually asked to withhold a name or an
embarrassing fact from a story. Since it is likely that such dilemmas will arise
in your chosen profession (the illustration above is based on what happened
to one of the authors the first day on the job), your answer will be more
readily available and more logical if you hold such discussions either with
trusted colleagues in a casual atmosphere or by yourself well in advance of
the problem. The cases in this book are selected partially for their ability to
predict your on-the-job dilemmas and start the ethical discussion now.
Since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have tried to draft rules or
guidelines governing how to make ethical choices. In ethical dilemmas such as
the one above, you will need principles to help you determine what to do amid
conflicting voices. While a number of principles work well, we will review six.
Figure 1.2. Calvin and Hobbes © 1989 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of
Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
12 Chapter 1
We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we
have learnt it: for instance, men become builders by building houses, harpers by
playing on the harp. Similarly we become just by doing just acts, temperate by
doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 13
Far from being old-fashioned, Aristotle’s concept of virtue ethics has been
rediscovered by a variety of professions. As Kenneth Woodward (1994) states
in a Newsweek essay entitled “What Is Virtue?” a call for virtue is still rele-
vant today:
But before politicians embrace virtue as their latest election-year slogan, they
would do well to tune into contemporary philosophy. Despite the call for virtue,
we live in an age of moral relativism. According to the dominant school of
moral philosophy, the skepticism engendered by the Enlightenment has reduced
all ideas of right and wrong to matters of personal taste, emotional preference
or cultural choice. . . . Against this moral relativism, advocates of the “ethics of
virtue” argue that some personal choices are morally superior to others.
Confucius’s Self-Cultivation
A similar, yet distinct, philosophy of ethical thought can be found through
Confucius’s teachings of self-cultivation.
Confucian philosophy is devoted to the cultivation of virtues. Specifically,
self-
cultivation is the key pathway to moral excellence, according to
Confucius. While Confucian philosophy often is compared and contrasted
with tenets of Western philosophy, especially Aristotle’s concept of character
building, the idea of self-cultivation as taught by Confucius was never a cen-
tral theme in Western philosophy. Indeed, self-cultivation is fundamentally
“different from the Western model where decision-making is the central con-
cern” because the “approach places more emphasis on the project of under-
standing and cultivating the self” (Feng, 2020, p. 21).
The key difference is that self-cultivation is internal, not external. Self-
cultivation is not practiced with a goal of acquiring psychological or material
goods. This ultimate goal distinguishes Confucian teachings from Aristotle’s
virtue framework where individuals develop moral character by developing
the ability to find pleasure in virtue and pain in vices.
For Confucius, self-cultivation is an expression of the self as a follower of
the Way: dao (Feng, 2020).
Utilitarianism
The original articulation of utilitarianism by Englishmen Jeremy Bentham
and later John Stuart Mill in the 19th century introduced what was then a
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 15
novel notion into ethics discussions: The consequences of actions are impor-
tant in deciding whether they are ethical. In the utilitarian view, it may be
considered ethical to harm one person for the benefit of the larger group. This
approach, for example, is the ethical justification for investigative reporting,
the results of which may harm individuals even though they are printed or
broadcast in the hope of providing a greater societal good.
The appeal of utilitarianism is that it has proven to mesh well with Western
thought, particularly on human rights. Harvard ethicist Arthur Dyck (1977,
p. 55) writes of Mill:
He took the view that the rightness or wrongness of any action is decided by its
consequences. . . . His particular understanding of what is best on the whole was
that which brings about the most happiness or the least suffering, i.e., the best
balance of pleasure over pain for the greatest number.
of his book The Right and the Good. Commenting on this tension, ethicist
Christopher Meyers (2003, p. 84) says,
As the book title suggests, Ross distinguished between the right and the good.
The latter term refers to an objective, if indefinable, quality present in all acts. It
is something seen, not done. Right, on the other hand, refers to actions. A right
action is something undertaken by persons motivated by correct reasons and on
careful reflection. Not all right actions, however, will be productive of the good.
In acknowledging the competition between the good and the right, Ross
differs from Kant and Mill, who both proposed only one ultimate value. To
Ross, these competing ethical claims, which he calls duties, are equal, pro-
vided that the circumstances of the particular moral choice are equal. Further,
these duties gain their moral weight, not from their consequences, but from
the highly personal nature of duty.
Ross proposed these types of duties:
1. the duty to tell the truth, veracity (which may be implied by fidelity); and
2. the duty to nurture, to help others achieve some measure of self-worth
and achievement.
Ross’s typology of duties works well for professionals who often must
balance competing roles. It also brings to ethical reasoning some affirmative
notions of the primacy of community and relationships as a way to balance
the largely rights-based traditions of much Western philosophical theory.
Like Kant, Ross divided his duties into two kinds. Prima facie duties are
those duties that seem to be right because of the nature of the act itself. Duty
proper (also called actual duties) are those duties that are paramount given
18 Chapter 1
specific circumstances. Arriving at your duty proper from among the prima
facie duties requires that you consider what ethicists call the morally relevant
differences. But Ross (1930, p. 24) warns that
there is no reason to anticipate that every act that is our duty is so for one and the
same reason. Why should two sets or circumstances, or one set of circumstances
not possess different characteristics, any one of which makes a certain act our
prima facie duty?
Let’s take an example using one of Ross’s prima facie duties: keeping
promises. In your job as a reporter, you have made an appointment with the
mayor to discuss a year-end feature on your community. On your way to the
city hall, you drive by a serious auto accident and see a young child wandering,
dazed, along the road. If you stop to help, you will certainly be late for your
appointment and may have to cancel altogether. You have broken a promise.
But is that act ethical?
Ross would probably say yes because the specific aspects of the situation
had a bearing on the fulfillment of a prima facie duty. You exercised dis-
cernment. You knew that your commitment to the mayor was a relatively
minor sort of promise. Your news organization will not be hurt by postponing
the interview, and your act allowed you to fulfill the prima facie duties of
beneficence, avoiding harm, and nurturing. Had the interview been more
important, or the wreck less severe, the morally relevant factors would have
been different. Ross’s pluralistic theory of values may be more difficult to
apply than a system of absolute rules, but it reflects the way we make ethical
choices.
Ross’s concept of multiple duties “helps to explain why we feel uneasy
about breaking a promise even when we are justified in doing so. Our uneas-
iness comes from the fact that we have broken a prima facie duty even as we
fulfilled another” (Lebacqz, 1985, p. 27).
Feminist Theory
Feminist theory begins with a different set of assumptions about how human
beings come to know what is ethical. Classical philosophy approaches eth-
ical knowing—epistemology—as a thought experiment. Once the thinking
is complete, and general principles understood, the resulting theory can be
applied to “real life” situations. However, feminist epistemology—and hence
feminist theory—begins with the lived experience. Only as real-life ethical
choice is understood, and over many instances of choosing, does theory
emerge. Because of this ground-up epistemic approach, feminist theory tends
to embed contemporary problems in its theoretical work. It foregrounds
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 19
The criterion for judgment thus shifts from goodness to truth when the morality
of action is assessed not on the basis of its appearance in the eyes of others, but
in terms of the realities of its intention and consequence. (Gilligan, 1982, p. 150)
had learned to care for themselves and to include themselves among that
group of people whom it is moral not to hurt.
The ethics of care has developed intellectually based on Gilligan’s work.
Nel Noddings, for example, has theorized that thinking about care most fun-
damentally reflects the mother–infant bond. Because Gilligan was writing
about women, her subsequent work has emphasized that men, too, care. As
Linda Steiner notes,
Thus journalists are ethically obligated not only to be sensitive to the voice of
care, but also to evaluate and help readers evaluate claims of care and suffering
and to evaluate policies and proposals to ameliorate suffering…. This politicized
version of care calls on media to privilege the problems, stories, and counter-
stories of marginalized or subordinated peoples and others who deserve care and
compassion. (2020, p. 445)
Life in the 21st century has changed how most people think about issues,
such as what constitutes a fact and what does or does not influence moral cer-
tainty. But ethical theory, with its apparent uncertainties and contradictions,
appears to have taken a back seat to science. As people have become drawn
to ethics, they seek “the answer” to an ethical dilemma in the same way they
seek “the answer” in science. Consequently, the vagaries of ethical choice as
contrasted with the seeming certainty of scientific knowledge cast an unfair
light on ethics.
We’d like to offer you a different conceptualization of “the facts” of both
science and ethics. Science, and the seeming certainty of scientific knowl-
edge, has undergone vast changes in the past 100 years. Before Einstein, most
educated people believed that Sir Francis Bacon had accurately and eternally
described the basic actions and laws of the physical universe. Bacon, how-
ever, was wrong. Scientific inquiry in the 20th century explored a variety of
physical phenomena, uncovered new relationships, new areas of knowledge,
and new areas of ignorance. The “certainty” of scientific truth has changed
fundamentally in those 100 years, and there is every reason to expect similar
changes in the present century, especially in the areas of neuroscience, nano-
technology, and artificial intelligence. Science and certainty are not synony-
mous despite our tendency to blur the two.
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 21
SUGGESTED READINGS
ESSAY
DENI ELLIOTT
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Case studies are wonderful vehicles for ethics discussions with strengths
that include helping discussants
1. appreciate the complexity of ethical decision-making;
2. understand the context within which difficult decisions are made;
3. track the consequences of choosing one action over another; and
4. learn both how and when to reconcile and to tolerate divergent
points of view.
However, when case studies are misused, these strengths become
weaknesses. Case studies are vehicles for an ethics discussion, not its
ultimate destination. The purpose of an ethics discussion is to teach
discussants how to “do ethics”— that is, to teach processes so that
discussants can practice and improve their own critical decision-making
abilities to reach a reasoned response to the issue at hand.
When the discussion stops short of this point, it is often because the
destination has been fogged in by one or more myths of media case
discussions:
Myth 1: Every opinion is equally valid.
Not true. The best opinion (conclusion) is the one that is best
supported by judicious analysis of fact and theory and best addresses the
morally relevant factors of the case (Gert, 1988). An action has morally
relevant factors if it is likely to cause some individual to suffer an evil
that any rational person would wish to avoid (such as death, disability,
pain, or loss of freedom or pleasure), or if it is the kind of action that
generally causes evil (such as deception, breaking promises, cheating,
disobedience of law, or neglect of duty).
Myth 2: Since we can’t agree on an answer, there is no right answer.
In an ethics case, it may be that there are a number of acceptable
answers. But there also will be many wrong answers—many approaches
that the group can agree would be unacceptable. When discussants
begin to despair of ever reaching any agreement on a right answer or
answers, it is time to reflect on all of the agreement that exists within the
group concerning the actions that would be out of bounds.
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 23
CASE
CASE 1-A
PHILIP PATTERSON
Oklahoma Christian University
When you look at the photo, it stirs your emotions. It’s the last moment
of one girl’s life (the younger survived). It’s a technically good photo—
perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime shot. However, when you learn the backstory
of this photo, a world of issues emerges and the real discussions begin.
That’s the beauty of cases as a way of learning media ethics.
For this case, here is what you need to know: One July afternoon,
Boston Herald photographer Stanley Forman answered a call about a
fire in one of the city’s older sections. When he arrived, he followed a
hunch and ran down the alley to the back of the row of houses. There
he saw a 2-year-old girl and her 19-year-old godmother on the fifth-
floor fire escape. A fire truck had raised its aerial ladder to help. Another
firefighter was on the roof, tantalizingly close to pulling the girls to
safety. Then came a loud noise; the fire escape gave way, and the girls
tumbled to the ground. Forman saw it all through his 135 mm lens and
took four photos as the two were falling (see figure 1.3).
The case study has several possible angles. You can discuss the gritty
reality of the content. You can factor in that within 24 hours, the city of
Boston acted to improve the inspection of all fire escapes in the city, and
that groups across the nation used the photos to promote similar efforts.
You can talk about the ingenuity and industry of Forman to go where the
story was rather than remain in front where the rest of the media missed
it. You can critique his refusal to photograph the girls after impact. You can
debate why the Pulitzer Prize committee gave Forman its top prize for this
photo and add in the fact that more than half of the various “Picture of the
Year” awards over decades are of death or imminent death. You can discuss
whether the Boston Herald profited off the death and injury of the girls
and what Forman’s role was once he witnessed the tragedy. And you can
ponder what happens when this photo hits the internet, stripped of context.
You can talk about any or all of these issues or imagine others. That’s
the beauty of a case study—you can go where it takes you. From this one
case, you can argue taste in content, media economics (“If it bleeds, it
leads”), personal versus professional duty, and so forth.
An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 25
Perhaps you will want to role-play. Perhaps you will ask yourself what
Kant or Mill would do if he were the editor, or whether a communitarian
would approve of the means (the photo) because of the end (better fire
escape safety). Perhaps you want to talk about the “Post Toasties Test” for
objectionable content in the morning paper, whether it passes the test,
or whether the test ought to exist. Or what values led the paper to run
the photo and the committee to give it an award.
During the semester, you can do more than just work through the
cases in this book—you can find your own. All around you are cases of
meritorious media behavior and cases of questionable media behavior.
And, quite frankly, there are cases where good people will disagree
over which category the behavior falls into. Good cases make for good
discussion, not only now but also when you graduate into the marketplace.
So, dive in, discuss, and defend.
Figure 1.3. Stanley J. Forman, Pulitzer Prize 1977. Used with permission.
PART I:
FOUNDATIONS
The first part of this book reflects the understanding that there are not
different sets of ethical rules for different occupations. To provide just one
example, public relations cannot achieve its goals without news, and without
news stories that are truthful and are believed by readers and viewers. Thus,
Part I begins with a discussion of truth, moves to the concept of privacy,
and then to loyalty. All explore the professional reality that journalists and
strategic communication professionals employ multiple ethical constructs
in their daily work. That work takes place in a community—a democratic
society—and hence has an impact beyond the individual. The goal of democ-
racy is not merely to exist but rather, as the founding documents of the United
States suggest, to promote a just self-government. Hence Part I of this book
concludes with an examination of ethical issues centering on social justice.
Students will find case studies representing every professional role in each of
these chapters. The goal here is to understand and then be able to apply the
same ethical theories to a range of specific ethical choices.