Ethical journalists? Hey, it turns out we really are

Given the shameful violations of professional standards and betrayals of public responsibility at CBS, the New York Times, USA Today and the New Republic -- among others -- in the last few years, most Americans would probably regard the phrase “journalistic ethics” (or “ethical journalists”) as an oxymoron of monumental if not downright laughable proportions.

Indeed, the recently released 2004 edition of Gallup’s annual survey of what Americans think of the honesty and ethical standards of various professions found that journalists ranked behind not only nurses, grade school teachers, clergy and judges but behind auto mechanics, state and local officeholders and seven other professions as well (but slightly ahead of business executives, congressmen, lawyers, advertising practitioners and car salesmen). Only slightly more than 20% of poll respondents said they considered journalists to have “high” or “very high” ethical standards.

But now someone has actually conducted a formal study of journalists’ ethics, and they found -- surprise? -- that journalists are actually more ethical than the practitioners of most other professions.

Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Renita Coleman of the School of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University have just spent two years subjecting a sampling of 249 journalists nationwide to a written test long used by sociologists, psychologists and other academics to examine the “ethics and moral development” in various professions and among college students preparing for those professions. Their conclusion: “Thinking like a journalist involves moral reflection, done at a level that in most instances equals or exceeds members of other learned professions.”

Wilkins and Coleman conceded that “public opinion would not support such an assessment of journalists as sophisticated moral thinkers,” but they noted, “As is frequently the case, conventional wisdom is not always supported by empirical evidence.”

The professors’ findings, first published in Journalism & Mass Communications Quarterly and also available in the new book “The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics,” are based on the Defining Issues Test first developed at the University of Minnesota in the mid-1970s and since administered to more than 30,000 people.

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Better than most groups

This was the first time the test was given to journalists, and their average ethics score -- while lower than those for practicing physicians, seminarians, philosophers and medical students -- was higher than those for the practitioners of hundreds of other professions and academic pursuits previously tested, including nurses, business professionals, orthopedic surgeons, Navy enlisted men, graduate and undergraduate students and adults in general.

Among the journalists who took the test, there were no significant differences, the professors said, between those in print and broadcast or between men and women.

Wilkins and Coleman, both former journalists, personally administered the tests and analyzed the results. They contacted news organizations large and small, print and broadcast, across the country, seeking cooperation and promising anonymity, and while they don’t claim they wound up with a scientific random sample, they do think they tested a legitimate representative sample of the nation’s journalists by every relevant demographic measure.

Each test consisted of six hypothetical situations -- four that had been used in previous tests of nonjournalists and two specifically related to journalism that Wilkins and Coleman devised themselves, based on actual events.

In taking the test, the journalists read a description of each situation and then had to decide what they would do if confronted with the specifics of that situation.

“There were no right or wrong answers,” Wilkins told me when we spoke last week. “We were more interested in how and why they decided what to do than we were in the decision itself.”

Thus, each case listed 12 factors that could influence the journalist’s decision, and the journalist was asked to rate on a seven-point scale the importance of each (from “not at all important” to “very important”) in his decision-making process.

Wilkins and Coleman then evaluated the responses in terms of ethical and moral thinking -- generally, did the journalist decide on a certain course of action because it would benefit society (good, moral, ethical) or because it would help his career or his news organization (not).

One of the nonmedia hypothetical situations asked whether a doctor should accede to a request from a patient, in great pain and dying of cancer, for a dose of morphine that would both stop her pain and kill her. Another asked if a man should steal a drug he couldn’t afford but that could save his dying wife’s life. A third asked if a woman should report to the police a man she recognized as having escaped from prison eight years earlier after completing only one year of a 10-year sentence, and who since then had “saved enough money to buy his own business, was fair to his customers, gave his employees top wages and gave most of his own profits to charity.”

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Snap judgment

One of the media-related hypotheticals asked whether to use hidden cameras to expose the abuse of patients by home health-care providers, and the other -- the more interesting to me -- involved the question of whether a newspaper should publish a photo of two children, ages 3 and 5, who were “playing junkie.”

In the latter case, the test-takers were told the photo had been taken with the permission of the parents to illustrate a story on the effects of drugs on children. The parents are addicts, the hypothetical says, and they “think their children don’t see what they do, but as this photo shows, the children have ‘playing junkie’ down to a detailed routine.”

The test-takers were shown just such a photo -- in which a little girl has her arm straight out, with rubber tubing wrapped around it, as she pretends to inject herself with a plastic syringe while her brother watches.

“The children’s grandmother has heard about the photo and called your newsroom to ask that you not run the photo,” the scenario says. “There are mixed opinions in the newsroom. You have the final say. What would you do?”

The answers are “Run the photo,” “Don’t run the photo” and “Can’t decide.”

Among the 12 factors the journalists are asked to weigh in making their decision are:

-- “Your competition is working on a similar story . . .

-- “You’ll probably get a lot of angry calls and people will cancel their subscriptions, making the publisher and advertising department angry.”

-- “If I don’t run this photo, I may prevent these children from being taken from their parents....The conditions leading to situations like theirs will persist.”

-- [If I do run the photo], “The kids will grow up having this horrible, graphic reminder of what happened.”

Most reasonably intelligent people would probably agree that the first two answers, while probably worthy of consideration, would not be indicative of good moral, ethical reasoning as primary factors in making a decision while the latter two would be. So how did Wilkins and Coleman know if the journalists who took the test were answering honestly or were just trying to make themselves look good?

Wilkins and Coleman say the developers of the Defining Issues Test realized that some people might choose answers that would make them look more ethical than they actually are, so they inserted among the decision-making factors several “nonsense answers -- reasons that sounded impressive but were really meaningless -- such as “The sanctity of living is more important than the dignity of dying.”

Test-takers who were trying to sound ethical, as opposed to giving honest answers, routinely ranked reasons like that as being very important. So the test-givers -- Wilkins and Coleman included -- threw out the scores of people who checked those answers, effectively eliminating those individuals from their test sample.

“We threw out about 7% or 8%,” Wilkins said.

I wonder how Jayson Blair would have fared on the test.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.