The Knowing–Perceiving gap in journalists’ professional ethics: Professional socialization and young adults’ perceptions in contemporary China

Journalism professionalism and ethical legitimacy

Across all professions, professional ethics serve as a foundational benchmark of social responsibility and integrity. During the rise of mass communication, journalists were celebrated as “uncrowned kings,” a title reflecting their profound sense of mission and a high level of social responsibility. Seib (2002) characterized journalism as a “moral enterprise,” emphasizing the central role of ethical norms in defining the journalistic profession and shaping its societal function. Journalists’ professional ethics not only serve as an important basis for public trust in journalism but also directly influence the credibility and societal impact of journalism—making ethics an indispensable element of the media industry. For journalists, the standards of professional ethics constitute the core of professional integrity and the foundation of career development. For the public, they ensure information transparency and form the bedrock of social trust.

Traditionally, journalism professionalism has been understood as a system of occupational norms and institutional practices through which journalism establish professional authority, social legitimacy, and public trust. Central elements of journalistic professionalism include ethical responsibility, objectivity, autonomy, public service, and the gatekeeping function of news production (Deuze, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2007). In this sense, professional ethics are not merely the moral principles of journalists, but constitute a foundational mechanism through which journalism differentiates itself from nonprofessional forms of information production.

The journalism profession, once widely respected for its role as a societal watchdog and its strong ethical foundations, is undergoing profound transformation under the pressures of digital disruption. In many countries, public trust in journalism has declined, with the United States experiencing one of the most significant decreases (Hanitzsch et al., 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, a report by Pew Research Center found that Americans expressed more negative evaluations toward journalists than toward the pandemic coverage itself (Greenwood, 2020). Correspondingly, similar trends have emerged within the Chinese journalism industry. Wang and Meng (2023) found that, amid the rapid expansion of digital media, Chinese journalistic texts have increasingly moved away from traditional standards of journalistic professionalism. Specifically, three indicators of professional journalism—brevity, immediacy, and plurality of sources—have shown significant decline, while adherence to conventional news structure, objectivity, and public orientation have also partially declined.

These transformations in journalistic professionalism and public trust (Carlson, 2018; Hanusch and Vos, 2020) are closely associated with several structural shifts in contemporary digital media environments, particularly the platformization of news production, the commercialization of digital communication, and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies. First, platformization has contributed to a decline in news quality and a weakening of journalistic authority. The contemporary Internet-based media ecosystem is characterized by openness and participation (Singer, 2007), within which journalists are no longer the sole “gatekeepers” of information dissemination. Instead, ordinary users can now actively participate in the production and circulation of content through social media and other digital platforms, partially replacing journalists’ traditional role in environmental surveillance (Wright, 1960). These transformations have further fragmented the gatekeeping function traditionally exercised by journalists and blurred the boundaries between professional and amateur journalism (Müller and Wiik, 2023).

Second, the commercialization of digital platforms and news organizations has increasingly reshaped journalists’ professional values and ethical orientations. Although citizen journalism has expanded participatory communication and redistributed communicative power, it has also been criticized for problems related to questionable authenticity, uneven quality, and limited objectivity. Moreover, within online media environments, the proliferation of fake news, sensationalized or misleading headlines, commercially motivated news practices, and privacy-violating reporting—all of which violate widely recognized standards of professional ethics—may further undermine public trust in both the media and journalists, while also generating broader social consequences (Ognyanova et al., 2020; Wen, 2021).

Third, AI-driven transformations have posed profound challenges to journalism as a profession and to journalists themselves. As traditional news audiences decline and AI technologies continue to advance, news organizations are increasingly relying on algorithmic systems for content generation (Diakopoulos, 2019; Surjatmodjo et al., 2024), further weakening journalists’ professional distinctiveness and reinforcing perceptions that journalists are replaceable (Jamil, 2021). Moreover, the accessibility and affordability of AI and deepfake technologies (Hameleers, 2024) have enabled ordinary users to rapidly generate large volumes of false or misleading content. Consequently, challenges related to news authenticity, accountability, algorithmic bias, and the amplification of emotional or value-driven content (Porlezza and Schapals, 2024; Sonni et al., 2024) are increasingly reshaping the ethical foundations of journalism and challenging established norms of journalistic professionalism. Taken together, these structural transformations have accelerated the deprofessionalization of journalism by weakening journalists’ traditional gatekeeping authority, blurring the boundaries between professional and nonprofessional news production, and destabilizing established norms of journalistic practice. Against this background, professional ethics, as a core foundation of journalistic authority and public trust, has become more important than ever before.

These transformations are particularly significant within the contemporary Chinese media environment, where rapid platformization, algorithmic communication, and intensified market competition have profoundly reshaped journalistic practices and professional boundaries (Weiner et al., 2018; Xu and Jin, 2017; Ye and Sun, 2024).As younger generations grow up within highly digitalized and platformized media environments (Zhao et al., 2025), journalism students and other potential future media practitioners are increasingly exposed to hybrid and competing understandings of journalism, professionalism, and media environments. Examining how aspiring media journalists perceive and internalize professional ethics is therefore essential for understanding the development of journalistic professionalism in contemporary China.

Professional socialization and implicit ethical cognition

As a core foundation of journalistic legitimacy and professional authority, journalists’ professional ethics must be internalized by journalists in order to meaningfully shape their ethical cognition, professional identity, and normative understandings of journalism (Deuze, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2007). In this sense, professional ethics of journalists are not merely external codes of conduct, but become embedded through processes of professional socialization that transmit occupational values, norms, and role expectations (Deuze, 2005) to future journalists. Professional socialization refers to the process through which individuals acquire the norms, values, identities, and behavioral expectations associated with a particular profession (Merton et al., 1957; Weidman et al., 2001). Within journalism, professional socialization occurs through journalism education, newsroom culture, internships, and interactions with professional communities, all of which contribute to the internalization of journalistic norms and ethical standards (Deuze, 2005; Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017).

Given that professional socialization shapes the internalization of occupational norms and ethical values, variations in individuals’ exposure to journalism education and professional practice may lead to differences in their ethical cognition, professional identity, and normative understandings of journalism (Deuze, 2005; Grint and Nixon, 2025). In the context of journalism education, students with different levels of professional socialization—such as journalism majors, students with internship experience, and those without journalism-related training—may therefore exhibit different implicit attitudes toward journalists’ professional ethics.

Existing research on journalists’ professional ethics has relied predominantly on explicit self-report approaches (Riedl and Eberl, 2022; Sun et al., 2024; etc.). However, given that professional ethics are closely associated with socially desirable norms and professional expectations, participants may consciously regulate their responses in questionnaire-based studies to align with perceived social standards (Paulhus, 1991; Tourangeau and Yan, 2007). To address these limitations, scholars have emphasized the importance of implicit cognition in the study of socially sensitive attitudes and professional values (Iyengar and Westwood, 2015). Implicit attitudes refer to automatic evaluative associations that may operate beyond conscious awareness or deliberate self-presentation. Compared with explicit self-report measures, implicit measures are considered less susceptible to social desirability bias and normative self-regulation (Banaji, 2001). Among the most widely used approaches for measuring implicit attitudes is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which assesses automatic associations between target concepts and evaluative attributes through reaction-time categorization tasks (Greenwald et al., 1998). Because the present study focuses on attitudes toward a single target category—professional ethics of journalists—rather than contrasts between two competing categories, the Single-Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) is particularly suitable for examining implicit evaluations of journalists’ professional ethics (Karpinski and Steinman, 2006).

To date, relatively little research has examined how different levels of professional socialization shape younger people’s implicit evaluative associations toward journalists’ professional ethics, particularly within the Chinese context (Burgh and Zeng, 2012; Weiner et al., 2018; Xu and Jin, 2017; Ye and Sun, 2024; Zhang, 2009). Therefore, the present study combines implicit attitude measurement with qualitative inquiry to examine how young adults with varying levels of professional socialization perceive professional ethics within the contemporary Chinese media environment. Specifically, Study 1 employs the Single-Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) to examine implicit evaluative associations toward journalists’ professional ethics across participants with different levels of journalism-related education and professional experience: those with journalism internship experience (JIE), those majoring in journalism and communication (MJC), and those neither majoring in journalism and communication nor having internship experience (NN). Study 2 uses qualitative interviews to further explore how young adults, experienced journalists and journalism educators understand and interpret professional ethics and values in contemporary digital media environments.

Based on the literature on professional socialization and ethical internalization, the present study proposes the following hypotheses:

H1

Participants with journalism-related education or internship experience will demonstrate more positive implicit evaluations associated with journalists’ professional ethics of journalists than those without such training.

H2

Participants with journalism internship experience will demonstrate stronger positive implicit evaluative associations toward journalists’ professional ethics than journalism majors without internship experience.

Study 1

Procedure

Participants completed the SC-IAT individually using E-Prime 3.0 software. To control for potential order effects, the sequence of experimental blocks was systematically counterbalanced. Half of the participants completed Blocks 1 and 2 first, whereas the other half completed Blocks 3 and 4 first (see Table 1). To minimize key-pressing bias, stimulus presentation frequencies were balanced across response categories. In Blocks 1 and 2, concept words, positive attribute words, and negative attribute words were presented at a ratio of 1:1:2, whereas in Blocks 3 and 4, the ratio was adjusted to 1:2:1.

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Table 1.

Sequence of trials blocks of SC-IAT.

Blook	No. of trials	Function	Items assigned to F - key response	Items assigned to J - key response
1	24	Practice	Positive + journalist	Negative
2	48	Test	Positive + journalist	Negative
3	24	Practice	Positive	Negative + journalist
4	48	Test	Positive	Negative + journalist

Each trial began with a fixation cross (“+”) displayed at the center of the screen for 800 ms, followed by a target stimulus presented for up to 2000 ms. Participants were instructed to categorize the stimulus as quickly and accurately as possible by pressing the corresponding response key. After each response, a blank screen was presented for 1500 ms before the onset of the next trial. During the practice blocks, participants received immediate feedback on response accuracy. Correct responses were followed by a green “✔”, whereas incorrect responses were followed by a red “×”, each displayed for 1500 ms. No feedback was provided during the formal test blocks. The detailed structure of each trial is presented in Figure 1.OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The procedure of behavior experiment.

Results

Behavioral data

Calculate the D score respectively. The mean D-scores for the JIE, MJC, and NN groups were 0.203, 0.082, and 0.179, respectively. A one-way ANOVA revealed no significant differences in D-scores among the three groups, F (2, 64) = 0.176, P > .05. This result did not support either H1 or H2.

Discussion

Contrary to our initial expectations, the findings revealed no statistically significant differences in implicit evaluations associated with journalists’ professional ethics across participants with different levels of journalism-related education and professional experience.

While these null findings may tentatively indicate that, in highly platformized and hybrid media environments, professional socialization may have a weakened influence on the differentiation of implicit ethical perceptions among young adults. JIE, MJC, and NN students are all exposed to overlapping news production, self-media content, and algorithmically curated information. Consequently, the boundaries between professional journalism and everyday digital communication may be increasingly blurred, potentially reducing the distinctiveness of journalists’ ethical cognition.

To contextualize these quantitative findings, Study 2 employed qualitative interviews with students, professional journalists, and journalism educators. The aim of Study 2 was conducted to provide contextual insight into the quantitative pattern.

Study 2

Because implicit attitudes cannot be directly inferred from interview data, Study 2 was designed to contextualize rather than validate the SC-IAT findings. While Study 1 revealed participants’ implicit evaluative associations with journalists’ professional ethics, it could not capture how participants explicitly understood and interpreted journalists’ professional ethics in contemporary media environments.

To provide contextual understanding of the quantitative findings, we conducted a qualitative follow-up study. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with student participants from Study 1, professional journalists, and journalism educators to explore their explicit perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of journalists’ professional ethics and the changing boundaries of journalism in increasingly platformized and algorithmically mediated media environments.

Method

Three types of students

Professional journalism

Journalism educators in university

General discussion

This study combined the SC-IAT with semi-structured interviews to examine how young people with different levels of professional socialization perceive the status quo of journalists’ professional ethics. The SC-IAT results revealed no significant differences in implicit attitudes across groups. Qualitative interviews suggested that, regardless of journalism education or internship experience, the three groups of participants perceived journalists’ actual ethical standards similarly: journalists were seen not as a morally superior profession but as an ordinary one. These tentative findings offer a preliminary challenge to classical professional socialization theory and point to a phenomenon that might be termed “de-differentiation” in how young people perceive journalists’ professional ethics in the digital media environment.

The limitations of professional socialization

Classical professional socialization theory (Deuze, 2005; Hanitzsch, 2007; Weidman et al., 2001) assumes that journalism education and internship should cultivate a professional identity distinct from the general public. However, the SC-IAT results revealed no significant differences in implicit attitudes toward journalists’ professional ethics among three groups of participants (JIE, MJC, and NN). Qualitative interviews provided additional context for interpreting the quantitative pattern by examining participants’ explicit understandings and experiences related to journalists’ professional ethics: while all three groups could articulate classroom-taught ethical ideals such as “social watchdogs,” “objectivity and fairness,” and “exposing the truth,” they simultaneously believed that journalists are not morally superior to other professions in practice.

Professional socialization does exert some effect—it successfully transmits normative knowledge of what journalists “should” do. But it does not shape a differentiated perception of what journalists “actually” do. Across all three groups, students demonstrated a consistent pragmatic attitude: journalists are ordinary people whose ethical standards are no higher than those in other professions.

The key to understanding this tension lies in distinguishing between normative beliefs (what journalists should do) and status quo perceptions (what journalists actually do). Much of the existing research on journalists’ professional ethics relies on explicit self-report measures that primarily capture normative beliefs and are susceptible to social desirability bias. By combining the SC-IAT with in-depth interviews, this study sought to partially address this limitation. The findings suggest that professional socialization is effective in transmitting normative knowledge but less effective in shaping perceptions of actual professional practice. Although students generally recognized journalistic ideals, many simultaneously perceived a gap between these ideals and journalistic practice. This “knowing–perceiving” gap may help explain ongoing challenges in journalism education and professional identity formation.

The professional socialization literature offers the concept of “reality shock,” referring to the disappointment and disillusionment that novice practitioners may experience when ideals do not align with workplace realities (Kramer, 1974). This study suggests that, in the current media ecology, such experiences may not emerge only upon entry into the profession but may also begin to develop during the socialization process itself. JIE students explicitly reported experiences consistent with this form of shock, including statements such as “My chosen topics were rejected time and again” and “I felt like an emotionless writing machine.” Although MJC students had limited direct newsroom exposure, they appeared to develop similar perceptions—such as “low salaries” and “limited career prospects”—through observing senior students’ career trajectories and attending professional lectures. NN students, who primarily encountered journalism through self-media content and platform-based information, also tended to characterize journalism as a high-pressure, low-reward, and increasingly unattractive career. This finding suggests a potential boundary of professional socialization, whereby status quo perceptions may be shaped more by direct or indirect exposure to industry realities than by institutional education. When discrepancies arise between idealized educational narratives and observed practice, a knowing–perceiving gap is likely to emerge, particularly in the current digital media environment.

Drawing on both the SC-IAT and interview data, this study suggests that participants from different socialization backgrounds held broadly similar perceptions of journalists’ professional ethics. The findings point to a possible shift from normative understandings of journalism toward more pragmatic perceptions of journalistic practice and suggest that, while professional socialization may effectively transmit normative knowledge, status quo perceptions are likely shaped more by broader structural and informational environments.

Study 2 complemented the SC-IAT findings by examining participants’ explicit understandings of journalists’ professional ethics. The interviews identified a “knowing–perceiving” gap and provided contextual insight into the quantitative findings. Together, the two studies suggest a broadly consistent pattern, while capturing different dimensions of journalists’ professional ethics.

Potential mechanisms underlying de-differentiation

To explore possible reasons for the convergent perceptions of journalists’ professional ethics among young people from different backgrounds, this study identifies three interrelated mechanisms that may help account for this convergence.

The first mechanism may operate within the professional socialization pathway. Journalism students and interns are exposed to two competing narrative systems during their education and training. One is a normative narrative, transmitted through classroom teaching and textbooks, which emphasizes journalists as “kings without crowns” and “social watchdogs.” The first provision of the Code of Professional Ethics for Chinese Journalists (2019 revision)—“Serve the people wholeheartedly”—serves as an example of this framing. The other is an experiential narrative, conveyed through internships, industry lectures, and career sharing by senior students, which highlights traffic pressure, resource contraction, and economic insecurity. One journalism student (MJC-22) described this contrast as: The classroom teaches ideals, but internships teach traffic. The coexistence of these narratives may contribute to a perceived tension in students’ cognitive orientation, involving awareness of what “should” be done while questioning whether it is fully enacted in practice.

The second mechanism involves the non-professional socialization pathway. Although non-journalism students have not received systematic journalism education, they develop perceptions of the profession through everyday media consumption and social media use. These non-professional channels tend to emphasize more experiential rather than normative portrayals of journalism. When young people encounter journalists discussing work pressure on social media or engage with short videos commenting on journalistic work, they gain experiential impressions of what journalists may encounter. One non-journalism participant (NN-32) noted: I mainly learn about the media industry through public accounts and Weibo; I feel that journalists have it pretty tough—low income, lots of pressure. This experiential framing appears broadly consistent with the experiential narrative within the professional socialization pathway. Across groups, perceptions of journalism’s status quo may thus share certain similarities regardless of formal educational exposure.

The third mechanism points to macro-structural factors. Both professional and non-professional pathways operate within a shared media environment shaped by platformization, commercialization, algorithmic recommendation, and traffic logic. A systematic review by Hastuti et al. (2025) suggests that algorithmic gatekeeping prioritizes engagement over in-depth reporting, potentially reconfiguring news values around “shareworthiness” while weakening traditional gatekeeping functions. These structural conditions constitute a shared “background of cognition.” One journalism educator observed: Journalists have gradually descended from the former “kings without crowns” to an “ordinary profession” (participant 21) in the digital era. When structural forces operate continuously across contexts, they may contribute to the emergence of more convergent status quo perceptions.

The three mechanisms may reinforce one another and operate in combination. Their interaction can contribute to a relatively persistent pattern of de-differentiation. Several boundary conditions should be noted. De-differentiation appears to occur primarily at the level of status quo perceptions rather than normative knowledge, and tends to be more pronounced among younger participants than among veteran journalists. As this study is situated in the Chinese context, different institutional environments (e.g., varying proportions of market-driven vs public media) may further shape the degree and pace of this process.

Artificial intelligence accelerating de-professionalization and catalyzing re-professionalization

De-differentiation appears to characterize an important pattern in younger generations’ perceptions of journalists’ professional ethics. However, the rise of artificial intelligence introduces a new dynamic that may simultaneously contribute to de-professionalization and create conditions for re-professionalization.

In terms of de-professionalization, AI may lower the technical and knowledge barriers to news production. Thäsler-Kordonouri and Koliska (2025) suggest that AI integration into the news value chain may recalibrate divisions of labor and reshape professional routines, potentially redistributing editorial authority and altering power dynamics in news production. Natural language generation and AIGC tools enable individuals without formal journalistic training to produce news-like content. As one educator in this study noted, “AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes are challenging the bottom line of fact-checking.” When practices such as “everyone can write” and “machines can generate content” become more widespread, the boundaries between professional and amateur production may become increasingly blurred. From the perspective of this study, AI may contribute to accelerating de-differentiation by enhancing the capacity of non-professional actors to produce content at scale.

However, AI may also prompt journalism to reconsider and reconfigure its professional boundaries. AI systems can efficiently perform routine tasks such as data processing and transcription, while human journalists’ comparative advantages are often discussed in terms of in-depth verification, value communication, and what Van Dalen (2024) describes as “humanness”—a set of capacities including news judgment, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning, which are widely regarded as more human-centered qualities. This appears to align with a form of re-professionalization observed in this study, emphasizing the differentiated roles of human journalists in meaning-making and judgment.

Correspondingly, professional ethics of journalists in the AI era may require reconsideration. While traditional frameworks centered on individual professional virtue remain relevant, ethical considerations may increasingly extend to human–machine collaboration, including questions of accountability in algorithmic participation, transparency in mixed human–AI content production, and responsibility in algorithmic recommendation systems. Journalists’ professional ethics in the AI era may thus carry a dual connotation: maintaining the role of journalists in verification and interpretation, while also addressing emerging governance challenges in human–machine collaboration.

Theoretical contributions and practical implications

The theoretical contributions of this study are threefold. First, it offers a potential refinement of professional socialization theory in the context of digital journalism. The findings suggest that professional socialization is effective in transmitting normative knowledge but may be less influential in shaping status quo perceptions. This points to a potentially underexplored dimension of professional socialization—status quo perception formation—and suggests that future research may benefit from distinguishing between different levels of socialization. Second, the study introduces the notion of “de-differentiation in the perception of ethical status quo” as a possible framework for understanding convergent perceptions across socialization backgrounds, and identifies three mechanisms that may contribute to this process. Third, methodologically, it demonstrates the value of combining the SC-IAT with interviews to distinguish normative beliefs from perceptions of actual practice and to partially mitigate social desirability bias.

At the practical level, the findings suggest that journalism education may benefit from complementing normative instruction with critical engagement with professional realities. Rather than emphasizing idealized narratives alone, educational programs may help students reflect on the tensions between professional ideals and real-world constraints. In addition, one possible strategy for rebuilding professional boundaries in journalism may be to focus less on excluding non-professional actors and more on strengthening verifiable forms of professional competence in areas such as in-depth investigation, fact-checking, and public dialogue. Finally, ethical frameworks in the AI era may increasingly need to extend beyond individual professional virtue to address accountability and transparency in human–machine collaboration, while preserving the distinctive human contributions to verification, interpretation, and meaning-making.

Limitations and future directions

This study has several limitations. First, the sample in Study 1 was confined to university students in Beijing, and the use of convenience sampling may limit the generalizability of the findings. Second, although the sample size exceeded the requirements of the a priori power analysis, it may have limited the study’s ability to detect small effect sizes. It should be noted, however, that the qualitative findings were broadly consistent with the SC-IAT results, providing complementary support for the observed pattern of limited differences across groups. Future research could employ larger and more geographically diverse samples and incorporate longitudinal designs to examine changes in ethical perceptions over time. In addition, investigating the moderating role of different institutional environments (e.g., market-driven media vs party media) and exploring how the actual use of AI tools may shape journalists’ ethical perceptions may provide fruitful avenues for future research.