Ethical risk perception of freebies and effects on journalists’ ethical reasoning

Accepting freebies and the consequence of doing so is a long‐standing ethical issue in journalism. Critics argue that freebies corrupt journalists and undercut the integrity of journalism. Working journalists tend to agree. Accepting freebies, however, is widespread in many countries. Why is there such an attitude‐behavior gap? Surveying 771 journalists in Taiwan, we explored the gap from the framework of optimistic bias regarding risk perceptions and risk‐taking behavior. Results reveal that most journalists thought freebies were unacceptable, but they perceived their peers as more vulnerable to the freebies‐accepting situation than themselves. The less vulnerable to such situations those journalists felt, the more tolerant they were toward freebies and the more likely they were to accept them.