Media Ethics and Accountability Systems

Claude-Jean Bertrand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351289627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Over the last few years, the O.J. Simpson case, then the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, and scores of minor scandals have dominated the US press, often taking precedence over important domestic and international issues. This tabloidization of the news media, both here and abroad, has proved that "the market" cannot insure media quality. In a democracy, for media to function well, they must be free of both political and economic muzzling. The only solution is to add self-regulation, or quality control, by professionals and public to the other two forces, the market and state regulation.

In this controversial volume, Claude-Jean Bertrand sets out to define a set of accountability systems--democratic, efficient, and harmless--to insure true freedom and quality of media. This brief, highly literate volume focuses not on philosophical foundations of media ethics or case stories, but on what is now missing in the codes. Many books deal with media ethics but few deal with accountability. Media Ethics and Accountability Systems zeroes in on the many nongovernmental methods of enforcing "quality control, " and on the difficulty of getting the media microcosm to accept such accountability. To remedy this lack, Bertrand proposes rethinking existing "media accountability systems, " some 30 to 40 in number, and creation of new ones. He observes that existing systems are rooted in four basic approaches: training: the education of citizens in media use and the incorporation of ethics courses in journalistic education; evaluation: criticism (positive and negative) not only from politicians, consumerists, and intellectuals, but from media professionals themselves; monitoring: by independent, academic experts over extended periods of time into the long-term effects; and feedback: giving ear to the various segments of media users and their needs and tastes, rather than scrutinizing sales and ratings.

Media Ethics will be of particular interest to academics in the fields of communication and journalism, as well as to the general reader with an interest in public issues and a civic concern for society.

PART 1

Basic Data

1

Major Distinctions

Media ethics is a misty zone. And the guides to the area often are philosophers using obscure language and having no experience as practitioners. Or, conversely, they are practitioners with little knowledge of what the thinking has been in the field. Some mix up the concepts while others wrap worn-out clichés in jargon. The result is confusion, sterile disputes, and inaction. So it seems useful at the start to establish a few clear distinctions.

Shackles on Press Freedom

One can be held responsible only for acts committed voluntarily. So ethics can develop only when media are free. Their freedom to inform faces five major obstacles, that are quite different from each other. The oldest, the technological one, is fading away. The second shackle is political: from its beginning, the development of the press was curbed by the crown and its courts; today, even in democracies, the government still strives to censor or distort the news. The third threat, which has grown more dangerous throughout the twentieth century, is economic: the use of media solely to make money. The fourth obstacle may come as a surprise for it is rarely mentioned: it is the conservatism of media professionals, their outdated ideas and methods (see p. 62). The last obstacle, never mentioned, resides in the surrounding culture, in traditions such as the status of women in moslem nations, tribal loyalty in Africa, respect for the old in Japan. The guilty party there, in other words, is the public.

Press Regimes

Basically, there are four possible regimes,¹ two that are democratic and two that are not. Each is based on a concept of the universe and of mankind. Put simply, pessimists regard the human being as a brute and deny him/her any free will: he/she needs to be watched, restrained, indoctrinated. On the other hand, optimists look upon humans as rational creatures: if they are given access to information and left free to exchange ideas, then they are able to manage the society in which they live.

The Authoritarian Regime

This type was the most common until the mid-nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the fascist State took over where absolute monarchies had left off. In such a regime, usually, media remain private firms run for profit, but the powers-that-be closely control contents. News and entertainment can be subversive. Ideas being broadcast must meet the needs of the ruling clique. No opposition press is permitted: nor any political debate. Even some types of human interest stories are forbidden, as they can be interpreted as signs of social dysfunction.

The Communist Regime

There media do not exist independently from a totalitarian State which has absorbed all institutions and industries: media operate like cogs in a gigantic machine. A concept like press freedom is irrelevant. That regime, inaugurated in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s was extended over Eastern Europe after 1945 then to China after 1949 and, in the 1960s to a large part of the Third World.

In the totalitarian regime, the State uses its media to broadcast its instructions, to persuade people to follow them and to teach the official ideology.² The first function of media is to lie, to hide whatever does not serve the interests of the ruling nomenklatura. By the end of the twentieth century, that regime seemed on the way to extinction: it had proved contrary to economic development, to social welfare, to the expansion of knowledge, to world peace—and, of course, to political democracy. That, however, leaves much of the marxist criticism made of capitalist media unaffected.

In the Third World, it used to be claimed that media had a special part to play: to serve development, to educate the population, to weld different ethnic groups into a nation and to preserve the local culture. Actually most often, in military dictatorships calling themselves socialistic, the undeveloped media were used to keep a despot in power and to serve an urban elite.

The Liberal Regime

The liberal, or libertarian, regime became the international norm thanks to Article 19 of the United Nations’ International Declaration of Human Rights (1948). It is founded on a doctrine born in eighteenth-century Europe, in the Age of Enlightenment: all events must be reported and all opinions put on the “marketplace of ideas.” Then human beings can discern the truth and use it to determine their behavior. If the State does not interfere, all will go well.

That beautiful illusion did not resist the growing commercialization of the press from the turn of the twentieth century. Whatever was profitable was then deemed to be good. Moreover, as corporations have a natural tendency to concentration, there was a risk that the power to inform, the privilege of setting the topics of the national debate, could fall into the hands of a few irresponsible media owners, which, at the end of the century, seemed to be happening.

The Social Responsibility Regime

That concept, born of a more realistic perception of human nature, is an extension of the previous one. The notion was launched in the U.S. by the “Commission on Freedom of the Press,”³ made up of eminent personalities from outside the media sphere. The media greeted its report, A Free and Responsible Press (1947), with indifference or rage. But over the next twenty years, the ideas it presented were generally accepted. According to that doctrine, it is better that media be not owned by the State or even controlled by it. On the other hand, media are not ordinary commercial firms whose success can be measured by profits. It is normal that they should seek profitability but they must be responsible towards the various social groups, i.e., respond to their needs and wishes.

If citizens are displeased by the service they get, then the media must react. Better it is that they amend themselves but if they do not, then it is necessary and legitimate that Parliament intervene. Experience shows that very often it is to avoid such an intervention that media develop a concern for ethics.

Keep in mind that those four press regimes never exist in a pure state. In authoritarian regimes, citizens have always had access to some underground or transborder media. And in liberal democracies, even in the U.S., a consensus exists among citizens that media need to be regulated in the general interest.

The Functions of Media

To judge whether media serve the public well, you need to know what services they are supposed to provide. These fall into about six categories. To each function corresponds a dysfunction, which is the target of media ethics.

To Watch the Environment

In present-day society, only the media are capable of providing us with a quick and full report on events taking place all around us. Their role is to obtain the information, to filter it, to interpret it, and then to circulate it. In particular, they must keep an eye on the three political powers (executive, legislative, and judiciary) in the interval between elections.

To Insure Social Communication

It is necessary, in a democratic community, that compromises be reached through discussion, that a minimal consensus be established without which there can be no peaceful coexistence. Nowadays, the forum where most of the discussion takes place is the media.

They relate every individual to a group, fashion the groups into a nation, contribute to international cooperation. Besides, small media insure lateral communication between people who share the same ethnic origin or a profession or some passion—but who, in mass society, are often scattered far and wide.

To Provide an Image of the World

Nobody has a direct knowledge of the whole planet. Beyond the range of one’s experience, what one knows comes from the schools or from conversations, but mainly from media. For the ordinary person, the areas, the people, the topics that media do not mention, do not exist.

To Transmit the Culture

The cultural legacy of any group needs to be handed over from one generation to the next: a certain vision of the past, the present, and the future of the world, an amalgam of traditions and values that give an individual an ethnic identity. Everybody needs to be told what is and is not done, what should be thought and not thought. In that socializing process, Churches in most of the West no longer play the part they used to play, especially in Europe. Nor does the family, especially in the U.S. There remain the schools—and the media which influence individuals during their whole lives.

To Contribute to Happiness: To Entertain

In mass society, entertainment is more indispensable than before to lessen the tensions that can lead to sickness, physical or mental. It is mainly provided by media. The user of media expects entertainment from them more than anything else—and that function combines very well with the other five.

To Sell

Media are major vehicles of advertising. Their owners’ primary purpose, quite often, is to seduce a public so as to sell it to advertisers. They try and create a favorable environment for the ads. For some observers, advertising plays a positive part: it informs and, by stimulating consumption and competition, it lowers prices (including those of media). Critics, on the contrary, accuse it of manipulating people, of causing waste and pollution.

Types of Media

A (mass) medium is an industrial firm which, by specific technical means, broadcasts, most often simultaneously, the same message to a large group of scattered individuals. This definition does not include the telephone, opinion polls and universal suffrage. Mail and billboards can be excluded as their messages are rarely other than commercial. Recordings are primarily material used by radio. As for the cinema, it has become not so much a medium as a provider of the small TV screen through cable, satellites, and cassettes. In common usage, media are newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

Within that definition, media are so different that ethics cannot be exactly the same for each. The distinction is clear between the printed press and audiovisual media; or between “public” media (under State control⁴) and commercial media and noncommercial private media.

However, a fundamental distinction to be made is between the press that deals with general information and the opinion press. Codes of ethics concern the former which, to a large extent nowadays, is politically neutral. It is accepted that the latter—whether religious, ethnic, political—can, for ideological reasons, distort reality,⁵ blackout opposite ideas, be unfair, or even insulting. But it should not lie or encourage to violence or racial hatred. Such a press most needs that press freedom be protected, since it usually irritates some part of the population and often the powers-that-be.

The specialized press stands apart. Its contents largely come from freelance contributors whose ethics are difficult to check, and most of its revenues come from specialized advertisers. Lastly, the controlled-circulation press is pure advertising—and the in-house reviews published by commercial or public institutions partake of “public relations.”

News and Entertainment

Entertainment media belong in a special sphere. For some of them which deal with pure amusement (like crossword magazines), ethics is irrelevant. However, the public expresses innumerable grievances towards most other such media—while ethicists seem to be strictly focused on journalism. Since media entertainment is produced by a huge industry⁶ and does not seem to have a political role, the trend has been not to bother about its ethics. In most countries, a few laws, regulations (about pornography, for instance), and contractual pledges are judged to be enough. Yet in the mid-1990s the public (with politicians following it) has expressed strong disapproval of the hysterical violence on the small and big screens and of the vulgar sensationalism on radio.

The boundary between journalism and entertainment has never been clear and it is growing less so: the popular press has always favored entertainment and now most commercial media glaze most of their products with it. Some overlap is inevitable, admittedly: a news story can be interesting yet unimportant; conversely, much can be learned from entertainment. Both types of media provide knowledge and education—and it is indispensable that they both serve the public well. But there should be no confusion of their domains. Their goals differ: accurate and useful news on the one hand and, on the other, amusement that hurts neither individuals nor society. Rules of behavior can hardly be the same.

The Participants

Employers and Employees

The media and the people who work for them should not be treated as one entity, as is often done in the U.S. Their responsibilities are different. Journalists are quite capable on their own of committing many professional sins. Nevertheless, the editorial policy of a medium, and its attitude towards ethics, are determined by the proprietors and their agents.⁷

Top executives are expected to possess business talents, not a moral conscience. And they are expected to respect laws and regulations: if they don’t, they have to answer for it in court.⁸ Actually, nowadays, quite a few ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Basic Data
• Part 2 Media Ethics
• Part 3 Quality Control
• Bibliography