Who is a journalist? One who performs a certain function at minimum standards, or one who adheres to best practices?
Erik Ugland, Ph.D., was one of 12 fellows selected to address those questions at the Media Ethics Colloquium at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Ugland and his co-author, Jennifer Henderson of Trinity University, wrote an article addressing the legal and ethical dimensions of the question “Who is a journalist?” and explaining how debates within each of those domains are too often conflated.
“We argue that what is routinely treated as a single debate really ought to be five or six,” says Ugland, an assistant professor of broadcast and electronic communication.
According to Ugland and Henderson, these include constitutional, statutory and administrative contexts on the law side, and credentials and accountability on the ethics side.
The issue of journalistic identity is also central to some of Ugland’s other research, which examines the role of news councils — organizations of media and citizens that hear, assess and resolve complaints by the public against the news media.
News councils are prevalent around the world, but in the United States exist only in Minnesota and Washington. In an age of very powerful institutions — including government, business and media — Ugland believes news councils could make a comeback.
“If the law is not used to restrain those institutions,” Ugland says, “then people will turn to ethics to try to appeal to the moral sensibilities of their leaders.”
Ugland adds that both of these research tracks are really about “who is entitled to engage in that discussion — who is entitled to shape journalistic practices. Does the public deserve a seat at the table?”
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