Never judge a group by its cover story.

That may be the moral of a new study about morals in journalism.

Despite the journalistic travails of Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, The New
Republic's Stephen Glass and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams,
"journalism is one of the most morally developed professions in the
country," says University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism
professor Lee Wilkins.

Journalists, Wilkins discovered, rank behind only seminarians,
physicians and medical students for moral character and ethical
behavior.

"Thinking like a journalist involves moral reflection, done at a level
that in most instances equals or exceeds members of other learned
professions," Wilkins explained.

That moral reflection, however, may lose some of its clarity when
racial issues arise.

"The media are responsible for racial portrayals that, by virtue of
their subtlety, are today even more sinister than was the overt racism
of the past," Wilkins said.

Defining Issues

Wilkins and Louisiana State University communications professor Renita
Coleman administered the Defining Issues Test to 249 reporters from
print and broadcast newsrooms across the country.

Never before given to journalists, the test is normalized against some
30,000 other professionals who have taken it over the past 30 years.

On this "single most widely used paper and pencil test of moral
development," Wilkins said journalists scored fourth highest among all
professions, with no significant differences between men and women, or
broadcast and print.

What's more, civic and investigative journalists scored even higher
than did their peers in other specialties.

"I'm not surprised journalists tested well on the moral development
test," said Central Michigan University (CMU) journalism professor
Timothy Boudreau. "Ethics is stressed, discussed, debated, defined
and refined in most journalism programs."

The study's findings -- which appeared in a recent issue of the
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly -- do not surprise other
experts either.

"Journalists spend more time discussing, analyzing and debating the
ethics of their profession than any other professionals, save for
maybe in medicine," said MU Journalism School editorial department
chairperson Charles Davis.

"It's not surprising journalists are moral in their work," added Kim
Garretson, director of emerging media for the Best Buy Corporation.
"The majority of journalists know that first and foremost, they are
storytellers. They either tell it straight, or they put a very clear
point of view on their work. Not doing so would probably be pretty
transparent."

Reflecting on Race

Visual information boosted ethical thinking in study participants,
said Wilkins and Coleman, who added a twist to the test -- photographs
that coincided with written scenarios.

"The photo allowed journalists to think deeply about the stakeholders
in the scenario in concrete as opposed to abstract ways," Wilkins
explained. "In social science terms, it promoted information
processing that was deeply logical, yet still connected to the
emotions that photography provokes."

But photos of African-American stakeholders seemed to drive a stake in
the heart of journalism's largely ethical demeanor.

Journalists demonstrated "significantly lower levels of ethical
reasoning when the people in the photos were African-American," the
study revealed.

This finding would seem to square with the media's often-negative
portrayal of black America.

"Stupidity, thoughtlessness, and a lack of diversity in our thinking
processes is the key here," Wilkins told SJR. "I don't think it's
deliberate, but counteracting this apparently unthinking human
tendency is crucial, because race remains one of the most enduring
problems in America."

Blair's Lair

In recent years, individual journalists have tested the dark depths of
the ethical abyss.

Every few months, a new story seems to break revealing another moral
lapse on the grounds of the Fourth Estate.

Most recent case in point: Armstrong Williams, a respected columnist
who turned party hack by taking $250,000.00 from the Bush
Administration to pontificate positively on a presidential
brainchild -- No Child Left Behind.

"In every profession there are renegades, folks who simply repulse the
rest of the profession with their behaviors," MU's Davis told SJR.
"Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair were clearly troubled souls who never
should have been given pen and ink in a journalistic operation."

Dan Rather -- who tried to pillory the Bush Administration with
unauthenticated documents that cast doubt on the President's military
service -- "is a study in stars run amok, folks who grow too big in
the newsroom and become unedited," Davis added. "That story would
have never moved had that newsroom been a culture in which people
could question openly the motives and methods of their co-workers."

Glass, Blair and Rather may be renegades, but the massive exposure
their cases received may have made them more than mere outliers in a
study on moral behavior.

"While some ethical lapses occur in the profession, I think they are
magnified by others in the media -- talk radio, for example -- who
want to portray them as typical," said CMU's Boudreau, who teaches
media law and reporting.

Media magnification of journalism's problems alarms many readers,
listeners, and viewers.

"Alarm bells are beginning to sound," said Kim Garretson. "Audiences
are abandoning media properties where journalists tell their stories.
We're seeing the rise of 'citizen journalism' via web logging and
personal networks of people sharing 'news' not created or filtered by
a media company."

But web logs have their own peculiar biases and idiosyncrasies -- and
no guiding ethical code that strives for balance or fairness.

"Especially in the right-wing 'blogosphere,' the least-covered,
least-screamed-about episode of journalistic malpractice involves
Armstrong Williams," Charles Davis said.

Referring to pseudo-journalist Jeff Gannon's presence at a recent
White House press conference, Davis noted that the web loggers "who
want to throw Dan Rather on a pyre sure are quiet about the fact that
the White House had a planted male hooker lobbing softballs at the
president."

Future Shock?

With web logs, the Internet, cable television, email, instant
messaging, and a 24/7 spotlight on world events from virtually every
angle, pressures are mounting on traditional journalists as salaries
stagnate.

"Advertisers are notching up the pressure to show a measurable return
on investment, while news staffs are shrinking and pressure is
increasing for meeting the fickle demands of remaining readers," said
Best Buy's Garretson. "Might we start to see more ethical and moral
snafus?" he asked.

"Under the crunch of deadline pressures, and with growing competition
to be first, journalists sometimes make some poor real-life
decisions," answered CMU's Boudreau.

The study's authors warn that journalism isn't a perfect profession,
nor does it operate in a perfect world.

"Both Renita and I have spent a lot of years in the business -- and we
see good ethical decisions being made every day, as well as some
mistakes," Wilkins told SJR. "This study does not say journalists are
perfect, just that we are good moral thinkers. But even good thinkers
can make horrific mistakes."