Abstract
Most applied ethics training in journalism in the West follows Enlightenment-era, reason-based ethical principles: Justice is intrinsically better than injustice (Kant), and the best choice is achieving the best outcome for all concerned (Mill). Recent scholarship in ethics suggests that ethics is much broader than this. This article examines a set of news stories to see whether journalism ethics can usefully be analyzed using more than the justice and harm principles. The answer is yes. This has implications for journalism ethics both in the Enlightenment-based West and in parts of the world where ethics is not dominated by reason.
Introduction
The questions about the moral way to live—the classic “What ought I to do?” or “How ought I to live?”—are millennia old and have been answered in a wide range of philosophical and theological ways. But since the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century and that era’s dedication to the power of reason, moral decision-making in the West has centered on two pillars of rational thought—the deontology of Immanuel Kant and the consequentialism or utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Introductory textbooks on ethics introduce other thinkers as well—Aristotle, John Rawls, Carol Gilligan, and one or two more—but Kant and Mill are central to nearly all arguments (see Frankena, 1972; Rachels, 2010; Knowlton & Reader, 2009) among many others).
Journalists and journalism educators, particularly those in the Anglo-American world and those places influenced by that world (see Hallin & Mancini, 2004), have generally followed suit and argued that justice or fairness, plus avoiding doing harm, are central (Rafter & Knowlton, 2013). The major American professional organization, the Society of Professional Journalists, maintains in its preamble to its code of ethics that “public enlightenment in the forerunner of justice” (Society of Professional Journalists, n.d.) and has no fewer than nine professional practice admonitions as to how journalists can “minimize harm” (Society of Professional Journalists, n.d.). The code of conduct for the National Union of Journalists, the primary organization of reporters and editors working in the United Kingdom and Ireland, is more of a trade union rule sheet than a statement of moral principles, and is less explicit in outlining the purpose of how its members should behave. Still, its first three principles insist that journalists should uphold the right of freedom of expression, work hard to be sure that reporting is accurate and fair, and do their utmost to correct “harmful inaccuracies” (National Union of Journalists, 2014).
In recent years, a number of prominent thinkers who focus on the morality of journalistic behavior—notably Stephen J. A. Ward, Clifford Christians, and Henry Wasserman—have sought ways to broaden an acceptable concept of journalism ethics to the non-West. All agree that the Enlightenment-based approach of either Mill or Kant is not fully satisfactory, but all conclude a broader model is very much a work in progress. Wasserman has presented a cogent synthesis of the state of the scholarship.
Wasserman writes that Ward is more interested in creating, as opposed to discovering, a universal journalism ethic.
If we adopt a cosmopolitan attitude in journalism, we change the aims and principles of journalism ethics, and we alter our conception of democratic journalism. The object of democratic journalism becomes not only the promotion of national democratic community, but also global democratic community. Cosmopolitan journalists are “global patriots” with a special affection for humanity and its flourishing. The claim of humanity extends the journalist’s loyalty from the public of her hometown and country to humanity at large. (Ward, 2008, cited in Wasserman, 2010, p. 76)
Christians (2010) writes,
An ethics of universal being is an alternative. It enables us to start over intellectually with the holistic notion of human as humans-in-relation, rather than with a truncated notion of humans as rational individuals. It speaks against the claims of both philosophical and cultural relativism. It is held together by a pretheoretical commitment to the purposiveness of life in nature, defined in human terms as the sacredness of life. (cited in Wasserman, 2010, p. 74)
And of his own efforts, Wasserman concludes,
A journalism ethic has to be found that can provide a framework within which journalism can operate globally yet also allow for the contextual specificities of localities. While the search for a global journalism means finding values that resonate even in disparate societies, such an ethic should also account for the problematic natural of “universals.” (Wasserman, 2010, p. 71).
Wasserman acknowledges the difficulties and concludes, “The search for a global journalism ethics must be open-ended” (p. 80).
This article is a contribution to the preliminary work that Wasserman has detailed. It begins with an argument from psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who posits that there are at least six dimensions to morality—the two familiar, reason-based ones dominant in the West, but four others as well, which tend to get downplayed or undervalued in the West, treated as less significant rites or customs, not rising somehow to the standard of full-blown moral principle. This article uses a test case to see whether Haidt’s other dimensions can usefully be applied to a workable sense of journalistic propriety both within and without the world dominated by the Enlightenment.
The core of Haidt’s argument can be teased out of the acronym, WEIRD, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, a term coined by a group of cultural psychologists in a seminal journal article titled “The Weirdest People in the World?” (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Their article maintains that much of what we know, or think we know, from psychological experiments and surveys is grossly unrepresentative of humanity as a whole because a huge percentage of the subjects of these studies are educated, pro-democratic Westerners—most often, students at Western universities. These subjects “are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you wanted to make generalizations about human nature” (Haidt, 2012, p. 96).
The WEIRD world, Haidt argues, has taken the rationalism of Kant and Mill too much to heart and, as a result, tends to define morality almost exclusively in terms of promoting justice, that is, Kantian deontology or in avoiding harm, that is, Millian utilitarianism. Far better, Haidt argues, if more attention was paid to the famous dictum of that other great philosopher of the Enlightenment, the Scot David Hume, who maintained that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
Haidt has identified these four additional moral principles:
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
The Sanctity/degradation (Haidt, 2012, pp. 153-154)
Liberty/oppression (Haidt, 2012, p. 172)
Haidt argues that all six of these dimensions are universal, but that some cultures have, for complex reasons of economics, politics, geography, and other factors, emphasized some of these six dimensions over others. The WEIRD people have emphasized the first, in the form of Mill’s utilitarianism, and the second, in the form of Kant’s deontological commitment to justice, but have tend to ignore or downplay the other four. People still respond to the other dimensions, Haidt argues, but tend to regard them as less important than the first two, with their home in the Enlightenment, and thus mis-identify their own and others’ responses. In other cultures, sanctity may be more highly regarded, or loyalty, or respect for authority.
The case study of this article is a test of whether the morality of journalistic behavior—what reporters write and why—can be analyzed and assessed morally, using more than the Enlightenment principles of justice and harm.
The Case Study—The Murder of Three Women
Jill Meagher, 29 years of age (BBC)
On Friday, September 22, 2012, Jill Meagher, an Irish immigrant working for ABC radio in Australia, was having drinks with friends and colleagues in the Brunswick suburb of Melbourne. At around half past one, the group left for home. Meagher, who lived with her husband, Tom, in an apartment just around the corner from the bar, decided to make the short walk alone. When she did not arrive home, Tom spent the rest of the night searching for his wife and repeatedly ringing her phone. At 6:00 a.m., he reported Meagher as a missing person. Her body was found 6 days later.
Catherine Gowing, 37 years of age (BBC)
Catherine Gowing was an Irish vet working in north Wales. On October 12, 2012, she went missing from her home. Nineteen days later, her body was found.
Aoife Phelan, 30 years of age (The Irish Times)
Aoife Phelan, a child minder living in Ireland, disappeared after leaving a friend’s house at around 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 25, 2012. When she failed to turn up for work the next morning, police spent 2 weeks looking for her. Her body was found on November 7.
Within an 8-week period, these three women were murdered. Two of them were raped. However, the media coverage of the Jill Meagher story was far greater, to such an extent that her death drew comparisons with that of Princess Diana. (See The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun, and The Australian, 2012.) On the morning, Meagher’s body was found, her name was mentioned on Facebook and Twitter every 11 s, and the closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage of Meagher moments before she disappeared was shared about 7,500 times in just 2 hr. The head of social media at one communications firm said the level of social media engagement with the Meagher case was “unprecedented other than natural disasters in Australia” (see The Sydney Morning Herald, 2013).
An analysis of the LexisNexis database shows that Meagher’s name was mentioned in more than 3 times as many newspaper articles as Catherine Gowing’s and almost 10 times as many as Aoife Phelan’s. The Irish Times ran almost 10% more stories about Jill Meagher than about Aoife Phelan and over 60% more than about Catherine Gowing. Google searches of Jill Meagher in Ireland, in the United Kingdom, and in Australia will generate almost 7 times as many results as Catherine Gowing and 16 times as many results as Aoife Phelan (see the appendix).
How does one account for the difference in the coverage afforded these three cases? A close reading of the coverage suggests that moral dimensions well beyond harm and fairness were at play, whether the journalists were fully conscious of them or not. The answer is complicated and one can draw upon the vast literature into the effects of violence, television, the mere exposure effect and affective primacy. Analyses such as these go part of the way toward explaining the coverage afforded the Meagher case. But Haidt argues that interest in an event, person, organization, or thing is likely to increase if it appeals to a broader moral base, that is, if it deals with more than just harm and fairness. If this is true, then such a theory could be applied to help determine the appeal of particular news stories. It can then be argued that stories that encompass more elements of the moral foundations will become bigger than those that trigger fewer of the foundations.
Liberty/Oppression
At 9:21 a.m. on September 26, Catherine Deveny, an Australian entertainer, tweeted: “I called Crime Stoppers this morning and reported a guy who tried to pull me of my bike on a Saturday night (Sunday 1:00 a.m.) in July. Sydney Road.”
“He was alone. On foot and I described him as ‘early 30s, sandy hair, jeans and blue hoodie.’ I just saw the footage now. Same guy.” She was referring to Adrian Earnest Bayley, the man police subsequently arrested and charged with Meagher’s murder.
Haidt (2012) notes that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations because it enables them to unite to shame, ostracize, or in extreme cases even kill anyone whose behavior threatened the rest of the group. He says that “it takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.”
Deveny’s tweet and subsequent blog post detailing the incident appear to be part of this process. In the days that followed Meagher’s disappearance, reports of numerous other attacks, which took place in close proximity to where she was last seen, appeared on the Internet.
The media used figures from Victoria police to show that the number of attempted abductions had increased in recent years, with 611 such offenses between 2011 and 2012. Over 150 of those took place in close proximity to where Meagher was abducted (see The Sydney Morning Herald, 2012).
If Meagher’s disappearance had caused people to believe that Sydney Road, the surrounding areas, or even their own local areas were not safe, then her murder was not just on Meagher, but on the basic freedom to walk the public streets in safety. One journalist wrote “many people will have read the story of Jill Meagher and thought ‘that could have been me’ . . . So many times I and my friends have taken a chance to walk home after a night out” (see McGovern, 2012). A few days later, on September 30, 2012, more than 30,000 people walked the streets of Melbourne to honor Meagher. Speaking at the event, Meagher’s mother called for cameras to be placed on the streets to “keep people safe.” The march was not organized by the council but by ordinary citizens within the community.
The original triggers for the liberty/oppression foundation include signs of attempted domination. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger (Haidt, 2012). Men overpowering women is an obvious trigger for the liberty/oppression foundation that is common to all three cases. However, there were two key differences in Jill Meagher’s disappearance:
The unfolding of the story in the world’s biggest gossiping community, the Internet. 1
The moral outrage that prompted people to call Meagher’s killer a coward and “scumbag” whose eyes should be cut out “followed by [his] tongue and then his ba**s” (see aussiecriminals.com, 2012, and Facebook/The Sydney Morning Herald, 2012).
Public outrage, campaigns, press coverage, and Internet gossip are forms of “reverse dominance hierarchies,” in which the majority of a group comes together to restrain would-be alpha males who threaten an egalitarian way of life (Haidt, 2012). In this case, the would-be alpha male was Adrian Earnest Bayley and, by extension, anyone else who threatened the safety of women. Thousands of years ago, spears and daggers mitigated physical strength as a threat to egalitarianism. Today, the Internet and social media largely fulfill this role. Online platforms, without any gatekeeper or editorial agenda, empower anyone to publicly challenge and make a stand against what they feel is wrong. “Reverse dominance hierarchies” initially took place at a local, community, or group level. However, modern media mean that people from all over the world can come together to dominate and control those who threaten basic freedoms.
An overwhelming majority used Internet-based media in this way. People took to Facebook and Twitter to make positive statements about public safety. But it was also used to promote an alternative point of view and a far uglier dimension to the Meagher story, blaming the victim. On September 25, an anonymous poster left the following comment on the Help Us Find Jill Meagher Facebook page:
She was obviously at a bar/club, left there in the early hours of the morning, obviously partially pissed/drunk, and she “lead someone on” [sic] and the consequences followed her. If she is going to flirt with someone, make sure that you go through with it because someone is obviously pissed off with her . . . in my opinion, it’s now old news, she met with foul play as a result of her actions inside the pub/bar OR as I mentioned before . . . ask the husband.
Similar opinions were posted on social media, boards, and blogs. Furthermore, they were not wholly confined to online space. Several days earlier, Neil Mitchell, a radio broadcaster with Australia’s 3AW, said that he hoped Jill Meagher had been “off partying somewhere, [because] judging from her Facebook page she likes a good party.”
The belief that women who go out, flirt, or have a drink are in some way culpable for being raped has been supported by findings that prosecutors are less likely to take on rape cases where victims were intoxicated at the time of the assault (Frohmann, 1991). Victim blaming and perverse moralizing of this nature are serious threats to freedom, liberty, and egalitarianism. But the backlash against this victim blaming was swift and angry. This new controversy—whom to blame and how much?—wound up contributing to increased coverage of the Meagher story.
Aoife Phelan was murdered at around 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on a Thursday night after leaving a friend’s house and Catherine Gowing was killed in her own home. Neither had been drinking or on a night out. This meant that victim blaming or rape myths could not be invoked to justify feelings of proportionality toward the victim, and thus provoke, as in the case of Jill Meagher, the widespread anger and backlash, which centered on the freedom/oppression moral foundation.
It appears that insinuations that in some sense Meagher “was asking for it,” caused more people to rally around in her defense. Journalists, broadcasters, and the public at large condemned anyone who felt Meagher did not do enough to protect herself, or that she caused her own victimization. An Irish Times article about this victim blaming stated that “by making the victim partly responsible . . . we are playing into the hands of the perpetrators . . . Women shouldn’t have to worry about wearing high heels, or having a few drinks, or walking home alone” (O’Connell, 2012). After Meagher’s death, over 5,000 people marched against “victim blaming” in a rally organized by Reclaim The Night, a movement to end sexual harassment and violence. There is strong evidence to suggest that, in the case of Jill Meagher, a “reverse dominance hierarchy” was created at a local, national, and international level and that public will to initiate such a reaction was intensified by victim blaming.
Loyalty/Betrayal and Tribes
Human beings are homo-duplex because they live at two levels, as an individual and as part of the larger society (Durkheim, 1887/1992). At the individual level, human experiences are profane, that is, ordinary or common. However, at the societal level, human experiences are almost ecstatic. The emotions and passion felt at this higher level are referred to as “collective effervescence” (Haidt, 2012). Haidt argues that switching from the lower level to the higher level is just a basic part of being human. This transition, known as either self-transcendence or the hive switch, can come in various different forms. For example, people have described “collective effervescence” during times of war, while among nature or at rave concerts (Haidt, 2012). Haidt argues that when there are severe perceived dangers, the self gives way to a higher authority, the group. Durkheim believed anything that unites people takes on an heir of sacredness. People will then work as a united group to protect this sacred object or value.
Meagher took on an air of sacredness in the public consciousness. As evidenced by the numerous shrines, graffiti tributes, and thousands of condolence messages, which popped up around Melbourne, she became a symbol, an icon that people circled around. There is evidence to suggest that the hive switch had been activated in many people. But why did this only happen when Jill Meagher was murdered? And why didn’t it activate when Aoife Phelan and Catherine Gowing died?
It has been noted above how perceived attacks, which affect fundamental freedoms, activate the liberty/freedom moral foundation. Activation of this foundation causes people to respond as a unit, rather than as individuals, to fight this threat. If more groups feel threatened, disturbed, or even just affected by the attack then more people are likely to respond or take action. But, as noted above, it was only when human beings developed a means of communication could they then co-ordinate themselves to act as a unit. In essence, communication is the glue, which binds the individuals in the group together.
Table 1 shows is a list of groups to which each of the three women belonged:
Groups or “Tribes” to Which Each of the Three Slain Women Belonged.
Note. The list is not meant to be exhaustive but mainly an observation of the groups which each of the women belong to. A.P. = Aoife Phelan, C.G. = Catherine Gowing and J.M. = Jill Meagher.
A.P. was a nurse and C.G. was a vet; however, such professions have not been included on the list of significant groups because, unlike J. M. they do not bear any direct connection to the media.
The table shows that Aoife Phelan’s murder only activated the tribal morality foundation in two groups (women and Irish people) whereas the cases of Catherine Gowing and Jill Meagher activated it in 4 and 5 groups, respectively. Consequently, the Jill Meagher story is likely to resonate more powerfully than the others because it can trigger a moral reaction from more groups. What is perhaps more important when considering tribal loyalty in this context is Meagher’s profession. She worked in the media. Before emigrating, she had worked with RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster, and in Australia she was employed by ABC radio. Meagher’s work colleagues were her friends, some of whom were with her on the night she was abducted.
For those closest to her, the tribal morality foundation would have been triggered because they are personally connected to the victim. They certainly would have felt a compulsion to do whatever they could to help their friend. However, colleagues who did not know her personally may have also felt obligated to help because they were part of the same tribe.
This strong connection to the media may have lead to a larger than normal amount of coverage for Meagher’s death if it triggered the tribal morality of journalists, not just at ABC but in the media in general. While this is significant, there was another more powerful and cohesive force which brought these groups together. It would seem that the extreme influence both the Internet and social media had in covering Meagher’s death united people in a way that did not happen in the other two murders.
It was not that the deaths of Aoife Phelan and Catherine Gowing failed to activate the hive switch in people, it was that it did not trigger it in as many people. Furthermore, those who did elevate to homo-duplex’s upper level were not as connected (via the Internet, social media, and personal media connections) as people were in the Jill Meagher case. Media coverage and communication are the means by which independent groups can become united. If enough people come together, they will experience self-transcendence, like the 30,000 who marched to commemorate Meagher’s death may have done.
Conclusion
The deaths of Jill Meagher, Aoife Phelan, and Catherine Gowing were strikingly similar. However, Meagher’s resonated more with the public than the other two. Although the moral foundations of harm and fairness explain why all three stories were newsworthy, they do not explain why Meagher’s death received so much more coverage.
Reports about similar attacks in the area where Meagher was abducted was a trigger for the liberty/freedom moral dimension, far more powerfully than in either of the other two cases. People took to the Internet and streets to fight the perceived threat to basic freedoms, such as public safety for women. Feelings of proportionality, which manifested themselves in “victim blaming,” heightened the need to eliminate these threats and helped to provoke a greater public response, which took the form of a “reverse dominance hierarchy.”
It appears that the Internet and social media served as the cohesive force of communication which enabled people to go from the lower homo-duplex level to a state of “collective effervescence.”
Jill Meagher’s death affected a larger number of groups, and the loyalty/betrayal foundations are likely to have been activated in more people than in the other cases considered here. Her job at ABC radio meant that tribal triggers could have been activated among people covering the story, which in turn could have lead to relatively more media coverage.
As with much media research, it is not possible in this case to conclude with certainty why journalists, individually or collectively, behave as they do. There are simply too many individual motivational variables involved, which are powerful but impossible to tease out of data of stories published or broadcast. For a generation now, we have seen considerable work done into professional norms of journalists in the workplace, led by D. H. Weaver and G. C. Wilhoit, what they do, where they come from, what they aspire to, and how they juggle the competing demands of public service and marketplace. 2 This study takes things in a somewhat different direction. Instead of examining empirically what they do, this study looks philosophically at the moral dimensions, conscious or unconscious, of what they believe they should do.
Much more work needs to be done before any solid conclusion can be drawn. But this preliminary study is highly promising. From it, we see that “journalism for the greater good”—essentially Millian utilitarianism—explains part of the coverage. Kantian deontology with its emphasis on justice is also helpful. But neither theory fully explains why the Meagher case drew so much more attention than either of the others. The traditional way of explaining news coverage tends to lapse into terms such as “news judgment” or “news values,” those mysterious understandings that senior editors seem to know instinctively and pass on to new reporters over time. The potential value of using Haidt’s six dimensions of morality is that these other dimension of journalism ethics can be looked at systematically. In this way, we are not reduced to saying something along the lines of “Meagher got more coverage because journalists like to write about other journalists.” Perhaps they do; Haidt offers an explanation as to why they do and why they feel right about doing so.
What does this mean for the teaching of journalism, either in theory classes or in journalism skills classes—the reporting, writing, and editing courses that are still the core and the heart of a journalism education? For skills courses, teaching through Haidt’s six dimensions, not just the two we all know so well, will, simply put, make for better reporters. We can teach students, most of them WEIRD, to be aware of their own impediments to neutrality in a way that it is very difficult to do otherwise. We can teach students to be on the lookout for words and phrases from interview subjects that they should take very seriously, even if they themselves do not cherish—or are not fully aware that they cherish—the concepts of loyalty or sanctity or personal freedom.
And for journalism scholars working either on Western or non-Western materials, deeply held convictions about Haidt’s moral dimensions could be of enormous help in understanding news events around the globe and our own and others’ reactions to them. People in both the Middle East and the Midwest may well sincerely and deeply believe that sanctity and tribal loyalty are as important as fairness. To dismiss those convictions as in any way trivial, or as not as important as the moral principles the West has lived with for 250 years, is do a grave disservice both to those newsmakers journalists report on and to the citizens they report to.
From contemporary headlines, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act controversy centered on state law in Indiana takes on a whole new complexity if we realize that both freedom and sanctity are at play and that the matter is more than thinly disguised code for wanting to be able to discriminate against homosexuals. The biggest domestic journalistic failure of the last year or so was the botched report of the alleged gang rape on campus at the University of Virginia. When we recognize that we tend to sanctify victims of sexual assault, it becomes easier to understand why “Jackie,” the woman at the center of the original story, was not questioned nearly as stringently as almost any other news source in any other type of story would have been.
Footnotes
Appendix
| Internet | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Search type | Google (Ireland) | Google (Australia) | Google (The United Kingdom) |
| Jill Meagher | 1,240,000 | 1,220,000 | 1,250,000 |
| Catherine Gowing | 188,000 | 183,000 | 183,000 |
| Aoife Phelan | 72,800 | 72,300 | 78,300 |
| Search type | Yahoo (The United Kingdom and Ireland) | BING | |
| Jill Meagher | 147,000 | 177,000 | |
| Catherine Gowing | 3,340,000 | 7,160 | |
| Aoife Phelan | 11,900 | 279,000 | |
| Online news websites (Ireland) | |||
| Search type | Irish Times (stories) | Irish independent | RTÉ |
| Jill Meagher | 45 | 94 | 105 |
| Catherine Gowing | 28 | 64 | 99 |
| Aoife Phelan | 41 | 86 | 51 |
| Online news websites (Australia) | |||
| Search type | ABC Australia | theage.com | smh.com |
| Jill Meagher | 203 | 245 | 214 |
| Catherine Gowing | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aoife Phelan | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Online news websites (The United Kingdom) | |||
| Search type | BBC.co.uk | Guardian.co.uk | Sky News |
| Jill Meagher | 12 | 4 | 11 |
| Catherine Gowing | 48 | 9 | 8 |
| Aoife Phelan | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| LexisNexis | |||
| Search type | LexisNexis | ||
| Jill Meagher | 2,165 | ||
| Catherine Gowing | 661 | ||
| Aoife Phelan | 219 | ||
Note. Determining the extent of the coverage of these three homicides was accomplished by straightforward searches in the databases. The women’s names were entered as search terms and the numbers in the table reflect the number of hits each received. Some of the searches turned up geography-specific results. U.K. sites turned up more references to Gowing, whereas Australian sites turned up more for Meagher, each doubtless reflecting the location in which these women were killed. Probably the most illuminating table is the first, the Google search for the three women. The content of the coverage, as opposed to the simple quantity, was obtained by going to hundreds of news accounts.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.