ABSTRACT
Modern journalism ethics was built upon the twin pillars of truth and objectivity. By the early 1900s, journalism textbooks, associations and codes of ethics cited truth and objectivity as fundamental principles of the emerging profession. Truth and objectivity have long roots in journalism, going back to the advent of the periodic news press. The claim to provide accurate and impartial reports or “relations” was made by the editors of the newsbooks of the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, mass commercial newspapers displayed a “veneration of the fact” (Stephens, 1997, p. 244).
