抄録
News reporting, particularly investigative reporting, is a fundamental element for democratic society. However, nowadays in the post-truth age, news coverage from the perspective of resistance to power as a watchdog or protection of vulnerable groups is sometimes criticized as mendacious or biased reporting. Instead of focusing on objectivity or truth, this paper examines reporting ethics or standards which justify reporting when it is difficult to establish its truth clearly.
Section 1 suggests that reporting ethics might be distinguished from professional ethics, considering discussions about professions in previous research. In addition, it argues that reporting ethics is a part of journalism ethics, considering on philosophical approaches which have appeared as means of overcoming the limitation of the social responsibility theory. Section 2 pursues how reporters should make judgments when they are confronted with serious ethical problems of reporting news from philosophical perspectives, referring especially to discussions about judgment by Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, which emphasized the importance of thinking from the standpoint of others through Common Sense. Section 3 proposes that the balancing approach, which is often found in legal judgments and used as the principle to weigh competing interests or rights of the interested parties, can be applied as the ethics of news reporting. Finally, this paper concludes that the balancing approach would be a ground for justifying investigative reporting when it is difficult to substantiate its truth, for instance when internal or confidential documents are revealed by whistleblowers.
