The Research On Journalism Ethics In The Period Of American Popular Newspaper

The journalism ethics question is a worldwide basic topic. From different angles of view, the academic and industrial circles, have long been exploring and studying the journalism and communication ethics that would provide the professional criterion for the journalists in forming their professionalism and formulating the ethics standard.The US is one of the earliest countries in the world that values the construction of and research on journalism occupational ethics, the achievements of which are extremely rich. It is of significance to study the formation and progress of American journalism ethics for journalism ethics research.With the appearance of American popular newspaper, the US journalism entered into a new time of development, and led the current of journalistic development around the world. In the period of American popular newspaper, the US media stepped into the specialized path gradually, constructed journalists'the morality spectrum, and formulated a set of occupational ethics standards, some of which have still been observed faithfully even today.Taking the time as an axis, this paper divides the evolution of journalism ethics in the period of American popular newspaper into three sections to unscramble the US journalism ethics evolution respectively. The first stage is exploration of journalists on the journalism ethics at the beginning of penny press coming into being, the overall characteristic of which is the bourgeon of fuzzy occupational consciousness with the appearance of some scattered related journalism ethics exposition; The second stage is the ponder of the yellow journalism on the news ethics, with Pulitzer, William as representative who made important contributions to form the journalism specialized ethics principle; The third stage is collective reflective thinking of journalistic circles during the jazz journalism period, during which journalistic circles understood the moral ethics and standard ethics penetrated gradually, which laid a notion foundation for the producing of"social responsibility theory"afterwards.In the popular newspaper period, the evolution of American journalism ethics had close correlations with the factors such as social politics, economy, culture and history and so on. This paper has summarized American journalism ethics before"the social responsibility theory"emerged, has expounded"the morality spectrum" of journalists, has hackled the evolution of journalism occupational ethics standard, and has analyzed the deep underlying cause.The construction of American journalism ethics in the popular newspaper period served as a good reference for China. In premise of realizing the moral disparities, moral cultural disparities and national disparities under different social regime, it is essential to seek the common factors in the journalism ethics. It is the conclusion drew in this paper that journalists'morality-training should be valued, the journalists'survival environment should be concerned, the journalism legal system construction should be sped up, the feasibility of standardizing ethics should be strengthened, the industry and organization's surveillance mechanism should be perfected, the widespread media criticism should be carried out and public media literacy should be enhanced.