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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 155-158
© 2001 National Communication Association

Ethics of Political Communication?

Richard L. Johannesen

Robert E. Denton, Jr., editor.  Political Communication Ethics: An Oxymoron?  Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000.  xi + 263 pages.  Selected bibliography and index. $69.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

This anthology of original essays is a revision of Denton’s 1991 anthology, Ethical Dimensions of Political Communication, also published by Praeger.  Retained and revised from that earlier edition are four essays: chapter 1, “The Ethical Performances of Candidates in American Presidential Campaign Dramas,” Bruce E. Gronbeck; chapter 5, “The Dangers of ‘Teledemocracy’: How the Medium of Television Undermines American Democracy,” Robert E. Denton, Jr.; chapter 6, “Narrative Form and the Deceptions of Modern Journalism,” Gary C. Woodward; and chapter 7, “Ethics and Political Advertising” Lynda Lee Kaid.  Six new or essentially new chapters have been added: chapter 2, “Images, Issues, and Political Structure: A Framework for Judging the Ethics of Campaign Discourse,” Ronald Lee; chapter 3, “Electronic Democracy, Virtual Politics, and Local Communities,” Steven R. Goldzwig and Patricia A. Sullivan; chapter 4, “Ethical Considerations of Civil Discourse: The Implications of the Rise of ‘Hate Speech,’” Rita Kirk Whillock; chapter 8, “ Soft Money and Hard Choices: The Influence of Campaign Finance Rules on Campaign Communication,” Clifford A. Jones; chapter 9, “Internet Ethics,” Gary Selnow; and Denton’s brief “Epilogue: Constitutional Authority, Public Morality, and Politics.”

In a brief preface, Denton contends that citizens often consider the phrase “ethical politics” to be an oxymoron, a self-contradictory concept.  The stereotype would have it that there is no such thing as ethical politics; to use them in conjunction is contradictory.  But Denton urges that politics and ethics should be synonyms.  That is our choice and that should be our goal.  His point is clear, but surely he is not literally saying that while all politics should be ethical also all ethics should be political.  Or is he, knowingly or unknowingly, actually implying such a postmodern view?  In the broadest sense of  “political,” can ethics ever be non-political?

It seems a wise choice to have moved Gronbeck’s essay to the opening chapter from its middle position in the earlier edition.  Here the chapter provides a valuable general framework for assessing and discussing political communication ethics across varied contexts, media, and traditions.  Gronbeck describes and illustrates three ethical pivot points that voters use/employ in judging candidate ethics: motives, character, and competence.  But his focus on standards that citizens do use or employ seems to sidestep whether these are the standards that citizens ought to utilize.  Perhaps here Gronbeck assumes that does equals ought.

Most of the chapters assume values central to the health and growth of American representative democracy, values that ethically responsible political communication should nurture and facilitate.  Six of the chapters focus on political campaign communication (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8).  Two of the essays analyze the influence of political structures in fostering ethically problematic communication practices.  Lee examines how changes in the mid-1970s in “party nominating procedures and federal regulation of campaign finance” have resulted in ethically dubious discourse practices: the stereotype of “the citizen as victim and an array of established interests as evil”; “a discourse that encourages leaders to hate the very institutions that they are desperately seeking to lead”; and discourse that belittles organizing as a valid form of citizen participation (44-47).  In what perhaps is the weakest chapter in terms of analysis of ethics, Jones examines post-Watergate campaign finance reform rules but fails to justify precisely how those changed rules led to unethical (not illegal) practices or raised issues of ethics.  The ethical grounds even for his implied ethical judgments remain unclear (194, 198).

As is appropriate for a volume published at the dawn of a new century that promises vast technological change, three of the chapters explore ethical issues related to the Internet.  Selnow admits that the Internet holds both positive and negative potentials for political communication.  But he focuses his arguments on three ethically undesirable Internet uses and effects for political communication: Up-loading information about citizens without their knowledge or consent through “cookie jars and site tracking”; disseminating inaccurate and misleading information, often anonymously; and fostering the further fragmentation of the electorate (213-237).  Selnow makes his ethical judgments in light of two traditional ethical stances – Rules/Rights and Results/Effects.  But in an explanatory note (#1, 237), he misidentifies the Results tradition with Situational Ethics.  Rather the Results view is better equated with consequentialism and its most notable version, utilitarianism (a teleological tradition focusing on achievement of good purpose).  Selnow’s position on the role of traditional centralized media, such as network and cable TV, is very positive (225, 233-234).  In contrast, Denton and Woodward are fearful of the largely negative impacts on the ethics of political communication of television and print journalism as currently structured and practiced.

Whillock examines the rise of hate speech as a societal problem and probes its implications for civil discourse.  She identifies ethical issues raised not only by the proliferation of hate group websites on the Internet and the activities of cyber-terrorists but also the more subtle and less obvious ways in which hate messages in political campaigns spread through the Internet.  This latter issue she terms the “everyday use of hate in political campaigns” (83).

In my view, the chapter by Goldzwig and Sullivan is the most non-traditional and most provocative in the book.  It is non-traditional and provocative in two significant ways.  First, they take a microscopic view of “political” communication broadly defined in operation at a metropolitan level in Milwaukee.  They contend, “If the Internet evolves as a site for the economically and intellectually privileged, we might assume that many people will be left out of deliberations enacted through cyberspace.  We take a different view in this chapter, however, and propose that people who are living on the margins of cyberspace are creating their own political enclaves by using more traditional forms of communication” (54).  Specifically they examine the “Word Warriors” talk show in radio station WVON directed at a predominantly African-American audience and hosted by two controversial local African-American political figures.  In part they demonstrate how the show functions to empower its listeners by focusing on the dignified and fulfilling lives that can be led by poor people.  And the political issues discussed by listeners and hosts clearly should not be dismissed as “insignificant in the sweep of understanding social change at the macro level” (64).

Second, the chapter by Goldzwig and Sullivan is non-traditional and provocative because of the ethical stance they take for analysis.  Their view is not the traditional Kantian categorical imperatives, Aristotelian virtue ethics, Mills’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’s impartial justice.  Instead they turn to a postmodern ethic rooted in our inherent obligation to respond to the call of the Other, especially the marginalized or suffering Other.  This obligation involves championing the interest of the lowly, meek, and powerless and evaluating the “Word Warriors” program for the degree to which it fulfills this obligation.  They stress, however, that the obligation to respond to the suffering Other does not mean “we must necessarily idealize the struggles of marginalized people and peoples’ movements” (68).  Not everyone in the group marginalized or discriminated against necessarily is “either an admirable or effective moral agent in the world” (68).  Their postmodern ethical perspective might have been strengthened significantly by drawing on the works of Emmanuel Levinas, on Zygmunt Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics, and on the late Martha Cooper’s essay, “Decentering Judgment: Toward A Postmodern Communication Ethic,” in John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniels’ anthology, Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminancy (63-83).

All in all, Political Communication Ethics is well worth the time and effort to read.  While the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven, almost all of them provide flashes of illumination, lenses of insight, and prods to disagreement.  Most of the chapters demonstrate in one way or another Zygmunt Bauman’s conclusion in his Postmodern Ethics (1993).  He believes that “the moral conscience – that ultimate prompt of moral impulse and root of moral responsibility – has only been anesthetized, not amputated.  It is still there, dormant perhaps, often stunned . . . – but capable of being awoken” (249).