Janet Cooke in Hindsight: Reconsideration of a Paradigmatic Case in Journalism Ethics

Abstract

Discourse produced in 1996 by journalists and journalism educators on the Internet was analyzed using a philosophical method called casuistry to see how they evaluated the Janet Cooke case fifteen years later. This analysis shows that these journalists, in reconsidering the Janet Cooke case, tended to favor scaling back tentative exceptions to the paradigm of journalistic lying that had emerged in response to the New Journalism of the 1960s and the Watergate investigation in the 1970s. This analysis illustrates the gradual refinement of moral concepts in journalism.