mass-communication-theory

Chapter 5 Normative Theories of Mass Communication 113
government agencies issue licenses, professional associations effectively control the
standards used to determine who will get a license.
4. In contrast with other professions, media practitioners tend to have less independent
control over their work. Media practitioners don’t work as autonomous
practitioners and therefore have difficulty assuming personal responsibility for their
work. They tend to work in big, hierarchically structured bureaucracies. Individual
reporters, editors, producers, and directors have only a limited ability to control
what they do. Reporters are given assignments by editors, advertising designers
work for account executives, and television anchors and camera operators follow
the instructions of news directors. Editors, account managers, and directors are all
responsible to higher management. In these large bureaucracies, it is difficult to assign
responsibility. Those at lower levels can claim that they are only “following
orders,” whereas people at higher levels can simply disavow any knowledge of
what was going on below them. Earlier we discussed the example provided by Judith
Miller and her problematic news writing about Iraq prior to the start of the
war. Miller’s editors claimed ignorance of her actions. Her colleagues suspected
what she was doing but chose to ignore it. So is Miller fully responsible for misleading
coverage, or do her colleagues and supervisors share blame?
5. In the media industries, violation of professional standards rarely has immediate,
directly observable consequences. Thus it is hard for critics to cite violations
or to identify the harm that has been done. When doctors fail, people die. When
lawyers fail, people go to jail unnecessarily. The results of unethical or incompetent
media practice are harder to see. “The media blew both of the major catastrophes
of our time,” wrote Greg Mitchell, editor-in-chief of Editor & Publisher, “I speak,
of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown.” The outcome of “missing
stories of this enormity” naturally had “consequences that will echo … for decades,”
but at the time of the initial failed reporting there was little way to know
that would be the case (2009, p. 16).
Cable news network MSNBC offers one example. Two of its personalities, Phil
Donohue and Ashleigh Banfield, were the only journalists to lose their jobs over
their coverage of the Iraq war: Donohue for inviting war skeptics onto his talk
show and Banfield for criticizing the lack of depth of war coverage (Cohen, 2008;
Greenwald, 2008). MSNBC’s morning news show host Joe Scarborough, however,
remained in his anchor’s chair despite war commentary that proved not only to be
wrong but critical of reporting that would, in fact, turn out to be accurate. Scarborough
editorialized soon after the invasion, “I doubt that the journalists at the
New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just
how wrong their negative pronouncements [on the war] were” (in “The Final
Word,” 2006).
Sometimes, unethical conduct might even do some good. The classic case of
Janet Cooke is instructive. Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote a
series of news stories about ghetto children that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
in 1980 (Altschull, 1990, pp. 361–364). Later these stories were found to be based
on fabricated interviews. Cooke took personal details and comments from several
people and then wove them together to create a fictitious interviewee. The resulting
stories had great dramatic impact, educating readers about the reality of drugs in
the inner city and spurring official action to clean up particularly troublesome
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