Linda Steiner

The prevailing normative model of contemporary journalism, drawn primarily from a liberal enlightenment tradition emphasizing universal notions of rights, contributes to what many perceive as a crisis in contemporary journalism; at the least, Kantian models are too "thin" to provide an adequate ethical standard. We consider the extent to which an ethic of care, reconceived to address weaknesses identified in recent scholarly critiques, provides journalists with an alternative framework for moral decision making. We use the concept of unequal ethical pull to rework caring and to promote caring for distant others because caring that remains at the personal level is inadequate as a moral value. We conclude by noting that public journalism and our retooled ethic of care share several important ideals. We suggest a program of mutually beneficial exploration, one that might help today's journalists cultivate the virtue of care as they work toward justice.

Feminist ethics aims to correct male-centered ethical methodologies and theories that under-value women’s moral thinking, deauthorize women as moral agents, and exclude women’s experiences as a source of moral reflection. Feminists refuse to try to deduce ethical codes from timeless rights; they resist abstract, disembodied, dislocated generalizations. This chapter derives a feminist approach to journalism ethics from four streams of work, including key concepts in feminist moral philosophy, particularly the ethics of care; feminist standpoint epistemology and its normative and methodological critique of objectivity; activist concerns with representation and language; and employees’ complaints about workplace discrimination and sexism. To illustrate the real-world implications for journalism, this chapter applies feminist journalism ethics to news coverage of work-related sexual harassment, especially harassment of women journalists.

The compelling ethical legacy of Clifford Christians's and his profound commitment to moral action is enriched by his engagement with universal proto-norms, values that order all human relationships and institutions and so bypass the divisiveness of appeals to individual rights, cultural practices, or national prerogatives. According to Christians, the primal sacredness of life establishes mutual respect as a basis for ethics and thus constitutes the premier proto-norm; our obligation to sustain one another defines human existence. Entailed by the sacredness of life are other basic ethical values, such as truth, human dignity, and non-violence. This essay considers whether generating all ethics from such universals has downsides and whether the ethics derived from this “primordial generality” produces the maximal ethics required by a complex, modern world