Journalism, Ethics and the Impact of Competition

Abstract

Journalists, like doctors, straddle ethical extremes. Doctors pledge themselves to saving lives but may also use the same skills to perform ethically dubious plastic surgery on the breasts of anxious teenagers — for profit. Similarly, journalists who learn the skills of investigation, analysis and communication may use them to hold power to account, but also to expose the lives of innocent people and hold them up to public ridicule. In each case the practices that are deployed may be positively harmful when used without ethical boundaries and, in each case, individual practitioners may find themselves tempted by commercial considerations, to push the boundaries of ethical practice, either for their own immediate gain or because market conditions put them under extreme pressure to act unethically. The decision to act ethically is, of course, an individual decision — something that Foucault describes as a ‘practice of freedom’. However, as he also explains, the ‘practice of freedom’ is constrained by power relationships:

one sometimes encounters what may be called situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen … In such a state it is certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited.

(Foucault 1984, cited in Rabinow 1994: 285)