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chapter 10 Religion, Morality, and Professional Values: A Study of the Ethical Sources of Today’s Journalists In recent years, journalists have appeared somewhat at a loss when faced with ethical conundrums and perplexing moral problems, particularly when they recognize that the public does not necessarily view journalists,as they often view themselves, as guardians of public morality. This can be seen in the frustration many members of the media—especially those in the Beltway culture of Washington,D.C.—experienced with the political scandals that obsessed the nation’s capital after the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992. Washington journalists played a key role, either as the original investigators or as a pipeline for partisan accusations,in such controversies surrounding Clinton and his wife,Hillary,as the “Whitewater” scandal involving the Clintons’ land transactions in Arkansas; the “Travelgate” scandal that erupted after Clinton dismissed a number of longtime staffers in the office handling White House travel ; the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs, where Clinton was accused of lying under oath and sexual misconduct; and the investigations of allegations that Clinton misused his office for fund-raising purposes. Throughout much of Clinton’s term, journalists scratched their heads over polls that showed the public did not necessarily share journalists’ outrage over the conduct of a president who was widely viewed as morally suspect and an ethical hairsplitter. But what journalists did not appear to recognize, I believe, is that they have become widely perceived to be on the side of a ritualistic, rulebound morality that has more to do with the Washington, D.C., outlook on the world than with morals or ethics. In the public’s mind, journalists’ intense response to every peccadillo and misstep in public conduct appeared to be a demonstration of something very much different from high-minded civic virtue.The public seemed to feel, at some visceral level, that when everything is a scandal, 10.148-162/Unde 1/15/02, 9:42 AM 148 Religion, Morality, and Professional Values 149 then, in the broadest moral sense, nothing is a scandal. The propensity of the press—as well as the increasingly partisan groups that orchestrate the latest scandal through congressional hearings, special prosecutor investigations, and headline-making leaks to the press—to tack the term gate onto almost any controversy may demonstrate a dubious moral outlook on public life rather than a lofty one. Some observers of public life in the United States see this situation as part of the culture of “civil religion” that has come to dominate the discourse of the country’s political elites—as well as the press corps that covers them. According to this theory, journalists easily deal with religious morality and religious moral judgments as long as these judgments reflect some amorphously perceived public viewpoint about proper moral behavior, not journalists’ own religious or moral values.1 In this scenario, journalists—convinced that there is a deep religious righteousness among the citizenry—were waiting for the public to rise up to punish Clinton for behavior that journalistic insiders know is commonplace among the political high and mighty. This led to the anomalous situation where a jaded and irreverent press corps came to believe that JudeoChristian moral standards should be applied to a president who wore his religious beliefs on his political sleeve, while the public, its theology imprecise and its interests more down-to-earth, never really took Clinton’s religious pose seriously and judged Clinton on more practical grounds (such as his presiding over a good economy). As interesting as this analysis is, I believe something more is at work.Journalists are influenced, as our research has shown, by the remnants of Judeo-Christian ethical values in a now highly secularized professional culture, but the confusion over their application of moral standards shows how little they often understand the source of their ethical instincts.It is easy for journalists—as well as the news organizations for which they work—to treat ethics as detached from religiosity, and many a-religious journalists would argue that one can follow a personal ethical code without holding any particular religious beliefs. Anthropologists ,philosophers,and historians have debated which came first—religion or morality—and many see ethics as an inherent human impulse drawn from tribal codes in existence long before the evolution of advanced theological systems that assimilated ageless moral precepts into their belief structures. In this view, people act ethically toward one another because it...

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