The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
Herald explained in a front‐page statement: “[W]e believe printing the news is part of the bargain we have made with the community. We’d be breaking the bargain if we didn’t print the news.”6 Reflecting on that statement later, Herald editor Mike Jacobs told an audience of journalists: “News, we said, is timely information of general interest. The Angel’s identity was clearly news. Besides, we said, if she really wanted to remain anonymous, she should have driven into Grand Forks in a pickup truck. With a gun rack.”7
The controversy in Grand Forks did, in Jacobs’s words, “blow over.” But the newspaper’s precipitous fall from community hero to community villain demonstrates a paradox in American society: People do rely on the information that independent news media provide – and even praise it in times of crisis like September 11 and the flood in Grand Forks. Yet the people who value the information also like to complain, and they are apt to react in anger when they think the media’s agenda differs from their own.
The public’s relationship with the news media is, indeed, one of love and hate.
The Evidence of Public Hostility
It is an irony that, even as the news media have matured and have strived to fulfill an obligation of social responsibility, the public has grown hostile. The hostility is painfully evident to anyone answering the telephone, or reviewing incoming email at news outlets, or perusing the reader comments appended to online news stories, or sampling the dialogue on social media.
There also is empirical proof. With occasional upticks, the public’s declining trust has been documented in surveys since the 1980s.
A Gallup Poll (Fig. 5.1) showed in 2019 that Americans were continuing to be mistrustful of the mass media. Asked if they thought the mass media would report “fully, accurately and fairly,” only 41% expressed “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence. When Gallup first measured trust in the mass media in 1972, 68% of Americans reported that level of trust. By 1997, trust was 53%.8
Gallup pointed to widely divergent opinions held by Republicans and Democrats “in the current highly polarized climate” of the Donald Trump administration. Among Democrats, 69% trusted the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” Among Republicans, only 15% rated the mass media that highly. Gallup found that a majority of Republicans trusted only one source of national news: Fox News.9
In 2020, two other surveys – one by the Pew Research Center and the other a collaborative effort by Gallup and the Knight Foundation – confirmed the public’s skepticism about the news media and revealed dark suspicions about journalists’ conduct. Key findings from those surveys are shown in Fig. 5.2.
The Pew survey showed that only 48% of Americans had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence that journalists “act in the best interest of the public.” 10
Even more troubling, from an ethics standpoint, was Pew’s finding that 44% think reporting mistakes happen because of a desire to mislead the public.11
The Gallup-Knight Foundation survey also found that significant numbers of Americans think reporting is sometimes deliberately wrong. The Gallup-Knight report concluded, “Americans perceive inaccurate news to be intentional – either because the
reporter is misrepresenting the facts (52%) or making them up entirely (28%).”12
To anyone who has worked in a newsroom of a mainstream news outlet, those findings are astonishing. According to the two surveys, roughly half of the people think journalists intentionally mislead the audience, and about a quarter of them think journalists fabricate the news. Students reading this textbook should be aware that a reporter who committed either offense would likely be fired.
Both surveys found that Republicans mistrust journalists’ conduct far more than Democrats.
Gallup conducts a periodic poll on perceived honesty of various occupations ( Fig. 5.3), and its 2019 poll confirmed that the public remains unimpressed with journalists’ ethics.
Gallup’s respondents ranked journalists in the middle of the pack – 11th out of 22 occupations rated. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed thought journalists had “very high” or “high” ethics standards. In Gallup’s survey in 1981, 32% of respondents thought journalists had “high” or “very high” ethical standards. In the 27 surveys since then, all but one of the ratings of journalists have been lower than the 1981 score.13
Explanations for the Hostility
Although public hostility to the news media has been well documented, the reasons for the hostility have not been. Thus the question is open to speculation.
Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute has noted a correlation between the low credibility ratings and relentless attacks on the news media. He says the attacks are coming from many directions, with a persuasive cumulative effect on “a public that has been conditioned to hate us.” In a column in January 2008, Clark mentioned politicians under pressure who “try to kill the media messenger”; radio talk shows with an agenda of wanting to destroy the credibility of the mainstream press; and the negative portrayal of journalists in films and television dramas. Clark concluded: “The public bias against the press is a more serious problem for American democracy than the bias (real or perceived) of the press itself.”14 And Clark made this point eight years before Donald Trump was elected president in a campaign that relied heavily on denunciation of the news media.
Over the longer term, suspicion of the news media has been fueled by the media’s dual nature – most news organizations have to make a profit at the same time that they fulfill their quasi‐civic function of informing the community. It is easy for cynics to ask: Are they reporting this story because it is news the public needs, or are they just trying to attract web traffic, raise broadcast ratings, or sell papers?
Another chronic problem, discussed by the authors of Doing Ethics in Journalism, is the way journalists explain their newsgathering decisions to the public. Rather than reflexively citing their legal right to publish the information, they should be emphasizing their moral obligation to report the news, the authors wrote, adding, “There is a tendency by journalists to wrongly assume the public understands the rationale behind First Amendment protections.”15
William F. Woo, a newspaper editor and later a Stanford University professor, wrote that journalists had to take some of the blame for the public’s lack of sympathy with the First Amendment. In Letters From the Editor, he wrote:
Many of us seem to think that the amendment was written for the press, rather than for the people, and that it confers upon us special privileges or rights that are not given to others. … There is almost no phrase used by journalists that I dislike more than “the public’s right to know,” for it so often justifies not courage and independence but excess, intrusion and abuse.16
Sometimes, the public misunderstands journalism’s mission, which quite likely was a factor in the reaction to the Grand Forks Herald’s outing of Joan Kroc as the Angel. In another common misunderstanding of journalism’s purpose, some people watching televised interviews and news conferences perceive that journalists are being discourteous when they ask tough but appropriate questions of public officials.
A cause of tension, for many newspapers at least, is that the editorial pages express opinions about the people and events covered on the news pages. Even though the news and editorials are written by separate staffs (or at least they should be), readers