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The Race Card and Ethical Reasoning:
The Importance of Race to Journalistic Decision Making














By Renita Coleman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Manship School of Mass Communication
221 Journalism Building
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
(225) 578-2045
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Paper submitted for consideration by the Minorities and Communication Division of AEJMC for the 2002 annual conference.


The Race Card and Ethical Reasoning:
The Importance of Race to Journalistic Decision Making



  ABSTRACT

A controlled experiment is used to investigate the effects of race of news subjects on journalists' ethical reasoning. In this study as well as in two previous studies reported here, the race of the people in the dilemmas had a highly significant effect on ethical reasoning. When participants knew the race because they saw photographs, their ethical reasoning scores were higher when the people in the ethical dilemmas were white than when they were African American.