One of the problems of debating the rights and wrongs of journalism is that no situation is exactly like any other. Applying codes doesn't work very well because news organizations avoid any but the most flexible guidelines.

There are good reasons to avoid ethical rules and regulations. First, no rule has ever been made that shouldn't also be broken in a particular situation. Second, we fear being hoisted on our own ethical petard in a lawsuit. And third, news organizations are very different from each other, and they operate from an idiosyncratic variety of moral platforms. For instance, paying a source would be considered a horrific breach by The New York Times, but would be business as usual at the National Enquirer and only a questionable act for television magazines, where payments would be cloaked as consultants' fees or some such euphemism. How does one compare the Times, the Enquirer, and Dateline, much less People, Salon, the New York Post, and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings?

I teach a course in media ethics at Duke University called “News as Moral Battleground." After struggling clumsily to compare — and judge — the ethical performance of various news organizations, my students and I created a tool to help us. We called it “the grid," although we never actually drew one on paper.

We started with the idea that ethical journalism has two elements that are always present: integrity and judgment. But unless they are both present in the proper proportion, the outcome can be a mess. For instance, a sense of moral outrage prompted Mike Gallagher, formerly of the Cincinnati Enquirer, to believe he was doing the right thing by invading Chiquita Brands's voice mail to expose what he considered to be higher crimes. One could say he acted from a high sense of integrity, but his judgment was appalling.

On the other hand, what about the decision by Gannett, owner of the Enquirer, to renounce all of Gallagher's exhaustive reporting rather than risk an expensive and embarrassing libel suit? You could make the argument that Gannett's decision reflected good judgment on the basis of a justifiable self-interest, but it wasn't high on the integrity scale.

We found that the key element of the judgment component was deciding what set of ethical principles to apply in any given situation. Journalists function at all times on three moral planes: as professionals, as citizens, and as human beings. Sticky ethical problems almost always involve making a judgment about which of these standards to apply when they are in conflict.

For instance, Gallagher justified stealing voice mail by applying the citizen's standard to himself, which says you should foil corruption. We concluded that he should have given precedence to the professional standard, which says journalists don't steal information. On the other hand, if a reporter is at a fire and, in desperation, a fireman asks him to hold a hose, should he abandon his note pad and hold the hose? In such a case, is journalistic detachment superseded by one's burden as a citizen?

Similarly, the journalistic standard commands that you should report what you know. But many news organizations do not report the name of rape victims, not because it would not be news, but because on a human level, it would be unjust. In the case of rape, they set the human priority above the journalistic one.

But what about the case when The New York Times identified Patricia Bowman as the rape victim of William Kennedy Smith after her name had been revealed by NBC? The Times quickly abandoned using the name because it feared a public relations disaster. Was the error to publish the name the first time? Or to stop publishing it ? How does judgment match up with integrity? And how does that situation compare to what Gannett did in the Chiquita Brands case?

The grid: integrity against judgment, beginning with the basic question of which set of ethical standards apply — journalistic, citizen, human.

Using the grid doesn't necessarily make it easier to find the answer to an ethical dilemma. My students and I disagreed just as much after we began to use the grid as our analytical tool as we had before.

But it helped us unearth the most important issues. It gave us a common language for making distinctions and sorting out what we thought. And it gave us a way to compare the decisions of news organizations that have little in common except that they each face thorny ethical problems every day.

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