The rapid development of AI in journalism, particularly following the emergence of generative AI, has intensified the need for ethical guidance, prompting news organisations and self-regulatory bodies to produce a growing body of guidelines and recommendations. Drawing on a moral pluralist perspective, this paper investigates how virtue ethics and consequentialist reasoning interact with duty-based approaches across a corpus of 65 texts published by European newsrooms, professional organisations and self-regulatory actors. The analysis examines how virtues such as prudence, authenticity and vigilance, alongside outcome-oriented considerations such as harm prevention, public trust and societal impact, are operationalised in practice. The findings show that ethical reasoning in AI-mediated journalism is frequently hybrid and context-dependent: duties establish normative boundaries, while virtues and consequences guide contextualised judgement and decision-making. These results suggest that the ethical challenges posed by AI cannot be adequately addressed without a pluralist approach integrating rules, consequences and professional judgement, highlighting how guidelines transform ethical journalism into an interpretive structure in which these elements become operational mechanisms.
Ethical reasoning in AI-mediated journalism does not follow a single framework but emerges through the combined use of different normative approaches. Duty defines constraints, while virtue and consequentialist reasoning extend ethical evaluation to judgement, risk and societal impact. This pluralist configuration is not exceptional but routine, structuring how journalists interpret uncertainty, assess risks and make decisions in AI-mediated environments.
Dierickx, L., & Lindén, C.-G. (2026). Situating virtue ethics and consequentialism in European AI guidelines for journalism. Ethical Space: International Journal of Communication Ethics. https://doi.org/10.21428/0af3f4c0.26b942f5
This paper is a part of a special issue « The ethics of artificial intelligence in professional communication », edited by Stephen J. A. Ward and Donald Matheson. https://ethicalspace.pubpub.org/the-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence-in-professional-communication-vol-23-nos-23
