information about the stunning events at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Wire services sent bulletin after bulletin around the world.
The next day, newspapers added context and analysis. Newsmagazines published special editions. “In those early defining moments of mid‐September, the nation’s news media conducted themselves with the courage, honesty, grace, and dedication a free society deserves,” Gloria Cooper wrote in Columbia Journalism Review. 1
There were casualties. A photojournalist and six television transmission engineers were killed at the World Trade Center.
“On this day of unimaginable fear and terror, journalists acted on instinct,” Cathy Trost and Alicia C. Shepard wrote in a 2002 oral history that documents the heroism: “They commandeered taxis, hitched rides with strangers, rode bikes, walked miles, even sprinted to crash sites.” Appropriately, the book’s title is Running Toward Danger.
It wasn’t competition that motivated them – cable and broadcast networks, for example, shared video that day. It wasn’t profit – the networks aired no commercials for 93 hours, and all news organizations broke their budgets to cover the story. As Trost and Shepard concluded, it could only be instinct that drove these journalists, an ingrained conviction that their profession is a high calling to public service. 2
In The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote about a craving for news that humans have had throughout history. They call it “the Awareness Instinct” – people’s need “to be aware of events beyond their direct experience.” Knowledge of the unknown, the authors wrote, gives people a sense of security. 3 Contemporary society needs reliable information to satisfy the Awareness Instinct, and it was especially in demand on September 11.
Journalism’s Guiding Principles
In 1997, Kovach and Rosenstiel began two years of interviews, forums, and surveys intended to define journalism’s purpose. There were clues in the ethics codes adopted by national journalism organizations. Those codes asserted that journalists serve the public and that they are dedicated to truth and fairness.
Beyond writing the codes, journalists had not spent much time analyzing what their guiding principles were. For one thing, they thought it was evident that they worked in the public interest and that the news they published or broadcast defined their standards. For another, their lawyers had cautioned against putting these standards in writing, lest they be used against them in court. And, finally, meeting the deadlines for today’s newscast or tomorrow’s newspaper always seemed to take priority over the intellectual exercise of writing down their professional beliefs.
However, as Kovach and Rosenstiel’s research proceeded, it became clear that certain beliefs were widely and strongly held. These beliefs guided the authors to a definition of journalism’s primary purpose: “to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self‐governing.” They elaborated in The Elements of Journalism: “The news media help us define our communities, and help us create a common language and common knowledge rooted in reality. Journalism also helps identify a community’s goals, heroes and villains.” 4
An affirming statement of journalism’s purpose was crafted by Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, and Robert G. Kaiser, The Post’s managing editor, in their 2002 book The News About the News. Downie and Kaiser wrote:
Citizens cannot function together as a community unless they share a common body of information about their surroundings, their neighbors, their governing bodies, their sports teams, even their weather. Those are all the stuff of news. The best journalism digs into it, makes sense of it, and makes it accessible to everyone. 5
Kovach and Rosenstiel identified the key principles – which they called the “elements” – of journalism. Six of those are listed here:
Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. Although truth is difficult to define, there was unanimity among journalists that the first step is “getting the facts right.” Kovach and Rosenstiel concluded that “the disinterested pursuit of truth” is what distinguishes journalism from other forms of communication, like propaganda and entertainment. 6
Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens. The authors described “an implied covenant with the public” that the work is honest. The covenant, they wrote, “tells the audience that the movie reviews are straight, that the restaurant reviews are not influenced by who buys an ad, that the coverage is not self‐interested or slanted for friends.” This first allegiance to the readers, viewers, and listeners is the basis for journalistic independence. Journalists are most valuable to their employers if they put their duty to the audience ahead of the employer’s short‐term financial interests. 7
Journalism’s essence is a discipline of verification. This principle is the basis of techniques that reporters and editors rely on to get the facts right, such as “seeking multiple witnesses to an event, disclosing as much as possible about sources, and asking many sides for comment.” 8
Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover. Journalists are observers, not players. For their reporting to be trusted, reporters have to be detached from the people and events they cover. They must ensure there is not an appearance of a relationship that would conflict with their journalistic duties. 9
Journalists must serve as an independent monitor of power. News media have a watchdog role, “watching over the powerful few in society on behalf of the many to guard against tyranny.” Essentially, journalism is a court of last resort when the systems of government and business break down. Kovach and Rosenstiel note that the media should report when powerful institutions are working effectively, as well as when they are not. 10
Journalists must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. The news media have an obligation to amplify the community conversation, allowing citizens a voice in comments on news websites, letters to the editor, op‐ed essays, and radio and television talk shows. Kovach and Rosenstiel caution that the journalist has to be “an honest broker and referee” who insists that the debate is based on facts, because “a forum without facts fails to inform and a debate steeped in prejudice and supposition only inflames.” 11
Defining ‘Social Responsibility’
For more than a century before The Elements of Journalism articulated them, journalism standards had been steadily improving. Underlying this trend was the news media’s growing acceptance of social responsibility – a concept that, in its application to commerce, imposes on business enterprises a moral duty to make their communities better. This is a duty that goes beyond merely obeying laws. Although social responsibility is not discussed here as a religious matter, a principle in Judaism known as tikkun olam seems to define it. Tikkun olam (pronounced tee‐KOON oh‐LUHM) is Hebrew for “repairing the world” – an obligation to fix the problems of society, including violence, disease, poverty, and injustice. 12
In the world of commerce, a company’s acts of social responsibility might involve contributing money and executive time to charities, hiring the disabled, or going beyond legal requirements to prevent pollution. A classic business example is the straightforward way in which Johnson & Johnson responded to the Tylenol tragedy of 1982. Someone tampered with containers of Tylenol on store shelves in Chicago, inserting cyanide that eventually killed seven people. Through the news media, the company immediately warned
