By Kelly McBride
2001 Poynter Ethics Fellow
Religion and Ethics Reporter, The Spokesman-Review
Ken Garfield and Shirley Hunter Moore both came to work at The Charlotte Observer one August day this year expecting to cover an excruciating funeral.
They are both competent, respected, experienced journalists. But they were of different minds when they got to work that morning.
A six-month-old baby had died the week before, strapped into his rear-facing infant car seat, left in the back seat of his father’s Ford Explorer. The father, a vet, told police he had simply forgotten to drop off the child at the baby sitter’s house on his way to work. He discovered his horrible mistake on his way to the sitter’s house after work that day. The father subsequently was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit because authorities thought he was going to kill himself. The police were investigating the baby’s death.
Moore had been on the story ever since that day. She had canvassed the neighborhood, asked the family for a photograph, interviewed police and other experts. She was ambivalent about the funeral. The story had been emotionally draining. Everybody in town seemed to have an opinion about it. Either they thought the father had made the worst mistake of his life, or they thought he was a criminal. Moore had been having these conversations day and night for a week straight.
On top of that, her bureau was short staffed. While she had been writing stories for the daily paper, her colleagues were stuck filling the zoned edition without her help.
Ken Garfield is the paper’s religion editor. He was a newcomer to the ongoing coverage of the baby’s death. But he knew the pastor officiating at the funeral. He knows his way around churches and eulogies. He saw a good news story, one of those rare opportunities to ask some deep questions about life, death, and relationships. Would the parents sit together? Would the father put his arm around the mother? How does one move on after contributing to such a tragedy?
So it was an easy decision for everyone involved. Garfield covered the funeral. Moore picked up the slack back at the bureau. The story was published. It was a well-done piece of journalism, written under difficult circumstances.
An Ethical Gap
What happened that August morning at the Observer happens every day, in every newsroom in America. And it is rarely recognized as a clash of ethics. Many journalists come to work with a method for making ethical decisions that has been ingrained in their very fiber. That method is there for some cub reporters the day they pick up their first notebook. Others come to work without a well-developed moral compass, but over time they watch their peers and their mentors and they learn. For some people, the newsroom culture reinforces and nurtures their ethical development. For others, that same culture strangles it. While they might grow and flourish outside their jobs, when they come to work, they experience a system in which their personal ethics do not apply.
For some journalists, their personal ethics — the values they hold dear and the method they use for making decisions — mesh well with the ethics employed by the broader industry. They easily adapt to the language of journalism ethics. They learn quickly to draw upon the values of truth telling, accuracy, fairness, and balance.
For others that’s just not the case. Their own values often conflict with those embodied by the broader industry. And the way they make decisions is often not even recognized as a legitimate method. They feel torn between who they are as a human being and who they are as a journalist. They struggle to defend their profession to their family and friends. And they constantly have second thoughts about the decisions that are made at work, even when they participate in the decision-making process.
It’s easy to see who the people in the first group are. They are the top reporters, the veteran editors, and the photographers with all the awards. But who are these people in this second category? Often, they are the journalists who leave promising careers in journalism for other jobs. They are the angry young people who never feel heard. They are the quiet reporters, photographers, and copy editors who gravitate toward a specialty position on the fringes of the newsroom.
Why should we care? Like most American businesses, there is a form of natural selection that takes place in journalism. Those who can’t, or won’t, adapt to the way things are done are weeded out. They quit. They change careers. Or they simply fade into a corner job somewhere, not fully participating in newsroom culture.
Here’s why we should care: Journalism is under fire in America right now because it is perceived that we have no ethics. Even when we do our most stellar work, when we try to explain how and why we do things, we struggle to be understood by the general public. One of the reasons we struggle to explain ourselves is because we are speaking a different language from many of the people in our audience. We are relying on a narrow set of values and a certain method that is not shared by a large portion of our readers and viewers. Our form of natural selection has left us with an ethically skewed sample. It’s like the diversity lesson. After years of criticism from minority communities, we finally know we can’t tell some stories unless we make an effort to reflect our communities in our reporters, photographers, and editors. And we have learned that lesson the hard way. If we can’t do good journalism without a diverse and culturally sensitive staff, how can we do good ethics?
Recent History
All this is not meant to detract from recent efforts to shore up our ethical standards and practices. Until the last couple of decades, newsrooms had very little method to their ethics. Instead, most reporters and editors worked under a mandate something like this: “Tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”
We’ve come a long way. A quick scan on the journalism shelves of any college library will reveal several recently published books that advocate ethical systems for journalists. While most journalism ethicists say we haven’t come far enough, the average journalist today is at least aware that ethical decision-making involves more than just hand-wringing, long meetings, and attaching the occasional editor’s note to controversial stories and photos.
Almost every trade group, from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to the National Press Photographers Association has an ethics committee. Every college and university with a respectable journalism program has an equally respectable ethics specialist on staff. And many American dailies have written or revised a code of ethics within the last five years.
But while journalists have been searching for their ethics, ethicists have discovered there may be more to morality than they were willing to concede half a century ago.
Carol Gilligan first suggested 20 years ago that philosophers and psychologists have overlooked different, yet valid, ethical systems. In the 1982 book, In a Different Voice, she detailed her research. At that time the Harvard University professor was responding to the Freudian notion that women had inferior moral judgment when compared to men. Freud, and those who followed, claimed that women — because of both their biological hard wiring and their environmental training — are slower to develop as individual moral agents, more resistant to society’s rules and regulations, and in general “less civilized than men.”
Those who followed included Gilligan’s mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, who pioneered a six-stage scale for measuring morality. His scale is still used today in many circles to both teach and judge ethical development. On Kohlberg’s scale, men consistently scored higher than women, reinforcing the Freudian notions of morality. Gilligan questioned whether women were truly less moral than men, or if Kohlberg’s scale was somehow skewed toward male experience and language.
The short version of her answer is yes, the scale is skewed. Gilligan and her assistants interviewed hundreds of women about to make an ethical decision. What she found is that many women don’t fit neatly into Kohlberg’s scale. Instead, they use different language and a different framework for decision-making.
Gilligan went on to describe a masculine version of ethical decision-making rooted in an abstract set of values, to which weight is assigned during a specific case of ethical reasoning. She called this a traditional ethic of justice.
The feminine version of ethical decision-making is rooted in preserving relationships and connections. When operating from this framework, a decision-maker works to prevent connections between people from being severed. She called this an ethic of care.
Thus Gilligan mapped out two equally valid methods of making moral choices. The first, justice, is the traditional form of ethics practiced in most modern-day settings. The ethic of care, while widely practiced, is not recognized by most institutions as a method at all.
Although Gilligan’s theory is still controversial today, moral ethicists generally agree that there is an ethical system based on the concept of care and that care is rooted in the feminine. Gilligan’s harshest critics faulted her for claiming that care was a superior system of ethics and was exclusive to women.
“Gilligan asked the right questions,” says Rosemarie Tong, an ethics professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and author of the book, Feminine and Feminist Ethics. “But now we know that in terms of ethics, male-female differences will play out differently in different cultures. Gilligan limited her research to one culture and generalized to different cultures from there.”
In fact, minority men scored lower on Kohlberg’s scale. So did people from lower socioeconomic groups, people raised in matriarchal households, and people who just innately respond to the world in nontraditional ways. What holds true today is that there is a dominant way of doing ethics rooted in a male, western European school of thought, Tong says. And there are unrecognized ethical methods, rooted in class, race, and gender.
When people with different ethical styles make their way into the business world, they must adjust the way they make decisions or risk being judged as less moral.
“It surfaces in journalism all the time,” Tong says. “Look at the classic criticism. The public gets mad at the media when it is too aggressive in pursuing victims, then the public sends out mixed signals because that is what the public craves.
“It’s as if the whole culture is stereotypically masculine.”
The Conversation That Didn’t Happen
So fast-forward to that August morning at The Charlotte Observer. The individual reporters, as well as the newspaper, had an ethical decision to make: Should they cover the baby’s funeral and, if so, how should they cover it?
Garfield, the religion editor, relied on traditional news judgment. It was a good story. People would read it. That doesn’t mean he didn’t approach the story with sensitivity, because he gave the topic a lot of thought.
“This just struck me as such an interesting, unresolved kind of case,” he said. “It was the talk of the town, how the dad could have done that. Everybody had a different opinion, and I thought the story could advance people’s understanding some.”
Moore approached the funeral from a different point of view. She worried about further intruding on the family. But she also worried about the burden her colleagues in her bureau were assuming so she could be free to write for the daily paper. She was more ambivalent.
“I know we do things, it’s part of the news,” she said of airing the tragedy in the newspaper. “It’s never a pleasant thing to do. I have two kids myself.”
Although she came to work that morning prepared to write the story, she was relieved when Garfield stepped in.
“At our office, we needed all the help we could get,” she said.
Garfield wrote the story that day. And the paper heard a fair amount of criticism from the public. Many thought the newspaper had intruded on a private moment and was exacerbating the tragedy. In his religion column later that week, he defended the paper’s coverage of the funeral and its broader coverage of the tragedy.
At no point did Garfield, Moore, or their editors ever step back and identify that each of the reporters was going through a different ethical process that brought up different ethical concerns and solutions. Nor would anyone expect them to. Because newsroom culture recognizes only one method of ethical decision-making (a justice method), discussions about ethics tend to be restricted to that method, how it’s used, whether it’s used, and what the possibilities are. Rarely does newsroom culture allow journalists to question the method itself.
But that’s just what we need. We need to explore the very fundamentals of our ethical foundations. We need to tap into the resources of academia to examine matters of gender, organizational culture, and leadership style. There are journalists who are not fully participating in the methods we have in place because there is a gap between their personal ethics and the ethics of the profession. If we could at least name that disconnect, our ethics would take a different turn.
Businesses and institutions across the nation are struggling to incorporate alternative styles of ethics, says Tong, the UNC ethics professor. But the battle is slow-going.
“Ethical styles can be culturally modified or even eliminated, so that the artificial becomes natural and the natural becomes deviant,” Tong says.
Many people might show up for work their first day firmly rooted in a care-based ethical method. But by watching their peers and their supervisors, they will adopt the justice-based method prevalent in most businesses. Those not successful in making that shift are often perceived as less successful in general.
The Fix
In a way, journalists have already dabbled in blending traditional justice-based ethics with care-based ethics. It’s called public journalism.
William F. Woo, journalism professor at both UC Berkeley and Stanford University, teaches his students a process that blends care and traditional justice ethics. He supports the arguments behind public journalism, but thinks proponents made a mistake when they gave the concept a name that set it apart from everyday journalism. Instead he argues for a reform of journalistic ethical methods, incorporating care and justice into a framework that could be duplicated and defended.
“I believe you ought to be able to articulate all of the ethical concerns, and care is always a powerful one,” he said. “But whatever method you use, it has to result in a full collegial conversation.”
In fact many psychologists prefer to see care and justice not as either/or propositions but as opposite ends of a continuum. Some people might operate closer to one end than the other. While others bounce around, perhaps relying on an ethic of care when personal decisions must be made and an ethic of justice when it comes to business decisions.
Even in her early work, Gilligan conceded that many people could make decisions from both frameworks, but that women were more likely to be more versatile.
But just because many decision-makers are likely to rely on care or justice, or even blend the ethical styles, that doesn’t mean the ethic of care gets equal treatment in newsrooms.
As Gilligan argued 20 years ago, care is seen as an inferior value. Modern-day psychologists and ethicists say that’s still the case, particularly in the world of business. The challenge is for organizations to identify their ethical styles and then analyze how alternative styles can be blended or incorporated.
Woo advocates that newsrooms, big and small, create forums in which journalists can discuss ethics in a non-threatening environment. Weekly gatherings, regular meetings that already take place, and on going in-house training sessions are all opportunities for such discussions. The key, Woo says, is to create a culture in which staff members won’t be ridiculed or dismissed for bringing up concerns that might not be part of the traditional framework.
“I’m very comfortable with decisions made out of care,” he says. “I don’t think that care every time is the value that comes out on top.”
Too often when care collides with other values, such as telling the truth or remaining independent, journalists discard care as the inferior value, Woo says. A classic case is when journalists report on poverty. What’s wrong with buying an impoverished family a meal or taking up a collection in the newsroom to provide them with Christmas presents, Woo asks.
“I don’t see anything wrong with acknowledging in an editor’s note: ‘We fed this family.'” Woo says.
The tricky part is when care actually collides with the more firmly rooted ethic of telling the truth, he says. Woo suspects that most journalists blend care and justice on a personal level. But often the larger newsroom systems for making decisions don’t allow for an ethic of care to be expressed at all, and certainly not on equal footing with other values, in particular the democratic value of the public’s right to know.
Within journalism associations we need to create a model, or models, of such newsrooms. We need to broaden our training of reporters and editors to facilitate these discussions. Then we need to devise a way to track the outcome of these efforts.
The payoff will come on many levels. We will make better decisions. We will be better able to explain ourselves to the public. But the biggest motivation is we will gain a better understanding of the way individuals and groups make moral choices. We will be better journalists.
And we will tell better stories.
