Questions of Judgment in the Newsroom

Current media ethics theorizing remains preoccupied with building competing normative philosophical frameworks, yet does not often focus on the operation of human value systems, which arguably are the engines that drive most ethical deliberations. Much media ethics scholarship also lacks an empirical foundation. This study draws from social-psychology research on value systems to construct a profile of journalistic values using a modified version of the Rokeach Value Survey. By examining the relationships between journalists? value rankings, the journalistic roles they embrace and how they rate different types of ethical questions in terms of difficulty, this study suggests an avenue for more useful theorizing about the process of journalistic ethical decision making. A nationwide probability-sample survey of 600 U.S. newspaper journalists shows relationships between individual prioritized values and journalists? perceptions of the difficulty of different types of ethical issues. A series of personal, in-depth interviews with journalists also explores the ways in which they perceive the role of personal values and how those values manifest themselves in everyday decision-making.