Research on Journalism Ethics in Spain (2007-2018). Evolution and prospects

Abstract

This paper studies the state of research on journalism ethics in Spain through the analysis of doctoral theses, scientific papers, R&D projects and research groups on ethics from 2007 to 2018. The methodology used was content analysis of the corpus registered by the Mapcom project, comprising 3,518 units. The results reveal that ethics, despite its central position in the journalistic profession, represents only 1.4% of scientific activity. Production is centred around a very few universities and a limited number of professors with great experience in deontology research. Furthermore, in this field, academic cooperation between universities and internationalisation is residual. Regarding the object of the study, it is observed that the digital environment lacks a sufficient volume of scientific production to address the ethical dilemmas that journalists face in this dominant field in present-day communication. In addition, research into ethics raises some specificities in use of the methodology with respect to Communication studies, favouring discursive methods (mainly, interviews with professionals) over content analysis.