Professional Confidence and Situational Ethics: Assessing the Social-Professional Dialectic in Journalistic Ethics Decisions

Abstract

Ethical decisions that journalists make vary greatly in their situational context, often shaped by a tension between professional values and organizational imperatives. This survey of newspaper reporters questions the notion of a common ethics decision-making framework that applies uniformly from situation to situation. Through three ethical situations—each varying in the nature of interaction with news sources—the study considers how individual, peer-group, organizational, professional, and societal levels of analysis relate to journalists' ethics decision making. Results found that ethical decisions vary by context and that an important difference among journalists is their degree of professional confidence.