Teaching Media Ethics as a Controversy: A Pragmatic Framework for Chinese Journalism Education

Abstract

Journalism education in China currently operates within a profound structural tension: it must strictly adhere to the state-mandated “Marxist View of Journalism” as its fundamental ideological guide, while simultaneously equipping students with the professional competencies demanded by a globalized media environment. This deep-seated normative friction often compels educators to adopt defensive “gatekeeping” strategies and bureaucratic risk aversion in the classroom. Consequently, students experience a severe epistemic disconnect between sanitized theoretical instruction and the complex, morally ambiguous dilemmas of real-world reporting, rendering them vulnerable to cynicism and narratives proclaiming the “uselessness of journalism.” Drawing upon Michael Hand’s “epistemic criterion,” this essay argues that media ethics must be explicitly taught as an open, controversial issue. It demonstrates that both Western liberal models and contemporary Chinese Marxist paradigms possess profound internal theoretical coherence and practical rationality, despite their conflicting ontological assumptions regarding state power and the public good. To break the current pedagogical deadlock without compromising macro-political safety, this paper proposes a localized adaptation of Thomas E. Kelly’s “Committed Impartiality.” Within this framework, “commitment” is redefined as an institutional baseline that treats the Marxist view as a non-negotiable professional boundary, while "impartiality" is re-operationalized as descriptive professionalism that ensures a fair, evidence-based presentation of competing paradigms. Furthermore, this theoretical model is enacted through a structured “Collaborative Argumentation” mechanism, a four-phase classroom procedure incorporating technical topic selection, depoliticized semantic shifts, and disciplined role-playing. Ultimately, this framework provides a politically viable and epistemically rigorous compromise, safeguarding critical micro-level spaces for professional inquiry.