Environmental journalism has been criticized by various special interest groups and some editors for advocacy and faulted for inaccuracies. Sources, in turn, many from the science communities, have been accused of inaccessibility, and public relations representatiws from both industry and environmental organizations are regularly blamed for unethical behaviors rangingfrom hyperbole to more serious discussion or omission of factual information. This article reports a preliminary study of ethical decision making among members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, identifying ethical motivation diljerences (...) using the Ethical Motivation Scale. The implications of the reported dominant extrinsic guides are discussed in light of a proposed protocol for ethical environmental communication. (shrink)

The current revival of communitarian thinking, alongside public journalism as its journalistic counterpart, is one response to thefractures that characterize modern society. I identifyfive symptoms/causes ofthefractured world. I then show, briefly, some contrasts between the communitarian ideal and that of liberal democracy. The conclusion calls for journalists to undertake the task of reworking our basic conceptual framework in ways that avoid the twin extreme, and naive anthropologies of individualism and collectivism in favor o f a communitarian view based upon acknowledgment (...) of human interdependence. (shrink)

Mass media ethics and the classical liberal ideal of the autonomous individual are historically linked and professionally dominant--yet the authors of this work feel this is intrinsically flawed. They show how recent research in philosophy and social science--together with a longer tradition in theological inquiry--insist that community, mutuality, and relationship are fundamental to a full concept of personhood. The authors argue that "persons-in-community" provides a more defensible grounding for journalists' professional moral decision-making in crucial areas such as truthtelling, privacy, organizational (...) culture, and balanced coverage. With numerous examples drawn from life as well as from theory, this book will interest journalists, editors, and professionals in media management as well as students and scholars of media ethics, reporting, and media law. (shrink)

Examines the theories of Socrates, Kant, Dewey, Piaget, and others to explore the implications of Socrates' question "what is a virtuous man, and what is a virtuous school and society which educates virtuous men.".

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The philosophic lineage of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Rest has been traced to Kant, but elements of cognitive moral development are evident from Aristotle forward. Kohlberg's constructs of stages or levels, of upward movement through those stages, and valuated end-states are congruent with how ethics and epistemology were advanced in empiricists' and rationalists' exchanges. Since developmentalists share journalism's common ethical heritage, introducing cognitive moral developmentalism into the study of journalism ethics heightens perspectives on ethical practices already latent in (...) the business and academicians' study of journalism ethics. ;Rest's Defining Issues Test yielded a domain-general Principled moral score, and the Journalist's Instrument measured a domain-specific Principled score of journalists' ethical thought. The theoretical difference between the DIT and the JI was the introduction of a Craft element, which elucidated ethical distillates within the trade that are primarily procedural in nature. A survey, derived from past studies of journalists, obtained data from a population of 71 from across the United States. Based on how ethicists and epistemologists built theory by reflection and exchanges, interviews with another 85 journalists sought behavioral evidences of stages, movement, and valuated end-states as they dealt with constructed dilemmas. ;In terms of cognitive moral development, journalists are an above-average group who outscored other groups on the DIT with more formal education--the strongest predictor in other studies. They also continued to mature into the age of post-formal development as median-age adults rather than leveling off at around age 24. Regression analysis showed journalists' education, their perceptions of levels in life, and their values were significant predictors of cognitive moral development. As long as journalists produced stories, they matured. ;The differences in their domain-general and domain-specific scores seemed to result from reliance on procedural rather than principled thinking and look-ahead behaviors associated with expertise. Strong evidence indicated that the dilemma-like nature of news stories resets default hierarchies in the non-monotonic, defeasible thinking of journalists on ethical issues. Also, it appeared possible that one story could have a strong enough impact to reset the default hierarchy an entire stage in a journalist's thinking. (shrink)