Chapter 1: Institutional Pressures

This chapter focuses on the ethical issues that arise with the business demands in the news media industry. The five cases in this chapter demonstrate how media practitioners are often caught in conflicting duties to their employers, to their readers or viewers, and to their own professional conscience. They illustrate some of the conundrums that occur regularly in today’s news business. This chapter features cases that discuss HuffPost’s business model, the mental and physical crises journalism professionals are facing worldwide, lessons from Philadelphia Inquirer’s bankruptcy, the issue of paid journalism worldwide, and the impact of AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT on journalism.