Trust Me, I'm a Journalist!

This paper, "Trust ME, I'm A Journalist": Ethics and Journalism Education by Ian Richards, a professor at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, gives great insight into the interwoven concepts of journalism and ethics in the sense of teaching and learning. Personally, I believe ethics should form the innate foundational set of values from which a journalist works.

The paper stems from the somewhat forgotten fact that education is an ethical enterprise. Every decision regarding what to include or exclude from every course is value-laden, and as such has ethical implications. This thinking applies as much to journalism education as any other field but, within journalism education, perhaps more to journalism ethics that any other area.



"It is no secret that journalism today is in a state of crisis, and that popular perceptions of ethical standards of the media in general and journalists in particular are an important contributor to this situation. In any serious consideration of contemporary journalism, journalism ethics is centre stage and, for this reason, ethics is also central to journalism education. Yet, while there has been extensive debate and reflection with regard to journalism education generally, there has been surprisingly little serious examination of what journalism students are taught about ethics. This paper argues that a fundamental re-examination of the whole project of teaching journalism ethics is necessary if journalism educators are to meet what Stuart Adam has described as their primary responsibility to build, through scholarship and reflection, the language 'that captures and expresses the experience of making, knowing and judging journalistic work and reflects a sense of responsibility and stewardship for its quality and standards' (Adam, 2001:318)"

- Ian Richards