ABSTRACT
Citizens, journalists, and academics have long debated issues such as fairness, privacy, and truth-telling in public forums, seminars, and newsrooms. These debates about media conduct and content first became self-conscious deliberations about ethics in the 1890s. The sustained ethical evaluations of the Progressive Era were followed first by manifestations of media professionalization, then by applications of social responsibility theory, and subsequently by concerns for global humanitarianism. Along the way, underlying assumptions changed from the caveat emptor of libertarianism to consideration of universal human obligations. Taken together, these four periods of ferment in American media ethics history—the Progressive Era, professionalism in the 1920s, social responsibility after 1947, and global humanitarianism since 1980—transformed public concerns about journalism into systematic reflection and practical application.
