Loyalty to the facts. "You inevitably develop an intense sense of revulsion or a mild attachment for one candidate or the other," said Joseph Alsop, Jr., a political writer. "But you have to be loyal to the facts or lose your reputation." John Dewey put it this way: "Devotion to fact, to truth, is a necessary moral demand."

An involvement in the affairs of men and women that requires experiencing or witnessing directly the lives of human beings. Involvement generates compassion, accuracy and fairness, which are the foundations of an ethical journalism.

The ability to distance one's self from experience to generate understanding. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian writer imprisoned by Mussolini for his commitment to freedom, said he had to learn the necessity of being "above the surrounding within which one lives, but without despising them or believing one's self superior to them."

A detached curiosity, an exploratory attitude toward events and ideas. Detachment requires the journalist to be bound by evidence and reasonable deductions. Detachment is not indifference, which develops when, as Northrop Frye puts it, the person "ceases to think of himself as participating in the life of society…."

A reverence for shared values, rules, codes, laws and arrangements that give a sense of community. Such concern causes the journalist to keep careful watch for any action that can divide people by groups, classes or races.

Faith in experience when intelligently used as a means of disclosing some truths.

An avoidance of a valueless objectivity. This kind of objectivity can lead to what philosopher Stuart Hampshire describes as a "ice age of not caring." He writes that such an attitude can mean the end of civilization "not in a flurry of egotism and appetite leading to conflict…but in passivity and non-attachment, in a general spreading coldness…."

A willingness "to hold belief in suspense," to doubt until evidence is obtained, to go where the evidence points instead of putting first a personally preferred conclusion; "to hold ideas in solution and use them as hypotheses instead of dogmas to be asserted: and (possibly the most distinctive of all) enjoyment of new fields for inquiry and of new problems." (John Dewey)

An awareness of our limitations and responsibilities. The story can never equal the whole truth. A concern for the consequences, the impact of what we write. A firm understanding of the line between fact and fiction.

Belief in the methods of journalism —the conviction that this method will lead to some kind of truth worth sharing.

A moral vision of the future. "If you don't have that vision," says the Indian writer Ved Mehta, "sooner or later the system will collapse." Without a moral vision, the journalist's compulsion may be power, profit and place in society.

To be active rather than reactive. Walter Karp, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, writes: "The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful." The reporter who develops his or her own agenda for coverage is not source driven. This reporter goes into the community to help define the issues.

Responsibilities. "A journalist, in any effort to render truth, has three responsibilities: to his reader, to his conscience and to his human subjects." –John Hersey, New Yorker writer. The reporter's obligation is to "serve the public—not the profession of journalism, not a particular newspaper, not the government, but the public."—Clifton Daniel, former managing editor of The New York Times.