In the fall of 2006, I participated in an academic colloquium on journalism whose other participants, mostly academics and scholars, took it as a given that journalism stands within a 2,500-year-old moral tradition that starts with Plato and continues through the world’s great religions (the Judeo-Christian ones anyway), and philosophical traditions from the Enlightenment to the present.
That approach honors a profession that, strangely, hardly ever looks at itself that way. In more than 20 years spent as a reporter, editor, and bureau chief in newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad, I don’t recall having had even a single conversation about the morality of journalism.
This made me curious to explore why, and the following blog posts are the result:
1. Why is Journalism Morally Shallow?
3. Why Do Journalists Sometimes Strut Like Experts?
4. Is Jon Stewart a Journalist?
5. A Journalist Chats with a Professor
7. Healing Love
8. Thinking About Journalism as Teaching
9. Thinking About Language as Spiritual Food
10. A Plea to the White House Press Corps
11. Journalism, the Individual Conscience, and Social Aims