When We’re Good, We’re Very Very Good

Let’s say that journalists do. The larger point is that journalists know they do. That’s because journalists, by and large, are righteous people whose moral development is significantly above average–or so we’re told by The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics, published in January.

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The book, by journalism professors Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri and Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University, discusses their recent survey of 249 journalists across the nation. A summary of their findings appeared in last fall’s issue of the Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly.

Unsurprisingly, Wilkins and Coleman tell us that “journalists in this study did significantly better on dilemmas in their field than other types of ethical problems.” Those dilemmas are the ones they study in J school, chew over in bars, and learn about from experience. The authors found that moral development advances with age, education, and on-the-job autonomy, and that investigative reporters are more reflective than average reporters. “It has been shown,” they write, “that investigative reporters make moral decisions regarding wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for the public good, serve as moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of reporters.”

Reed was a hard-news guy. Scoops and in-depth reporting were a Crain’s tradition, and if Crain Communications wanted a change it needed an editor who’d be comfortable making it. So Reed resigned. There was talk of a nationwide search, but Bailey approached Crain’s from the Wall Street Journal, where he’d been a bureau chief and written a column on small business, and got the job. In his 15 months he did what he was brought in to do, maybe to a fault.

Decades of experience were lost as senior editorial employees resigned because they didn’t want to work for Bailey. They complained about long weekends at the office, micromanagement, and insufferability. One of Bailey’s changes was to take reporters off their beats periodically so they could spend a week working for the Internet editor.