ABSTRACT
Journalism in the late nineteenth century, notably in New York, was characterized by a race for circulation among many daily newspapers, with Joseph Pulitzer’s racy New York World running to the fore in 1890 with a stunning circulation of six-hundred thousand in a city of 2.7 million. Echoes of Kant’s conception of duty in contemporary journalism codes of ethics are not hard to find. Clearly, ethical journalists today have their own duty, or categorical imperative. “Journalism empowers viewers, listeners and readers to make more informed decisions for themselves; it does not tell people what to believe or how to feel.” The elements of journalism are the ingredients that allow people to know the facts and context of events, to understand how they should react to that information, and to work on compromises and solutions that make their communities better.
