ABSTRACT
The news industry should see diversity as part of its ethical canon, Brislin and Williams wrote for the Journal of Mass Media Ethics in 1996. That same year, 69 percent of newspaper editors and broadcast news directors surveyed called diversity an ethical issue (Medsger, 1996, p. 7). Since the mid-to late 1990s, diversity has come to be viewed as a crucial part of accuracy and professionalism. If ethics broadly is concerned with how we live our lives and what we value (Jaksa & Pritchard, 1994, p. 3), then nothing could be more relevant to a discussion of ethics than the way people relate to, perceive, and share stories with those who are different from them. The impact of these stories stretches from shaping international relations to helping create empathy for a next door neighbor (Craig, 2006, p. 9). Alasdair MacIntyre believes that people come to know who they are through stories with interlocking narratives (1984, pp. 214-216). Each person’s very identity is created through these stories. “The pervasiveness of news and ‘mediated experience’ as the source of stories thus makes journalists in a sense, co-authors of moral meaning in contemporary society” (Lambeth, 1992, p. 87).
