| Summary: |
Journalism faces a crisis of ethics that threatens to lower its standards,
demean its honorable history, and question its future as a
democratic agent of the public sphere. Economic and social forces
undermine the relevancy of journalism principles while technology
creates a universe of new media that redefines the definition of journalist.
These staggering changes occur as news organizations can
now, more easily than ever before, reach people around the world.
Journalists struggle to maintain a credible ethical identity as they
sail the roiling sea of wired and wireless media, a postmodern version
of Heraclitus’s world of flux where nothing can be known because
nothing stays the same. What can ethics mean for a profession that
must provide instant news and analysis, and where everyone can
be a publisher, thanks to the internet? Rapid change has created
confusion about existing goals and standards of journalism. This
confusion runs deep, going even deeper than debates about specific
problems of practice, such as the use of confidential sources. The
confusion extends to how journalists should serve the public good
and what journalists are “for.â€1 No wonder the ship of journalism
lacks direction.
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