Many people have concluded that there is something deeply wrong with the character of most journalists. Their evidence comes from the journalists themselves: inaccurate reporting, television images of reporters mobbing a tearful newsmaker, salacious headlines, and those awful promotional 1. spots". That conclusion about journalists makes people angry. Why?

Jimmy
One reason, no doubt, is that what journalists do affects people. Take the infamous Janet Cooke, an African- reporter at the Washington Post. In 1981, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her front-page story about "Jimmy", an 8-year-old heroin addict. Her story set off a search to find the boy. Only after she received the Prize did it become clear that she had made him up. A shadow then fell over the credibility of the Post, over the investigative work of other journalists, and even over affirmative action.

But there is more to the public's concern about the character of journalists than the way journalists affect the public. The public also gets mad at bad journalists because journalists have been given privileges, especially the protection of the First Amendment, so that they may serve a larger social good. In the United States, at least, journalists are supposed to keep civil society abreast of ideas and events that significantly affect the well- of citizens and their prerogatives in a democracy. With those privileges comes the expectation that journalists will be worthy of the trust put in them. When they do things that make us wonder whether they have the character to deserve our trust, we get angry.

If the character of journalists is so important, why don't journalists scrutinize each other in the same way that they have scrutinized politicians like President Clinton? Unlike law, journalism has no fitness requirement-, indeed, journalism has no system of licensing whatever. Journalists seem reluctant to judge each other. They certainly aren't keen to discuss their own actions in terms of good and bad character. Why not?

Hypocrisy and convenience have something to do with it, of course. But the explanation is more complicated, as I will soon explain. First, however, we need to get clear about the distinction between private and public character -- and the connection between them.

Two Perspectives on Public Character
Aristotle thought that desirable character traits (or virtues) are inherently social even though they are also necessary for personal excellence. The virtues help us to live well together. Aristotle didn't distinguish between public and private character.

Today, one common way of talking about public character is as a "mask" one wears in public. Public character is that identity that "I" project for others-, private character is the "me" I know even if no one else does.

For a person to be authentic, the character on one side of the mask must be congruent with the character on the other. If they do not seem congruent, we talk about the person being "twofaced," a "hypocrite." We assume that the character behind the mask is the real one and that the character produced for public consumption is merely the product of manipulating what others see.

We can apply this way of thinking about character to Janet Cooke. She manufactured her resume as well as the story of Jimmy. Few, if any, knew who she really" was.

But, usually, things are more complicated. Take, for instance, the CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt. He was a roving reporter famous--and loved-- his affectionate chronicles of back- America. He was often honored by his colleagues and compared to journalism's greats. That was his public side. His private side was less honorable. Six years after he married, he began an extramarital affair. While settled with his wife in New York, he spent long periods with his mistress in Montana. His wife didn't find out about the other woman until after his death. Clearly, this long affair tells us something bad about Kuralt's character. But what does it tell us about his character as a journalist?

Kuralt's duplicity suggests another way of conceiving public character. Rather than having one core identity, "the real me", we might have several (overlapping) identities that coincide with the different roles we occupy in life: journalist, spouse, lover, friend, and so on. Although radical discontinuity between one's public and one's private character is as suspect on this conception of character as on the first, mere differences are not. One character trait may be more relevant in one context than another. The trait of decisiveness, for example, may be essential to the businesswoman, but much less important in a friend. The same businesswoman might be very decisive about approving an acquisition but reluctant to give personal advice. This discontinuity is not hypocrisy. The businesswoman is neither "really" decisive nor "really" reluctant.

Although I am attracted to the idea of a "real me", I lean toward the second way of conceiving character. We all belong to several communities where the substance of what is virtuous varies at least in degree. And there are I just too many examples of people who behave uprightly in the private sphere and despicably in the public - vice versa - for us to conclude that hypocrisy (or schizophrenia) is the only explanation.

Further, strict adherence to the first way of conceiving character threatens to weaken substantially respect for individual privacy. On the first conception, we are encouraged to poke around in a person's private affairs to evaluate her character, that is, to determine whether there is enough correspondence between the private and the public to clear her of the charge of hypocrisy.

So, it seems to me, the only reasonable way to evaluate people's public character - that of politicians as well as of journalists - is by what they say and do in public that is substantially relevant to their public role.

Do Journalists' Actions Speak Loudly Enough?
If what we know about what journalists say and do as journalists can be considered evidence of their public character, all we need to do is to examine those words and actions. It's not hard to come up with a short list of virtues we would like the evidence to show: honesty, fairness, diligence, and so on. Such virtues are appropriate objects of our attention because they tend to promote the good that journalism aims at-, that is, reliably supplying citizens with ideas and information relevant to making good choices - except that, as I suggested earlier, it's not that simple.

Mainstream journalists pride themselves on mastering the techniques associated with objectivity: faithfully reproducing word-forword statements, carefully giving "each side" of the story, writing in the third person, only reporting what can be verified through corroboration or direct observation, and so on. As media scholars Ted Glasser and Jim Ettema have noted, this mastery has the effect of morally distancing journalists from the outcomes of their work. We rarely catch journalists in action.

Journalists work so hard at not being "in" their stories that they seem to be nowhere at all. Although journalism may seem to get more opinionated all the time, especially on television, the typical news story still lacks a discernible point of view.

Further, we rarely catch journalists in action. We do not see what they said or did to get a story; we see only what's published or broadcast. One exception is when we are ourselves the subject of a story. Then we can observe journalists first hand. Another exception is when journalists allow us behind the scenes, for example, in the long column by the Post's ombudsman that followed his investigation of the Cooke scandal. Finally, we may sometimes see the journalist interviewing someone during live coverage of breaking news. But seeing should not always be believing. Even the most spontaneous-looking television can be highly contrived.

A final difficulty in assessing the public character of journalists is that what the public observes must be evaluated in context. That context is often missing, in part because journalists obscure the production process, but in part too because much of the public does not understand journalism's distinctive mission.

Where does all this leave us? I wish that journalists would adopt a more argumentative model of news, while continuing to observe exacting standards of accuracy and completeness. I also wish that journalists would do more to open to the public the process of making news. Elsewhere, I have argued for more scrutiny of journalists by journalists. These changes would make journalists more accountable to us and to each other - and would give us a lot more to go on when we attempt to evaluate their public character.

In the meantime, we must make do with the available evidence, limited as it is.