In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter 8 Trusting Their Guts: The Moral Compass of a Doubters’ Profession E.W. Scripps was a quarrelsome old cuss, a hard-drinking, willful , dominating personality who said what was on his mind and the world be damned. While Scripps may be best known as one of the earliest developers of the newspaper chain, in his memoirs he spent a good bit of time musing about journalistic morals and philosophizing about the conflicting feelings he had about religion’s impact on his professional outlook. “I cannot recall the time when I was not what is commonly called an atheist,” Scripps wrote. “I do not believe in God, or any being equal to or similar to the Christian’s God. . . . Yet when I called upon myself to classify myself as to what school of philosophy or religion I belong to, I have had no doubt but that I should be classified as a Christian.My morals,or my moral convictions, are those common to members of the Christian religion.”1 Scripps’s ambivalent feelings about the relationship between religion and morals go a long way in explaining the complex role that Judeo-Christian ethics plays in the professional practice of journalists, particularly in carrying out a newspaper crusade,to which Scripps heartily subscribed.Scripps believed that biblical values made for good journalism, and he was much more open in recognizing this than the modern journalist, who may subscribe to Scripps’s ethics but no longer has the knowledge of or the interest in religion to put it into historical perspective. Scripps, like many of his fellow journalists, did not put much stock in what he considered the mythological and legendary explanations of many biblical stories or in the orthodox theology that grew up around Jesus’ life and teachings and was adapted by the church as a measure of belief that determined everything from church membership to the potential for a believer’s salvation in 08.115-129/Unde 1/15/02, 9:41 AM 117 118 from yahweh to yahoo! the afterlife. Scripps did, however, place great store in the wisdom of the Ten Commandments, and, when he retired in 1908, he included them as part of his guidelines for editors to follow.All his writings and correspondence were sprinkled with quotations from the Bible, and he once referred to the newspaper’s editorials as “the teaching department,the statesmanship department,the spiritual department.” Although Scripps had no use for the organized church (“All that Christ taught is good,” Scripps once said. “Most, perhaps all, of the interpretations of Christ’s teachings by the theologians, have been untrue, unscienti fic,un-Christian,unnatural,wicked”),he believed that all reformers—including those in journalism—were forever trying to improve social conditions by applying the first principles of Christianity.“It is noteworthy that the most radical , the most determined, reformers are . . . outside the pale of the Christian church,” Scripps wrote.“These men may long have lost all faith in the church . . . but nevertheless,having been born into a world which had no other ethical point of view than the Christian, they have been so formed by their environment as to have no other than a Christian point of view.”2 Scripps’s views fit neatly into the idea of a “civil religion,” advanced by the sociologist Robert N.Bellah,who contended that a secularized version of JudeoChristian morals and ethics has become absorbed into the operation of our system of politics, governmental life, arts, and sciences.3 It is no great leap to see Bellah’s concept applied to journalistic institutions. In this view, journalistic values of virtuous conduct, dislike of intolerance, and belief in fundamental moral and ethical precepts may have been moved out of their explicitly religious application and into the secular, public sphere, but they still have their roots in basic religious concepts—in this country, largely Judeo-Christian. The media ethicist Ed Lambeth assumed this viewpoint when he argued that journalism ethics reflect Judeo-Christian values, not for religious reasons but because they have become the core cultural values of the larger society in which journalistic principles are an integral part.4 Other observers of the journalistic scene have noted this phenomenon at work. Jay Newman has argued that while few journalists are prepared “to devote their careers to working for a great religious awakening,” the historic connection between religion and the ideals of civilization promoted by journalistic organizations cannot be ignored. “The Christian religion can...

Share