Media Ethics Division
2021 Abstracts
Research Paper • Student • Carol Burnett Award for Graduate Student Papers • Gregory Gondwe, University of Colorado • Exploring moral ecology in the coverage of the 2020 racial protests: Analyzing sentiment and intent classification of Newspapers and Broadcast news content in the US • This study contributes to the literature of media moral ecology and the Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) model. It does so by significantly expanding the methodological approaches, and theoretically, by incorporating media genres as a form of moral ecology that informs journalistic practices. The study uses the 2020 news content about racial protests to examine whether the media genre/category (Newspaper or Broadcast) affects how journalists choose to uphold their moral features of implicit norms, the harm principle, and the question of justice. Findings suggest that compared to broadcast media, newspaper genres are more likely to uphold ethical values when reporting racial protest. However, this only happened when political affiliations were controlled for. But when regressed with political affiliations, the effects were significantly skewed, indicating a higher presence of adulterated moral features in the news stories.
Research Paper • Student • Carol Burnett Award for Graduate Student Papers • Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis, School of Communication HKBU • A Need for Change: The Perceived Power of Media and Journalists in Greece • Through 42 interviews with prominent political actors in Greek society, such as members of political parties (including Members of the Greek Parliament and their employees), alongside with well-known anti-fascists during 2019 and 2020, this paper analyses their opinions, ideas, and thoughts regarding the role of media and journalists in the events connected with the Macedonian Name Dispute (MND) in 2018 and 2019. MND was one of the most influential securitized topics on the agenda due to the promoted “Prespes Agreement” from the then-government that was supposed to solve the dispute. The use of MND in Greece’s political competition provoked several important events, such as the government’s fall and change. This study reveals that the MND’s coverage for the interviewees was a part of the problematic Greek media landscape, in which the journalists and the media are perceived as the most powerful societal actors in the country. In addition, the interviewees tend to believe that Greek journalism is not real journalism, as the professionals of the field are pulling strings to realize other goals than serving the public.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Shannon Bowen, University of South Carolina; Marlene Neill, Baylor University • Ethical Organizational Listening in Issues Management for Stakeholder Engagement and Moral Responsibility • Ethical listening is an essential component of strategic issues management as an executive-level problem solving function. This qualitative study of elite Chief Communications Officers (CCOs) seeks to help fill a gap in making listening an explicit and purposeful part of ethics. We seek to enhance the vital role of listening in engaging stakeholders and demonstrating moral responsibility in issues management.
Research Paper • Central Office Staff • Open Call • Yayu Feng, University of St. Thomas • Confucian Virtue System: Bring Media Ethics (Back) to a Humanistic Path • This article engages with Confucianism, the Chinese moral philosophy, and aims to introduce how Confucian ethics could benefit media ethics theorizing by explaining the central component in this ethical system: the notion of good and excellent it pursues and its highest principles. It facilitates a better understanding of the cultural and philosophical context that shapes media’s role in countries influenced by Confucianism, and contributing to the field a new perspective as it searches for global framework.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Andrew Duffy, Nanyang Technological University • Tear down this wall: Native advertising as boundary object in scholarship. • Journalism’s iconic wall separates editorial from advertising with entrenched ideological differences. A hybrid form straddles this wall: native advertising. As a boundary object where competing fields meet, this has been a subject of growing scholarship, making it a suitable subject to investigate the doxa and habitus of academic thought in different fields. This paper analyses titles and abstracts of papers in journalism and advertising scholarship to assess how each frames the subject of native advertising, with a view to identifying ontologies and axiologies of each. It observes the value of such analysis of boundary objects as a means to identify limitations and potentialities in cross-disciplinary work; and to challenge epistemic authority in differing fields. Mapping fields creates space for re-articulation of normal practice in scholarship. This paper also expands earlier theorising on boundary-work to include pragmatics as an element of any field and associated boundary.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Rick Moore, Department of Communication and Media, Boise State University • I Dare Someone to Try: SNL’s “Can I Play That” and the Ethics of Whitewashing and Stereotypes • The topic of whitewashing has been discussed in the popular press for many years. Scholars of media ethics, however, have been very slow to investigate the phenomenon. In this paper I wish to suggest a rather unusual place for academics to catch up on the most recent complications that whitewashing proposes. Given its growth in complexity, though, the problem—if looked at in all its dimensions—may have reached the point where it is insurmountable.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Greg Munno, Syracuse University; Megan Craig, Syracuse University; Katherine Farrish, Central Connecticut State University; Alex Richards, Syracuse University • Journalists with Different Mindsets Agree on Truth as the Profession’s First Obligation • This mixed-method study examines the mindset journalists bring to their work. Study 1 (n = 167) asked professional journalists, journalism professors, and student journalists to rank statements on journalism ethics and norms from most to least like their mindset toward journalism. Using the factor analysis procedure common to Q methodology, we identified two distinct mindsets among the participants. One factor expresses a neutral journalistic mindset that favors dispassionate reporting. The other shows more concern with the impact of journalism on its sources and a desire for more engagement in political discourse. A participant pool larger than that of a typical Q study allowed for additional quantitative analysis that identified significant differences in journalistic mindset by age, gender, professional experience, and journalistic platform. Using an explanatory-sequential design, study 2 (n = 16) further explored the journalistic mindset—the underlying web of beliefs and attitudes about the profession’s core values—with a textual analysis of follow-up interviews. The results, we believe, have applications to research on journalistic ethics and norms, and may provide some insight into the divisions generating conflict in many newsrooms today.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Holly Overton, Penn State University; Anli Xiao, University of South Carolina • Always Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide: Analyzing Moral Conviction, Perceived Motives, and Organization-Public Relationships in Corporate Social Advocacy Efforts • “This study conducts an online survey (N = 267) to examine the role of moral conviction as a
predictor of organization-public relationships (OPR) in the context of corporate social advocacy
(CSA). Four types of attributions are examined as a mediating variable. Results indicate that
moral congruency between an individual and an organization directly leads to stronger trust and
power balance and that moral conviction positively predicts all four OPR dimensions through
values-driven attributions. Implications are discussed.”
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • David Craig, University of Oklahoma; Katie Place, Quinnipiac University; Erin Schauster; Patrick Plaisance, Penn State; Chris Roberts, University of Alabama; Ryan Thomas; Casey Yetter, University of Oklahoma; Jin Chen, Penn State University • Moral Foundations in Life Narratives of Emerging Adults in Media-Related Fields • The purpose of this study was to explore the moral foundations evident in the life narratives of emerging adults in media-related fields, based on analysis of life story interviews with 182 recent graduates from six media-related programs across the United States. Participants offered rich accounts of how their sense of morality was shaped over the course of their lives, and thus influenced their sense of the virtues of care/harm, fairness/injustice, ingroup loyalty/betrayal, authority, and purity/integrity. Findings identified how individuals draw upon concrete examples of the moral foundations from their childhood, but also identified ways in which individuals moral awareness had refined during emerging adulthood. Thus, media educators must develop pedagogy that best enables our students to a) reflect on moral values and the roles they play in students’ holistic lives, b) engage in dialogue about virtues and moral foundation concepts, and c) have opportunities to explore and refine their moral awareness with regard to the media fields they will enter.
Research Paper • Faculty • Open Call • Patrick Plaisance, Penn State; Marlene Neill, Baylor University; Jin Chen, Penn State University • Moral Orientations and Traits of Public Relations Exemplars • This study seeks to contribute to moral psychology research on media professionals with a survey of the highly selective College of Fellows of the Public Relations Society of America. The study explores personality and character traits as well as ethical ideologies, and it also introduces the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) assessment to media ethics scholarship. Results (N = 59) affirm the exemplar status of Fellows, indicated by their top-ranked Global Character Strengths, including Honesty and Fairness, their above-average scores on Conscientiousness and Openness to experience traits, as well as the fact that a large majority reject relativistic thinking and demonstrate a strong concern for harm. Results also document positive correlations among several factors linked to empathy, justice and concern for harm. Those, coupled with an embrace of the MFT’s Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations, suggest a progressive moral orientation, and affirm the usefulness of a neo-Aristotelian framework for media ethics scholarship.
Extended Abstract • Faculty • Open Call • Erin Schauster • Moral reasoning and the life stories that depict personal interest, maintaining norms and universal principles • 75-word Summary: Moral exemplars in advertising are ideal candidates for understanding moral reasoning because of the challenges they face in the collaborative practices of strategic communication. Life story interviews and DIT results suggest that, while they exhibit high levels of moral reasoning, reasoning based on personal interest and, more so, maintaining norms are used to justify ethical decision making. More research is needed to understand the integrated, collaborative work of strategic communication and practices that influences norms.
Research Paper • Student • Open Call • Christopher Vardeman, University of Colorado Boulder • Skepticism, Egoism, & COVID-19 Advertisements: An Exploratory Study of Consumer Attitudes and Moral Foundations • The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for advertisers, and for small businesses in particular. Many retailers have had to adopt new messaging strategies to address responses to the virus in order to allay fear. This study measures consumer attitudes toward advertisements that make reference to COVID-19 safety responses alongside individual factors of advertising skepticism, egoism, and moral foundations thought to influence and predict such attitudes. Results are interpreted and implications for advertisers are discussed.
Research Paper • Student • Open Call • Lewen Wei, Pennsylvania State University; Pratiti Diddi, Lamar University • Morality rules: Understanding the role of prior reputation in consequences of scansis • Drawing from literature on crisis communication and moral licensing/consistency, we explored the role of prior organizational reputation on people’s responses to organizations’ morality-oriented negative publicity (i.e., scansis) through an online experiment (N = 293). We found organizations with better prior reputation tended to get more severe backlash in scansis than those with poorer reputation, which implicated the need to take the unique role of morality in scansis into account in both pertinent research and practice.
Research Paper • Faculty • Special Call for Ethics and Inclusion in Media Practice • Brad Clark, Mount Royal University • A New Objective: Recasting Journalism Ethics Through the Racial Reckoning • During the “racial reckoning” in 2020, racialized and Indigenous journalists in the United States and Canada called out their employers and industry for the systemic racism endemic to news operations and content. They explained their frustrations, criticisms and insights in columns, social media posts, essays, interviews, and other published media, frequently challenging notions of objectivity. This paper uses a qualitative content analysis of those media accounts to explore how journalism’s dominant ethic subverts inclusive newsrooms and news coverage.
Research Paper • Student • Special Call for Ethics and Inclusion in Media Practice • Alexis Romero Walker, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Converging Theory with Practice in the Media Skills Classroom • This article provides that there is a need to incorporate contemporary media and film theory in the media skills classroom to adequately work to decolonize education and bring equity to higher education media programs. Using an autoethnographic approach, the article showcases how to incorporate concepts related to equity in lighting in the skills classroom. The article additionally provides an adjusted approach to critical media literacy to effectively bring equity and inclusion to the media skills classroom, and proposes questions that instructors should ask themselves as they create their curriculum for their courses.
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