Book Review: The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason about Ethics

The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics, by Lee Wilkins and Renita Coleman (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005) 162 pages, $19.95The main title of this book might lead those unfamiliar with the authors' work to expect an apologia for media increasingly distrusted by the public. Lee Wilkins of the Missouri School of Journalism and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communication do show that journalists display higher-level ethical reasoning than adults in general as well as in several professional groups. This book, however, does much more than demonstrate that journalists may be more moral than the public perceives. It also provides a concise introduction to the psychology of moral development, a provocative examination of the role visuals play in ethical reasoning, and interesting lessons in research methodology.The book, which includes sections by Seow Ting Lee of the Department of Communication at Illinois State University and Anne Cunningham of LSU, contains 10 chapters centered on a series of studies done by Wilkins, Coleman and Lee on ethical reasoning among journalists and by Cunningham on ethical reasoning among advertising professionals. All but one of these studies used the Defining Issues Test, a paper-and-pencil test of moral development designed by psychologist James Rest in the 1970s. The opening chapters of The Moral Media are usefully devoted to placing the test and the business of determining media professionals' ethics-related thinking into the context of psychology's quest to map moral development.This will be familiar ground for media ethics professors who have used Media Ethics: Issues and Cases (McGraw-Hill, 2001), the textbook written by Wilkins and Philip Patterson, which contains a nice chapter outlining basic ideas on moral development. In The Moral Media, Wilkins and Coleman are able to go deeper, providing a more complete introduction to psychological theories of moral development that will be valuable for mass communication graduate students just beginning to wrestle with media ethics research and, one might hope, a prompt for more interdisciplinary work among established ethics scholars.The heart of The Moral Media, six chapters recounting the execution and results of the studies, also may be familiar to some in journalism and mass communication because reports using some of the data have previously been published in journals or presented at conferences. In this book, however, the authors are able to establish the links and the logical progression among the studies.They start by reporting the quantitative results of a study of 249 journalists, selected through multistage cluster sampling, that found those journalists, on average, use higher-level ethical reasoning than was found in similar studies of nurses, lawyers, veterinary students, orthopedic surgeons, adults in general, accounting auditors and other groups. The journalists were behind only seminarians/philosophers, medical students and practicing physicians. The book then reviews the qualitative data journalists provided when asked to explain their reasoning about the ethical dilemmas presented in the Defining Issues Test. Although reasonable people might quibble with a few of the categorizations of these comments, this section, like any good qualitative study, provides ample evidence from which readers can draw their own conclusions. …