Journalism Ethics at the Crossroads

This book provides journalism students with an easy-to-read yet theoretically rich guide to the dialectics, contradictions, problems, and promises encapsulated in the term ‘journalism ethics’.

Offering an overview of a series of crises that have shaken global journalism to its foundations in the last decade, including the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 US presidential election, the book explores the structural and ethical problems that shape the journalism industry today. The authors discuss the three principle existential crises that continue to plague the news industry: a failing business model, technological disruption, and growing public mistrust of journalism. Other topics covered include social media ethics, privacy concerns, chequebook journalism, as well as a new analysis of journalism theory that critiques the well-worn tropes of objectivity, the Fourth Estate, freedom of the press, and the marketplace of ideas to develop a sophisticated materialist reimagining of journalism ethics.

This is a key text for students of journalism, mass communication, and media ethics, as well as for academics, researchers, and communications professionals interested in contemporary journalism ethics.

Roger Patching has spent more than half a century as a journalist and a journalism educator. He worked for nearly 20 years in daily journalism for a newspaper, radio station, and TV station in Adelaide, South Australia, before moving to Sydney to work for the international media wire service Australian Associated Press, followed by a decade with the national broadcaster ABC in Brisbane. Then followed more than 30 years at various Australian universities, teaching broadcast journalism, sports reporting, and ethics. He is a life member of the national journalism educators’ association JERAA. Roger has co-authored nine journalism texts. This is his fourth collaboration with Dr Hirst.

Martin Hirst is a founding director of the Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy at AUT University in Auckland, NZ, and co-editor of the journal Political Economy of Communication, published by the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Martin is the author of News 2.0 (Allen & Unwin 2011) and Navigating Social Journalism (Routledge 2018). He has collaborated with other writers on From Broadcast to Narrowcast: Communication and New Media (Oxford 2007), Scooped: The Politics and Power of Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (AUT Press 2012), and So You Want to Be a Journalist (Cambridge 2012). Martin spent 20 years in journalism and a similar number of years in academia. He now writes and paints from his studio in Melbourne.