Today I gave a presentation on the lack of a corpus of scholarly publications on journalism ethics education. According to my research, the Journal of Mass Media Ethics and Journalism (and Mass Communication) Educator combine to publish fewer than 30 articles that deal explicitly with the issue of teaching ethics in journalism schools since the 1980 publication of the landmark pamphlet by Clifford Christians and Catherine Covert, Teaching Ethics in Journalism Education. Even if there were problems with my search terms, the fact remains that an alarmingly low percentage of the possible articles published in those two journals — where one would expect most of that conversation to take place — focused on the role that professors and instructors play in shaping their students’ conceptions and employments of ethics. Even if these kinds of conversations might happen on conference panels, if they were prominent enough or if those having the conversations were passionate enough, they would show up in a journal.
So, where is the research on how we teach our students about journalism ethics? If the research is being done, why isn’t it being published in two of the most obvious places?
As this project progresses, I’ll update it here.
Jordan Stalker 