Gene Foreman recently applied his 50 years of journalism experience as both an editor and a professor to writing a journalism ethics textbook. But his approach to ethics confuses me on two fronts: Its use of consensus ethical guidelines, and its apparent self-contradiction.
Let me elaborate on these points. I’d love to hear your responses.
I should first mention that I haven’t read Foreman’s book in full. So, I am well aware that all someone needs to do is tell me that Foreman addresses my concerns somewhere in the text, and I will deservedly slink back into my corner. However, the excerpt chapter, table of contents, and index offered on the book’s Web site do not suggest to me the book contains any refutation to what I’m about to say.
Justifying a new approach
The book, as Foreman told an Inquirer reporter, is based on the assumption that studying individual cases is more conducive to ethical development than general theories. The reporter, Michael D. Schaffer, includes quotes from other journalism professors and thinkers supporting Foreman’s position.
Foreman tells Schaffer: “What a lot of the current books do is to say, ‘You figure it out’ … I think [students] ought to know, ‘Here are the consensus guidelines in the profession.’ Here are all the experiences, good and bad, that practicing journalists have had.”
My fairest interpretation of this statement is that Foreman believes students are too inexperienced to contextualize ethical journalistic quandaries with all of the factors likely to influence their decision. Hence, ethics texts ask students to “figure out” a question they cannot construct.
Are practicing journalists that special?
But Foreman responds with the opposite extreme: He constructs for students both the questions and the appropriate answers by grounding an ethics textbook in the “consensus guidelines in the profession.”
Privileging the consensus view does not teach proper behavior; it only discourages challenges to that consensus. Additionally, by deliberately excluding the views of non-journalists, the book assumes that only journalists hold the key to acting ethically, or at least that journalists operate outside of the ethical realm occupied by the rest of us.
Contradiction
Foreman’s approach is also incompatible with one of the reasons, as described by one of Schaffer’s sources, for creating case study-based ethics books.
As Professor David Boeyink told Schaffer, journalism ethics spends “too much time focusing on top-down reasoning as a way of resolving ethical issues … [students need to decide] from the bottom up, focusing largely on the details of cases.”
But if journalism ethics is, in fact, too focused on the “top down,” then why does Foreman outline “the consensus guidelines in the profession”? Are guidelines not a “top” level of reasoning meant to guide the “bottom” reasons — exactly what Boeyink argues textbooks should not provide?
To recap, I disagree with Foreman’s case-study based approach to ethics because (a) it privileges the status quo opinion while discouraging challenge to that opinion; and (b) contradicts the original reasoning behind case study-based texts.
What do you think? Please share your comments.
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With due respect, and as a constructive suggestion, I think you should read the book before disputing my approach to teaching journalism ethics. Mike Schaffer’s kind piece in The Inquirer about my book is necessarily abridged, and I can see how, from reading it, you could form the opinion you express here.
The fact is that I am not advocating top-down decision making or imposing the consensus guidelines on students. I want to help students and practicing journalists improve their decision-making skills. The consensus guidelines, commonly expressed in ethics codes of journalist organizations and individual newsrooms, are an important ingredient in an analytical decision-making process, but they are NOT a substitute for that process. The book itself makes that clear.
A journalist who ignores the experience of his or her predecessors is squandering a valuable resource. A contemporary student of geometry is able to start with far more knowledge than Euclid had, precisely because of the pioneering work of Euclid and other scholars in the field.
I would like to close by quoting from the Preface of my book:
“If you fit [the] categories of student journalist and practicing journalist, you will find yourself addressed directly in this book. I want to reach out to you in two ways: first, to help you learn to make ethically defensible decisions in the practice of journalism; and second, to give you the benefit of the thinking of generations of professionals and scholars that resulted in today’s consensus guidelines for ethical conduct.
“With these goals in mind, I have divided the book into two parts. Part 1 examines ethics in a general way, shows the relevance of ethics to journalism, and outlines a decision-making strategy. Part 2 discusses specific subject areas in which journalists frequently confront ethical problems.
Throughout the book, the consensus guidelines are explained, not to dictate your decision-making but to offer a starting point for thinking through the issues. The idea is that you don’t have to start from a zero base; you can build on the best thinking of your predecessors. Where there is disagreement in the profession, I have noted that, too. All this is fodder for classroom discussion.”
Mr. Foreman,
Thank you for responding. I’m humbled that you would sort through so many Google results to find my little post.
As I said, criticising me by saying I just need to read your book seems to me sufficient, and I plan to do so. I tried to make clear in my post that I knew the limitations of my source material, and your comment addresses much of what confused me.
As to your comment, you wrote:
I agree that we should consider the experiences of our predecessors. However, you didn’t address my second concern: Why put predecessors from the field of journalism on an ethical pedestal? Why can’t journalists’ experiences ethically co-exist with those of police chiefs, or lawyers, or parents? Can the latter not also serve as a resource for students?
One response to this concern, which I neglected in my post, is that professors obviously can assign more than one book per class. They could easily assign both your book and ethics readings from multiple disciplines, thus providing more diverse fodder for the classroom.