Global Media Ethics

Problems and Perspectives

Stephen J. A. Ward, Stephen J. A. Ward

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118359822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Global Media Ethics

Global Media Ethics
Problems and Perspectives

"The book pleads convincingly that news media outlets and practitioners should urgently reconsider their practices and norms in a world gone global and digitally convergent. The various contributions broach the topic from completely different perspectives to create a very stimulating and constructive framework to identify and face the new ethical challenges of journalism and the news media."
François Heinderyckx, Université libre de Bruxelles

"News that crosses boundaries of culture and geography means rethinking media ethics. The demands of role, audience, digital transmission, and an industry under fierce economic pressure require the insightful approach to ethical thinking this volume provides. From theory to practice, this book has something for scholars and professionals alike."
Lee Wilkins, Journal of Mass Media Ethics

Global Media Ethics is a cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. Focusing on the ethical concepts, principles, and questions in an era of major change, this unique textbook explores the aims and norms that should guide the publication of stories that impact across borders, and which affect a globally linked, pluralistic world.

Through case studies, analysis of emerging practices, and theoretical discussion, a team of leading journalism and communication experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism and lead readers to better understand changes in media ethics. Chapters look at how these changes promote or inhibit responsible journalism, how such changes challenge existing standards, and how media ethics can develop to take account of global news media. In light of the fact that media journalism is now, and will increasingly become, multimedia in format and global in its scope and influence, the book argues that global media impact entails global responsibilities: It is therefore critical that media ethics rethinks its basic notions, standards, and practices from a more cosmopolitan perspective.

Part I

Media Ethics Worldwide

Chapter 1

Why Media Ethics Still Matters

Nick Couldry

Journalists who work for British tabloid or midmarket newspapers, which have nearly four-fifths of circulation in Britain,¹ are trusted to tell the truth by less than a quarter of its population (10% for tabloid journalists, 22% for journalists on the midmarket press). It is small comfort that less than a third of people in Britain trust leading politicians, trade union leaders, or senior civil servants. Only BBC news journalists are trusted to tell the truth by a majority of Britain's population, although trust in them also fell drastically between 2003 and 2010 (Kellner 2010). And yet it is taken for granted that free media are essential to a working democracy.

There is more than a hint of paradox here. Media's freedom to publish does not automatically aid democracy: What if media regularly publish lies or untruths, as so many of the British population believe or suspect? As philosopher Onora O'Neill puts it, “the press has no licence to deceive; and we have no reasons to think that a free press needs such a licence” (O'Neill 2002: 100). The paradox goes further, since an untrustworthy media cannot provide a secure basis for trusting other public figures or processes. As O'Neill notes, “if we can't trust what the press report, how can we tell whether to trust those on whom they report?” (O'Neill 2002: 90). There is easily enough provocation here toward the development of a rigorous framework of media ethics, and indeed codes of journalistic ethics have existed for more than a century in many countries (Bertrand 2000).

I want, however, to argue in this chapter that the status of media ethics in media research is, in many respects, problematic and in need of robust defense. This is for at least two reasons. First, there is the increasingly ambiguous status of institutional media themselves within the proliferating complexity of the digital media age; second, and connectedly, there is the rising demand for a broader ethics of communication that would give no special prominence to the ethical problems raised by institutional media. The best response, I suggest, is to develop a media ethics that is flexible enough to provide starting points for new debate, and not merely the reaffirmation of old rules and norms. Making this argument will bring out the special contribution of the philosophical tradition of ethics, by contrast with other approaches to the normative sphere, such as deontology. The distinction is important, although sometimes blurred in debate about media norms: By “ethics” I mean normative discourse focused on issues of the good and dispositions aimed at the good (virtue), while by “deontology” I mean normative discourse focused on duties (for a sharp treatment of the contrast, see Ricoeur 2007). Getting this distinction clear and so getting clear about the distinctive contribution that an ethics approach can bring to the normative dilemmas posed by media practice may, in turn, lay the foundations for a more robust communication ethics over the longer term.

Some Background

It might seem strange to anyone who followed, whether in Britain or internationally, the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed News Corporation in 2011, to say that media ethics needs justifying or defending as a topic. What could be more obvious than that practices at the media corporation in question needed to be more ethical? Indeed it is striking when no less a figure than Rupert Murdoch is forced to acknowledge in public the paradox mentioned earlier of democracy relying on an unreliable press. But that is exactly what he did when in a full-page advertisement printed in Britain's newspapers on 16 July 2011 he wrote that “The News of the World was in the business of holding others to account. It failed when it came to itself.” And yet what has followed the phone-hacking revelations is not clear action to clean up the media and root out unethical practice: Practical proposals are still awaited and an inquiry led by Lord Leveson will sit for many months in an attempt to find a way forward. Existing journalistic codes and the weak “self-regulation” that is supposed to enforce them (overseen by the toothless Press Complaints Commission) have done little or nothing to prevent unethical practices from occurring. One key reason, as Angela Phillips already noted before the scandal broke, is that the practical conditions of working journalists are increasingly inimical to ethical practice (Phillips 2011). As yet, there are no clear starting points of media ethics for putting this right. There is no public consensus around the specific ethical expectations we can legitimately have of journalists in a democracy. This suggests that the problems raised by the contemporary practice of journalism are deep, and not susceptible to simple fixing by codification.

An abyss threatens to open up in Britain where people have minimal reasons to trust media, and so have minimal reasons to trust anyone else in the public world. Public life in general becomes irreversibly corroded. Fatalism about the limits and weaknesses of the media (“that's the media for you!”) is a standard response, but offers no solution; indeed by normalizing mistrust in media it intensifies the problem, so blocking any ways forward.

An alternative approach, following Paul Ricoeur, is to note that it is precisely when the complexities of human and social life throw up outcomes that are problematic and unsustainable that new forms of ethics have to be built. Ricoeur calls such turning-points “limit situations”: As one example, he gives the danger to human life from medical care that is not careful about its own norms, so generating the need for medical ethics (Ricoeur 2007: 34–5). We have entered, I suggest, a limit situation today with respect to the practice of journalism, at least in a country such as Britain where the institutional conditions for producing what counts as journalistic output directly undermine the purposes for which we need journalists in the first place: to circulate information that is necessary for the good conduct of our common life together. As a result, a need—not just institutional or bureaucratic, but a deep social and human need—emerges for a media ethics that is focused in particular on the practices of institutionalized media production, and also is applicable to anyone who contributes as a producer or commentator to our public world. As the late Susan Sontag pointed out, in an age of smart phones and endless digital platforms for contributing to public culture, that really could be any of us (Sontag 2004).

On the face of it, the prospects for such a media ethics are good. Academic publications on media ethics have in the past decade broadened out from the field's pioneers (Christians, Ferré, and Fackler 1993, Christians, Rotzoll, and Fackler 1991) who emerged in the context of the long-standing tradition of ethical debate in US journalism schools (Zelizer 2011) to a broader range of authors in a number of countries: Pinchevski (2005), Couldry (2006: chapter 8), Silverstone (2007), Ward and Wasserman (2008), Phillips (2011). This current book is itself evidence of a growing international debate about the frameworks for media ethics.

In addition, as digital media's role in the texture of our lives has become increasingly apparent with the installing, for example, of social media platform “apps” on our smartphones, concerns have started to be raised by prominent analysts or pioneers of the digital revolution about its ethical consequences. Sherry Turkle's 2011 book Alone Together is a prolonged meditation on whether our relations with digital technology are “offering us the lives we want to lead,” a profoundly ethical question (Turkle 2011: 17); while virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier 2011) asks searching questions about whether the growing drive to put more and more of our lives online and to rely increasingly on digital systems for conducting and managing our lives is a positive trend.

The underlying point can be put quite simply. We no longer have a way of living together—of conducting any domain of life—without media but we don't yet know how to live well with media. Using Habermas's in some ways outdated dichotomy between “lifeworld” and “system,” there is no lifeworld any more that is not saturated at every level by system, including the systems that are “media.” However, systems are not places within which we can live. The intense functional determination of systems means that, of themselves, system spaces are incompatible with any tolerable life. The point is not that system has no role in a life lived well, but rather that a life saturated with system injunctions quickly becomes intolerable.

It is tempting at this point to conclude that the increasing recruitment of all of us as information producers and circulators in a vast hypertextual universe requires us to bypass media ethics and concentrate on building a broader communication ethics in which the issues of institutional media play a smaller role. Certainly there are many ethical issues raised by everyday use of digital platforms which do not derive from the constraints of journalistic practice. For example, mutual coveillance penetrates ever deeper into everyday practices of work, identity, and sociality, and we leave archive trails of our lives (with uncertain ethical consequences) on social networking sites and wherever we buy or observe anything (Andrejevic 2008, Zittrain 2008: 219–20, Turkle 2011). Meanwhile there are sweeping arguments that, in the digital age, the old separation of producer and audience disappears, so that all of us become “produsers” of one sort or another (Rosen 2006, Bruns 2008). If so, do we require a common ethical framework whose starting points cannot be the particular conditions of those still paid to be journalists or image producers? The uncertainties affecting the digital media are multiple, including the economic viability of large-scale media operations and their continued social status and legitimacy versus the growing status and legitimacy of decentered social networks online (Couldry, 2012: chapter 1).

At the most basic level, we might conclude that, since we no longer straightforwardly know what “media” are, the whole project of media ethics should be dropped in favor of a broader communication ethics that has little contact any more with journalism ethics. That at least is the implication of some recent invocations of communication ethics which make no reference to issues of journalism (Hayles 2009, Stiegler 2009). But that, I believe, would be a profound mistake. In the rest of this chapter I want to defend both the necessity of media ethics and its generative importance for the emergent field of communication ethics. I will do so by putting emphasis on both words in the term “media ethics,” arguing first for the distinctive contribution of media ethics and second for the usefulness of media ethics (as opposed to other philosophical approaches to media-related norms), for grasping the practical dilemmas with which the media and communication platforms (Gillespie 2010) of the early twenty-first century confront humankind.

The Need for Media Ethics

Truth seeking is a value for all effective forms of human organization, whether or not organized along democratic lines: Without practices aimed at truth (of which media are among the most important), co-operative human activity and the fulfillment of individual capabilities are impossible. My argument's implications are, however, particularly sharp for those societies that claim to be democracies, such as the United States and Britain, since, as Sheldon Wolin (2008: 263) notes, “it seems paradoxical to say that democracy should deliberately deceive itself.”

Notwithstanding the expanding role of commentary and “user-generated content” in digital cultures (Couldry 2012: chapter 2), most information we receive about the events and processes—governmental, economic, environmental, social—affecting our lives are institutionally produced. The emergence of media institutions (or “the media”) is virtually universal in human societies during modernity, but with varying relations to government, markets, and civil society (Starr 2004, Hallin and Mancini 2004). It follows that the overall consequences of such institutions for truth seeking and truth finding are an issue of potential ethical significance for any such society.

The irreducible importance of ethical norms for media institutions has recently emerged particularly sharply at the global level. A global scale implies a space of irreducible moral disagreement and diversity. Media do not reduce or resolve such disagreement: On the contrary, they bring it into view. So an initial question is: How can we live sustainably with each other through media, even though media unavoidably expose us to our moral differences? Bruno Latour (2004: 40) expresses the challenge with great clarity:

An entirely new set of questions has now emerged [on the political stage]: “Can we cohabitate with you?” “Is there a way for all of us to survive together while none of our contradictory claims, interests and passions can be eliminated?”…“What should now be simultaneously present?”

We do not need a set of explicit rules about media practice, but a framework of thinking that can build, at a global level, shared norms and values in relation to media practice in spite of our differences.

We need not, however, only look at the global scale. Any large-scale form of human organization raises ethical complexities. Media are one of the ethically significant “practices” in which humans are involved, at least when they organize on a large scale. Our formulations of a specific ethics of media must be shaped by the distinctive human needs that media can fulfill and the distinctive harms that media can cause: respectively, the need for information and the harm of misrecognition, or lack of recognition.

There are at least three reasons why we need a distinctive media ethics. First, there is no ethics distinctive to a single medium, because media narratives—always to some degree, and emphatically now, in the digital age—involve references to other media content, often in different media formats (Hepp 2010). Second, media ethics is broader than journalism ethics, by which I mean the already partly codified rules for institutionally empowered storytellers (journalists). Such codes are important and they have ethical content, but they emerge from particular institutional circumstances; instead I want to explore how far a general ethics of media can be built that is, in part at least, independent of the particular institutional contexts in which journali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Media Ethics as Global
• Part I: Media Ethics Worldwide
• Part II: Media and Diverse Public Spheres
• Part III: Global Issues
• Part IV: Theoretical Foundations
• Index