Journalistic Ethics: Part I

Note: This post was prompted by fellow member @BryanGStephens, with whom I have had an on-going discussion spread over a vast number of unrelated threads concerning the nature of the press, the First Amendment and their role in American politics.

Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, virtually every decent-sized American city had at least two newspapers. In addition to the popular press, many communities also had papers of ethnic or racial focus. Some of those papers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, became influential outside of their areas of ownership and became important voices nationally. The Courier's Wendell Smith was instrumental in helping Branch Rickey break baseball's color barrier with the elevation of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The one thing that these papers were not were unbiased reporters of straight news. On Wikipedia's list of defunct newspapers (dailies which published for ten years or more), 32 of them contained the name "Democrat" and 19 of them the word "Republican." And there are survivors still, such as the Plattsburgh (NY) Press-Republican and the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. They were all tied to their respective political parties and acted accordingly on their pages.

What prompted the change? When did "reporters" evolve into "journalists," and when did the need for objectivity become paramount?

I think you can trace it to a series of events, some of them political and others economic.

In 1900, there were no such things as J-Schools, but by the end of WWI all of the nation's most prominent journalism schools had been established. When the economics of newspapers really began to change, those that considered themselves professional journalists were taking over the management ranks. The bigger and more vibrant newspapers that survived the Great Depression moderated their overt politics to accommodate the new readers that they gained when their rivals folded and shut down their printing presses.

The Depression was bad enough, but the rise of broadcasting and motion pictures added to the financial pressures put on newspaper ownership. Publishers were at the forefront of obtaining broadcast licenses. For example, the WGN call letters were short for the World's Greatest Newspaper, the slogan of their owners - the Chicago Tribune. Thus they embraced the "broad" in broadcasting. The Tribune, which endorsed Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Republican Party (it would not endorse a Democrat for president until 2008) began confining its politics to the editorial page.

As early as 1940, Congress became interested in limiting media ownership. The wall that these new professional journalists put between the front page and the editorial page was enough to stave off cross-ownership rules for another 35 years.

Congress was also spooked by the rise of fascism in Europe. The 1949 "Fairness Doctrine" was ostensibly designed to promote balanced debate on controversial and important topics presented on radio and television but instead had the opposite effect, producing a Sunday morning ghetto of bad talk shows with horrible sets and absolutely no audience. It only generated one piece of significant 1st Amendment jurisprudence, Red Lion Broadcasting v FCC, in which the Supreme Court upheld limits to speech supposedly protected by the First Amendment because broadcast spectrum was limited.

By the 1980s the Reagan Administration looked at the rise of cable television and began to question those limitations. And if cable made the Fairness Doctrine obsolete, surely the internet has embalmed the corpse, incinerated it and buried it for good measure. So, why should the walls between editorial and news remain? Why shouldn't we accept the fact the natural order of things in the American media has returned to its partisan roots?

What is more ethical? For a reporter to operate under some false illusion of objectivity, or present their true political selves so that you can judge the veracity of the information they're selling you?

Next time, we'll take a look at the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and ask if they really apply in today's media landscape.