The ‘right to know vs knowing what’s right’: tabloid ethics and news reporting in the Iraq War

Abstract

This article describes how ‘tabloid ethics’ have infiltrated and transformed traditional notions of journalistic objectivity and is divided into four parts.The first part describes the development of the ‘contract by convention’ for objective reporting from earlier modes of behavior during the period of partisan journalism. The second part describes the collapse of that contract due to market pressures caused by the rapid availability of news on cable channels and the internet. The third part describes the ‘tabloid mentality’ that infects all news outlets to some degree, and illustrates this problem by focusing on two incidents from the Iraq War: the capture and rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and the controversy of the roll call of American soldiers killed in Iraq on the television show ‘Nightline’. The article concludes by arguing that tabloid journalism currently creates a ‘simulacrum of objectivity’ that most resembles the entertainment model of ‘reality shows’.