When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain.

Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists against their competition by spawning fresh, potentially exclusive, stories to go on their websites or into their newspapers.

• Journalists could argue that they provide a public service.

  Probably, but:

  • That doesn’t necessarily cancel out their engaging in business-against-business intelligence work.

  • Couldn’t the businesses that journalists investigate also argue, under the dominant ideology in this country, that they provide a public service by offering goods in the marketplace? If so, do they contribute better public services than do journalists?

• Journalists could argue that, if the corporation is clearly harming the public, then the journalist has a stronger moral claim to investigate them.

  But, journalists can’t know about the corporation’s harm until after their investigation. Their investigation could demonstrate that the reporter’s hunch was incorrect, in which case we would have to go back to whose public service was greater.

Does it matter whether journalists are considered corporate spies?

If journalists coordinated with law enforcement before investigating private businesses (given that we rely on the government to watch over business otherwise), thereby working on behalf of a public agency, would their work stop being corporate espionage? [1]

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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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