Kathleen Bartzen Culver is used to skepticism around her 9-to-5 gig, which involves studying journalism ethics.
“They’ll look at me and say, ‘Is that actually a thing?’” she says. “And I say, quite proudly, 'yes, it is a thing.'”
Having served as the Director of UW-Madison’s Center for Journalism Ethics for the last five years, Culver knows it’s more than just a "thing." Debating the standards of good journalism and then encouraging journalists to adhere to those standards has become one of the most important issues in the field. As journalism has come under attack, both by economic forces that threaten newspapers’ very existence and increased questions about its credibility, the Center’s national reputation and influence—and by extension, Culver’s—have grown exponentially.
“Journalism ethics are often in the eye of the beholder,” notes Culver, who also holds the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics. “I will never be in the business of defending journalism that is practiced without integrity. But I am very proud that the Center highlights important work being done in journalism that serves the public interest.”
Culver sees the Center as a bridge—a bridge between newsrooms and the public, and a bridge between academic research and journalistic practice. She’s fascinated by, for instance, major newspapers like the Boston Globe and the Salt Lake Tribune experimenting with the practice of removing or un-publishing people’s names that appeared in print for minor crimes that occurred many years ago.
“With a mistake someone made long ago, perhaps when they were a juvenile, the name no longer affects the public, but it can certainly damage that individual's reputation, and these news outlets are looking at that with fresh eyes,” Culver says. “I think the Center can play a role in highlighting concerns that people have, and how practices might change in response to that.”
Culver began her career as a journalist, covering police and the courts for the Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois, and for what was then the Milwaukee Sentinel. But the shock and emotional trauma of covering difficult events on a daily basis wore on her, and after covering a morning fire at Christmastime that claimed the lives of four children, she realized she was better suited to researching and teaching journalism than practicing it.
In graduate school at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Culver focused on media law and emerging technology, not ethics. After a brief stint doing marketing communications for the UW Health Physicians Group, Culver returned to the J-School again, this time to join the faculty, where she developed what became her signature course: Journalism 202, Mass Media Practices.
“I do work that I like to frame as being about both rights and responsibilities,” she says. “So that we're remaining committed to free expression principles but then also talking about using the tremendous power of those rights, with some sort of sense of our position within communities and how responsible use of that freedom is so important.”
Culver divides issues the Center tackles into what she calls “micro”—should a newspaper identify the victim of a sexual assault, or a criminal suspect who has not yet been charged? —and “macro.” The macro issues are tied to big stories and social trends that are often missed because most newsrooms’ broken business models have made resources scarce over the past several decades.
“One thing that I've been talking a lot about lately is that journalism ethics isn’t just for journalists anymore,” says Culver. “Now that we all are carrying around supercomputers in our pockets that essentially transform us all into publishers, we need to be thinking about the kinds of ethics that have been hammered out in journalism over more than a century, and how those might apply to public communicators beyond journalists.”
Culver’s start as director of the Center coincided roughly with the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016. Trump's attacks on news media put newspapers and cable TV news stations in the crossfire—and elevated Culver’s status as a national expert on issues in journalism ethics.
“Journalism is sort of always everywhere in people's lives, but nobody really thinks about it until some sort of controversy comes up,” she says.
Those controversies cover a wide spectrum. Should CNN reporter Chris Cuomo face discipline for helping his brother, New York's governor Andrew Cuomo, manage media strategy in the wake of a series of sexual harassment accusations? How should reporters handle shifting evidence about whether the COVID-19 pandemic was a result of the virus jumping from animals to humans or a lab leak? Whatever question comes in, Culver’s prepared to handle it.
“Sometimes when reporters call, I joke that they treat it like I have some giant stamp in my office and I'll say, ‘THAT WAS UNETHICAL,’” Culver says. “That's not how journalism ethics ought to work. Ethics ought to be about how we justify our decisions to the people who are affected by those decisions.”
(Interestingly, one of Culver’s frequent callers is her son, Peter, a UW-Madison J-School graduate who now works in journalism at WKOW-TV in Madison.)
There are only a handful of academic centers in the United States that focus on journalism ethics, but UW stands foremost among them. In 2013, the Center inaugurated the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, an honor named for the J-School alumnus who died while covering conflict in Syria. This year’s winners, Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell, won for coverage of labor abuses in the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia. Culver and her colleagues in the J-School just developed a set of modules for students and educators based on the work of recent finalists for the Shadid Award. The Center also hosts an annual conference that attracts journalists and academics from across the country.
One of the biggest issues Culver and the Center are focusing on these days involves ethics and social media platforms —in particular, the ways in which algorithms deliver content to us are affecting our trust in information.
“If social media platforms know that amping up your emotions and making you stick with content that's focused on conflict, then you as a consumer of that information are done a tremendous disservice,” says Culver. She points to a more ethical approach called solutions journalism, in which a a problem is reported alongside a possible solution, even if that solution remains unproven. Research has shown that readers who consume stories that include solutions feel like they can engage and make a difference.
“It will be really interesting to see if we can have a solutions-focused approach to social media algorithms,” says Culver. “It's a different animal, but it's something we should all be talking about.”