Morality, Competence, And Journalistic Excellence

One practical concern in journalistic ethics is that of morality. What is the relation between morality and competence in journalism? Must a good journalist be really morally strong as well? What is meant by morality in the first instance? is a formalist bound by the standards of ordinary morality? Is there a special journalistic morality that is separate and distinct form the standards of ordinary morality?

The word “morality” denotes culturally transmitted rules of right and wrong conduct that establish the basic norms of social life. Because the rules are pervasively acknowledged and shared in a cutltue, morality is not merely a matter of what a persona subjectively believes. That is individual do not create their own morality by making their own riles, and “a morality” cannot be purely a personal policy or code.

Morality is absolutely essential to social stability and the preservation of human decency, and the fact that it is sometimes ignored serves only to emphasize its significance. Moral philosophy formulates principles to help develop and evaluate moral beliefs and argumets.All rites and duties and obligation are bides on these propels, most of which are already present in public disrobe, buy usually in and imoprericw form.

The job of moral philosophy is to transcend moral intuition and purely contextual judgments any defining with precision such notions as conscience, responsibility, and firmness, without oversimplification or excessive abstraction.

One objective of an ethics for journalism is proper interpretation of rules of conduct directed at the amelioration of specific professional proble.There rules are henerally,athough not necessarily, rules of duty, and they are often accompanied by correlative rithes.Problesm arise over the demands made by rules about freedom, respect for privacy, fairness, avoidance of harm and the like, and over how to handle situation in which the rule re vagure,Beacues abstract rules cannot animate all possible situation, they must leave appropriate latitude for judgment and thus potentially for disagreement.

Like many matters in life sound judgment in applying rules is as vital as rules themselves. Imagine, of example , a newspaper attempting to frame rules than specify when it will and when it will not publish confidential information obtained from sauces. The bare fact the information is confidential is not a sufficient reason to rule our publication. Publication is sometimes warranted by reasons that outweigh the standard reasons for protection. Conversely, there is no warrant of rules declaring that it is fair to publish all the confidential information a reporter or sub-editor can unearth.

In the United States the so called Bradlees Rules decrees that a maximal effort be made to identity all sources’ by name in one-on-one interviews and that press briefings be for direct attribution (or the reporter would leave). The rule was a stab at one aspect of source of confidentiality. It was quickly dropped, however, because it was too confining and because other newspapers did not adopt it. Newspapers now do has a policy-neither too specific nor ego vague-concerning such  as permissible use of confidential information, and they also as permissible us e of confidential information , and they also have procedural rules ad guidelines than specify how editors and reporters should decked whether and how confident information can be published. Chartered and Virtue are also highly desirable characteristics of a good editor or reporter.


There is nothing novel about a virtue-based approach to professional responsibility. In 1959, a Harvard anesthesiologist was deeply troubled by numerous experiments than the physicians had performed on human subject. The anesthesiologist was convinced than truces, regulations and threats, if imposed to restrict experimentation in medicine, were more “likely to do harm than good”. He argued that physician needed to be more sensitive to sound training in scientific methodology and to the abiding importunate of cultivating a contours character.

Virtuous traits of all kinds are specially significant in credits and in environments with pressures to allow careful reflection .By cultivating moral values, doing what is right in these situations can become a matter of course rather than  a conflicted debate over how to interpret rules whose meaning and application n mat be less than clear .No one can be exacted to possess all the moral values or those behave virtuous with consistent, but some viruses such as honesty and trustworthiness are fundamental to the notion of a virtues and morally efinedchaarte. Adperson’s character is good or bead, virtues or voice, praiseworthy or blameworthy depends on the particular virtues of vies he or she possesses.

A report can be edited accualrtelt .fairly, and objectively,  or it can fail to meet these criteria. The editing cannot be called competent unless the reader sure satisfied, which suggests than moral criteria are embedded in your very conception of competent journalistic practice. That is standards such as fair nests and accuracy are moral dimensions of competence .Many professional standards and codes of eighties make and open appeal to the concept of comptence,even the word  competence’ is not specifically used in the code.