Do Media Organizations Have a Moral Life?

Source: RIA Novosti/Anton Denisov

We know that companies and organizations can have a distinct “culture.” A notorious example is Volkswagen, which for years relied on software that enabled their diesel cars to cheat on emissions tests. The global scandal has crippled the automaker, which has pled guilty to U.S. fraud and conspiracy charges and paid more than $26 billion in fines. In his recent book on the scandal, writer Jack Ewing argues that the case “vividly shows how a dysfunctional corporate culture can threaten the existence of even the mightiest of corporations” (2017).

But do companies have a “moral” life? And how might we describe the moral agency of media organizations?

Researchers are increasingly focused on these questions. And the answer to the first question appears to be “yes.” For years, business researchers have studied the perceived “ethical climate” of organizations. And more recently, scholars have suggested that employees operate within a “moral ecology” that can and should be studied. Some are even promoting the concept of “organizational moral learning” (Spitzeck, 2009) to suggest how organizations, and not just the individuals within them, exhibit a process of moral maturation.

Usually, when we talk about moral judgment or ethical norms, we presume a focus on single people. And rightly so; generally, ethical deliberation is understood as rooted in the individual (or several identifiable people hashing it out together). But the idea of an organization as an “ecology” – where one can study the “natural” setting of organisms and the interactions of features of the environment with everything living in it – has been gaining traction with business researchers. Some have started using an “ecological frame” to examine how the environment of a group of people can serve as a force that shapes their behavior. Others have talked of an “organizational ecology” approach as a good way to study types of organizations (Andersson & Ford, 2016). On scholar uses the term “platform ecosystem” (Xu, 2016) to explain how media outlets might harness social media.

Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that a shifting focus on organizations as environments has led to the burgeoning term “moral ecology.” The term draws our attention to the features of a single environment that serve to shape virtuous behavior – either by cultivating or encouraging it, or thwarting it. This is not an entirely new idea. Philosopher Alasdair MacInyre argued that the values we find embedded in “practice” or lines of work can indicate the moral nature of communities. And in 1988, business researchers Bart Victor and John Cullen claimed that “there is a growing belief that organizations are social actors responsible for the ethical or unethical behavior of their employees” (p. 101). In 2002, Udai Pareek mapped out measures of eight ethics-related features that appear to make up an organization’s culture: openness, confrontation, trust, authenticity, pro-action, autonomy, collaboration, and experimentation. And most recently, psychologist Chuck Huff and colleagues pointed to “moral ecology” as a key factor in explaining how computer science exemplars did the kind of morally-infused work they do. Moral ecology, they said, “is subjective and multifaceted. It is clearly shaped by many factors including – but not limited to – codes, management attitudes, national culture and regulation, the examples set by colleagues and role models, and competing personal projects” (2008, p. 294).

My recent work with journalism and public relations exemplars (Plaisance, 2015) also suggests that the moral ecology of a place needs to be better understood. What might be important factors in a newsroom, for example, that contribute to its moral ecology? Does office and desk layouts encourage collaboration or hierarchical thinking? What is the effect of the television monitors over journalists’ desks that stream real-time data about how many people are reading which stories and for how long? And for digital news sites, how does the reality of the 24-hour news cycle influence ethical standards? How does journalistic standards of truth-telling and newsgathering sit with the constant press of opinion, trolling and vigilantism that thrives online? What kinds of gatekeeping behavior have been abandoned? Retrenched? How does the pressure to cultivate an identifiable journalistic “voice” and brand online influence decisions about impartiality?

Media ethics scholars don’t really have good answers to these types of questions – yet.