ETHICS AND ELOQUENCE IN JOURNALISM

Abstract

Journalists’ common sense, their everyday moral intuitions, offers a practical but flawed way of knowing right from wrong. But rather than discounting or dismissing this “naïve everyday ethical knowledge,” which would rob journalism of its normative substance, we propose to rehabilitate it through a process of public justification. Grounded in aspects of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative ethics, we offer a model of press accountability that understands ethics as a process rather than an outcome. Our being-ethical-means-being-accountable theme emphasizes the role of eloquence, understood as the competence to argue in ways that advance common or shared interests, in an open and accessible discursive test of the validity of journalism's moral norms.

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