Global Media Ethics and the Digital Revolution

Noureddine Miladi, Noureddine Miladi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000506617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume responds to the challenges posed by the rapid developments in satellite TV and digital technologies, addressing media ethics from a global perspective to discuss how we can understand journalism practice in its cultural contexts.

An international team of contributors draw upon global and non-Western traditions to discuss the philosophical origins of ethics and the tension that exists between media institutions, the media market and political/ideological influencers. The chapters then unveil the discrepancies among international journalists in abiding by the ethics of the profession and the extent to which media ethics are understood and applied in their local context/environment. Arguing that the legitimacy of ethics comes not from the definition per se, but from the extent to which it leads to social good, the book posits this should be the media's raison d'être to abide by globally accepted ethical norms in order to serve the common good.

Taking a truly global approach to the question of media ethics, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and students of journalism, communication studies, media studies, sociology, politics and cultural studies.

Part 1

Media ethics revisited

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203551-2

1 Political correctness in a global age

The ethical implications of a hegemonic discourse

Andrew Pilkington

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203551-3

Introduction: What is political correctness?

We are continually being reminded that we live in a world where political correctness is pervasive. And yet the concept itself remains unclear and indeed contested. A few writers embrace the term to signal their belief in the importance of being inclusive, especially in language, and their concern to redress the disadvantages faced by minority groups: ‘PC fosters civility between diverse humans and … at its best, is sensitivity to the feelings and needs of others’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2018: 11, 21). More commonly, however, the term is used in a disparaging way to mock what is seen as a ludicrous attempt to avoid the real issues (see Ridler below) or warn us of the dangerous new culture threatening free speech and plain honest speaking (see Hitchens below). In the process a contrast is often drawn between political correctness and common sense: ‘Voters seek return to common sense in revolt against political correctness’ announces a headline in one broadsheet (Shipman, 2020).

Political correctness does not address the real problem faced by ethnic minorities, says head of the National Black Police Association … Andrew Gaye, an inspector with the Police Service of Northern Ireland told the Sunday Telegraph that this sensitivity may have gone ‘too far in some stages’ such as leaving people unable to call a black coffee black coffee. (Ridler, 2020)

I fear anyone who dissents from today’s pervasive culture of political correctness will be visited by the Thought Police … so how long until anyone who writes an article like this is dragged away in handcuffs. (Hitchens, 2020)

In 2017 Trevor Phillips, the first Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, presented a documentary on British television entitled, ‘Has political correctness gone mad?’. This question is commonly asked and answered in the affirmative (as in Bond, 2018). I shall restrict myself here to two examples where this common refrain is evident: the lampooning of an analysis of a children’s book (Brown, 2019) and the response of a supermarket to a complaint (Young, 2019).

World’s gone PC mad … Snowflakes: Mr Clever is a sexist … Flakes have slammed ‘sexist’ Mr Men character Mr Clever for ‘mansplaining’ an iconic bridge to ‘stupid’ blonde Little Miss Curious. (Brown, 2019)

Waitrose has apologized for selling ‘racist’ chocolate Easter ducklings after it received complaints that the dark one was named ‘ugly’ … Many Twitter users have reacted angrily to the supermarket’s decision to remove the chocolate ducklings suggesting it has given in to excessive political correctness. PC gone mad … yet again one person wrote. (Young, 2019)

These two examples clearly ridicule and belittle political correctness but the invocation of the common refrain, PC gone mad also in a sense brings the positive and negative usages of the concept together. A narrative is constructed which suggests that at one stage PC was indeed progressive in promoting social justice for minorities but that it has gone too far so that now ‘people are becoming frightened of saying the wrong thing, using the wrong language about a pretty wide range of opinion’ (Parris, 2019). This view is widely shared: ‘The progressive movement, that has done so much to tackle inequality and unfairness, has been captured by ultras who demand absolute conformity with every article of their faith’ (Phillips, 2020a). Another journalist, further right on the political spectrum, concurs. The decline of religion and subsequently secular ideologies has left a vacuum which has been filled by social justice zealots. Failing to acknowledge the success of previous human rights campaigns in righting historical injustices relating to race, gender and sexuality, new theories emerged ‘to suggest that things had never been worse. Suddenly – after most of us had hope it had become a non-issue – everything seemed to have become about race’ (Murray, 2020: 6). A crusading desire to right perceived wrongs has entailed the creation of ‘a set of tripwires laid across the culture … What everyone does know are the things that people will be called if their foot ever nicks against these freshly laid tripwires. “Bigot”, “homophobe”, “sexist”, “mysognist”, “racist” and “transphobe” are just for starters’ (Murray, 2020: 7).

There is little doubt that political correctness now typically carries negative connotations. Few people consequently identify themselves as supportive of PC and when they do, they sound on the defensive (Johnson, 2017; Alibhai-Brown, 2018). More typically, those who are sympathetic to the causes associated with PC will studiously avoid defining themselves as advocates of PC. The same is also true of a related concept, ‘woke’ which, though initially coined to refer to awareness of racial injustice ‘has been weaponised, used in conservative media circles as an insult’ (Hunt, 2020; Hirsch, 2019). Two examples will suffice: ‘The woke left is the new Ministry of Truth … Good people are silenced in an Orwellian nightmare where a tyrannical minority decide what we’re allowed to say (Turner, 2020). And ‘The march of wokeism is an all-pervasive new oppression’ (Phillips, 2020b).

Both political correctness and woke are rarely defined. Instead they are used to depict the Other in a disparaging way and often to suggest that there are powerful forces suppressing inconvenient truths and steadily eroding our freedom. One journalist claims that ‘the thought police are spiraling out of control’ (Street-Porter, 2020), while another believes that we need to wake up before it’s too late: ‘We’ve become a timid, mute, fearful society in which everyone must walk on constant eggshells for fear that they will be next for the social media pile-on and politically correct execution’ (Morgan, 2020: 327). This characterization of PC and woke is highly influential and clearly resonates with many people. A 2018 YouGov poll found that nearly half the respondents believe that ‘“there are many important issues these days when people are simply not allowed to say what they think”, 13 points more than the 35 per cent who believe people are generally “free to discuss what they think”’. In addition, ‘by two to one – 67 per cent to 33 per cent – Britons believe “too many people are too easily offended these days over the language that others use” as against the view that care with language is needed “to avoid offending people with different backgrounds”’ (Clark, 2019). A 2020 CSS poll presents a broadly similar picture, with ‘six in ten’ agreeing ‘that political correctness gives “too much power to a small minority of people who like to take offence”’ and nearly eight in ten agreeing ‘that “you have to walk on eggshells when speaking about certain issues these days”’ and over eight in ten agreeing ‘that “too many people are easily offended these days”’ (Shipman, 2020). The media in short portray political correctness in a derogatory fashion and most people buy this picture.

Origins of political correctness

The term political correctness, unlike woke, has a long history. While there is general agreement that it originated in left-wing circles, ‘an important historical shift seems to have occurred in the 1980s when the term increasingly came to be used by the political right, particularly in the US … to denigrate left wing political opponents’ (Lea, 2009: 11; 74). An influential article in the New York Times entitled ‘The rising hegemony of the Politically Correct’ (Bernstein, 1990) popularized the term and set in train a wave of stories about the threats posed to universities by cultural relativism, challenges to the canon and changing admissions policies. Such stories drew upon and reinforced a series of critiques mounted by conservative writers who espoused an avowedly elitist position in defence of high culture and criticized multiculturalism as a threat to Western civilization. The philosopher, Allan Bloom was the first out of the tracks with his book The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom, 1987) but he was quickly followed by other critics (Kimball, 1990; D’Sousa, 1991). ‘Decrying the influence of the campus left’, these writers were scathing about what they saw as its censoriousness, in the process enabling conservatives, ‘traditional supporters of censorship … to present themselves’ anew ‘as opponents of censorship’ and in favour of free speech (Sparrow, 2017). They attacked what they saw as the politicization of higher education, but they were themselves just as political as their liberal opponents, with their work ‘funded by networks of conservative donors’ (Weigel, 2016).

The term crossed the Atlantic in the early 1990s, carrying with it similar negative connotations. As the first book addressing the debate put it: ‘PC is a dirty word in modern Britain. To call someone PC is less a description than an insult carrying with it accusations of everything from Stalinism/McCarthyism to (even worse?) having no sense of humour’ (Dunant, 1994; vii). What paved the way for the campaign against political correctness in the UK in the 1990s was not, however, as in the US a critique of higher education but rather a campaign mounted by the right-wing press against the Labour Party, ‘popularly referred to as Loony Leftism at the time’ (Lea, 2009:158).

The contemporary derogatory meaning of political correctness goes back to this period. While some people have subsequently tried to put a positive gloss on the concept and reclaim it, this has not been successful (Ackroyd and Pilkington, 2007). The upshot is that those who continue to ‘embrace the causes most often associated with the term – the use of enlightened language; the promotion of multicultural forms of curriculum; and forms of affirmative action’ – typically feel ‘that they should avoid it and distance their behaviour from its connotations’ (Lea, 2009: 8).

Political correctness in a digital age

While concern with political correctness has ebbed and flowed, there is little doubt that in the last decade it has again become a critical concept in the rightist lexicon. Universities continue to be seen as posing a central threat in the US and, with the expansion of higher education in recent decades, universities in the UK also have received renewed attention, increasingly being characterized, along with their American counterparts, as controlled by a liberal elite and pervaded by political correctness. The ideas that inform social justice zealots and thus underpin PC have their roots within the humanities and social science departments of universities, it is argued, and these ideas are dangerous. Thus, despite the radical reduction of social injustice, the theories and texts (purportedly) pervading the academy ‘express with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist … seeking’ in this way ‘to divide humans into marginalized identity groups and their oppressors’, fuelling tribalism and threatening to reverse the manifest progress made in reducing incidents of racism, sexism and homophobia (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020: 183; 258). In the absence of serious issues relating to race, gender and sexuality, attention is paid to trivial matters: ‘Cambridge University set new standards of political correctness this week with its announcement of an inquiry into the way it benefitted from the slave trade’ (Biggar, 2019), an inquiry lampooned by another critic as ‘virtue signaling on steroids’ (Lyons and Yorke, 2019).

Despite continuities in perceptions of the threat posed by PC, the rediscovery of political correctness in the last decade takes a somewhat different form from that predominant in the 1990s and early 2000s. The distinctiveness of PC in its modern guise is twofold: a belief that freedom of speech, which should be absolute, is under grave threat, and a belief that younger generations (notably millennials, and especially their successors, generation z, the Internet generation) are fragile ‘snowflakes’ and keen to be protected from offensive speech (Symons, 2018).

The threat to free speech is deemed so severe that in the UK a Free Speech Union has recently been created which sets out its manifesto in the following terms: ‘Free speech is the bulwark on which all our other freedoms rest, yet it is currently in greater peril than at any time since the second world war’ (Dabhoiwala, 2020). This verdict is shared by the two most promin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Global digital media explosion and the question of ethics
• PART 1 Media ethics revisited
• PART 2 Media ethics in practice
• PART 3 Global media ethics global challenges
• Index