Top Tips: What does it mean to be an ethical journalist?

We live in an age of disinformation. But most journalists try hard to report the truth without being sneaky or causing harm in the process. They follow a code.

In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, News Decoder’s Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner explains what a code of ethics is in journalism and why it is important. 

You can find more of our learning resources here. And learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program or by forming a News Decoder Club in your school.

I watch a lot of movies about journalists and often find myself screaming at the screen: “They wouldn’t do that!” 

That’s when the journalist does something unethical like lying to a source to get them to give up information or bugging a room or stealing a document or working hand-in-hand with the police. 

I remember screaming at the screen when I watched the Paul Newman movie “Absence of Malice.” In it, actor Sally Field plays an investigative reporter. In one part, a young woman tells Field that Newman’s character couldn’t have done the thing he was accused of because he was helping her get an abortion at the time.

She told Field this information on the condition that the reporter wouldn’t tell anyone about the abortion. But the reporter published it anyway without any sense of remorse.

I’m not saying that kind of stuff never happens in real life. But those are violations of journalism ethics and despite all the derision that many people have for the journalism profession, most reputable journalists abide by a code of ethics. 

The SPJ Code of Ethics

In the United States, the one most journalists follow is set by the Society of Professional Journalists. Its Code of Ethics includes a lot of bullet points but they fall into four major principles:

1. Seek truth and report it

2. Minimize harm

3. Act independently

4. Be accountable and transparent

Basically, good journalists try not to mislead and care about the truth of what they report. They worry about the ramifications of their story and don’t want people hurt by it who don’t deserve to be hurt. 

They don’t report stories because important or wealthy or scary people want certain stories out, and they don’t hold back on reporting because someone offers them money or advantages. They tell their readers or listeners or viewers where and how they got the information they report. 

The International Federation of Journalists has a Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists. Many news organizations have their own codes as well. News Decoder has two codes of ethics for its journalists. One is the Young Reporter’s Code of Ethics. It has three basic principles: stick to the truth, respect the integrity of others and protect copyright.

The other is the Ethical Guidelines for Using AI on News Decoder. It has four principles: transparency; accuracy and verification; make human stories; accuracy and verification.

An ethical dilemma

Sometimes journalists find themselves in what we call ethical dilemmas. This happens when adhering to one part of the code — seek truth and report it — violates other parts of the code — minimize harm. If you report the story people will get hurt but the story is too important not to tell. 

Or maybe you have to do something that isn’t quite right to get information; someone gave you information you weren’t meant to have or you had to trespass or violate someone’s privacy or in some way break the law to get the information you need for a story.

A great example of an ethical dilemma is what faced Jeffrey Goldberg in March 2025. He’s the head of the Atlantic magazine and found himself included in an online chat on Signal with the U.S. vice president, secretary of defense and other high level people in national security in the U.S. government. They were chatting about an imminent attack on Yemen.

Goldberg didn’t initially report any of it because he thought it must be fake; how could he, a journalist, have ended up on a chat about top secret security issues? He reported it once he realized it was real and after the attack had happened. He even displayed parts of the chat.

What he reported involved information that was obviously classified. But the story that was so important it had to be told was how fast and loose high-level officials of the United States were with information that was a secret for a reason. The release of the information to the wrong people could put American troops in jeopardy. 

In reporting the story, Goldberg told readers that there were parts he wasn’t going to report because doing so would be wrong. He obviously wasn’t supposed to have this information. 

Seek truth and report it.

Now, all the information Goldberg did report he obviously wasn’t supposed to have. But the SPJ code doesn’t say that you have to be law abiding or respect authority or do what people tell you to do. Under the accountability section it says: “Explain ethical choices and processes to audiences.”

In this way it acknowledges that sometimes stories are so important — there are preventable deaths happening, maybe — that you have to do something not quite proper to report it. 

When you have to take those improper actions though, you must be able and willing to hold yourself to account publicly. You have to explain to your reader what you did and why you did it, which is what Goldberg did. 

In another great example of ethics, reporter Shane Bauer went undercover in 2016 to work as a guard at a private prison in the U.S. state of Louisiana to find out more about an industry that held some 130,000 people in prison. But he didn’t lie in order to get the job even though he couldn’t do the story without getting the job. And who would hire an investigative journalist for a job as a prison guard? 

He had on his resume his real name and real work history, which had him employed by the publisher of Mother Jones, a muckraking, left-leaning magazine. But the people who hired him for the prison guard stint never asked him about it.

By now though, some of you are screaming at your screen that journalists violate all that stuff all the time. We live in an age of disinformation and punditry where people constantly spout unverified and false information on shows called “news” and on podcasts and social media and in YouTube and TikTok videos.

But those who do are derided by the vast number of journalists who try to report the truth ethically. And what drives these journalists crazy is being put into the same camp as those who mislead and misinform. 

It makes them want to scream. 

Questions to consider:

1. What is a “code of ethics”?

2. What do we mean by an ethical dilemma?

3. Can you think of a time when it was difficult for you to tell the truth?