Balancing Ethics of Care, Inclusion and Journalistic Autonomy

There may be more shared values between documentarians and journalists than their ethics practices have so far suggested.

Documentarians’ collective work over the last decade, asserting national ethics standards around participant care and including long-suppressed voices, has laid the foundation for crucial next steps for a resilient, contextualized ethical framework for documentary. Journalistic ethics standards, particularly around journalistic autonomy, have sometimes challenged documentarians’ choices in implementing care-centric practices, as breaking a commitment to journalistic autonomy.

But a new CMSI report, “Balancing Ethics of Care, Inclusion and Journalistic Autonomy,” reveals ample evidence of journalists’ valuing care, and shows how journalists implement caring practices. Kimberly Anastásio—an assistant professor at Fordham University–and I looked at 23 codes of ethics from both professional organizations and trusted media institutions. We found an abundance of concern for care offered to sources, members of the public, and even fellow journalists. These examples can spur a more public conversation between journalists and documentarians about how to apply ethical values they share in different contexts, and particularly to hold power to account.

Documentarians have only now begun to build expectations for ethical practice into a field that has lacked a professional body with an ethics code. While journalists have many ethics codes, professional bodies and institutions with elaborate standards and practices, they have often been interpreted with rules that seem to limit the opportunities to offer appropriate care. As we show, discussion of the importance of context in implementing the values informing ethics codes within context has been left to specialized organizations such as the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma, to subdisciplines of journalistic practice, and to guidance responding to the moment.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• Ethics of care and inclusion have become a core concern in many documentary projects, including for funders of documentary.
• Documentarians have often hidden their care practices from distributors and media outlets to avoid running afoul of formal standards & practices.
• Journalistic autonomy is a bedrock ethical principle for journalists, so they can show that their work is free of outside influence, pressure or manipulation.
• But ethics of care also inform journalism, and care values are central to some journalistic documentary practices.
• Both for journalists and documentarians, these issues come to the fore in projects where the media makers and the participants establish longer-term relationships, or where participants face known risks.
• Journalists and documentarians have both grappled with this problem in ways that can help each other.
• We can see the care journalists have offered toward sources/participants in three areas:
  • Journalistic codes of ethics, both professional and corporate.
  • Targeted guidance for trauma-informed and respectful journalism.
  • Journalistic subdisciplines’ practices.

Documentarians and journalists can build upon both their organizations’ standards and those of the other to make their own guidelines more resilient. PBS Standards & Practices, the only media outlet that publicly shares its standards, has taken the lead in sharing guidance on contextualizing values in different circumstances. The annual conference and festival Double Exposure has pioneered cross-professional ethics discussions. For documentarians and journalists to share their experiences and expectations across their professional practices, and clarify expectations for different contexts where they grapple with power inequities is a great place to start.

The report, which builds upon my previous work with, among others, Documentary Accountability Working Group (funded by the MacArthur Foundation), was partially completed while I was at the Shorenstein Center’s Documentary in the Public Interest Initiative at Harvard University. Both Kimberly Anastácio and I would like to thank Matthew Levitas and Kenzie Larson, graduate students at American University, and Peter Pich at Harvard. And as always we are grateful for the leadership of Caty Borum and the support of Varsha Ramani at CMSI.

Read the report