Ethics of Media

N. Couldry, M. Madianou, A. Pinchevski, N. Couldry, M. Madianou, A. Pinchevski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137317513
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ethics of Media reopens the question of media ethics. Taking an exploratory rather than prescriptive approach, an esteemed collection of contributors tackle the diverse areas of moral questioning at work within various broadcasting practices, accommodating the plurality and complexity of present-day ethical challenges posed by the world of media.

1

Ethics of Media: An Introduction

Nick Couldry, Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski

In September 2012 a series of violent protests erupted in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia in response to a YouTube film that caricatured Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The protests, which were directed primarily towards the US where the short film was made, echoed the similar violent reactions to the publications of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Were the protesters right to express their anger at what were evidently provocative and offensive media representations of their faith? Were the filmmakers and cartoonists entitled to freedom of speech and is this freedom limitless? Or was this a clear case of media harm? And what, if any, is the responsibility of the audiences who not only watch and read but also produce, circulate and ‘like’, potentially harmful content?

The film protests were one incident in a series of recent events that sparked intense debate on the ethics of media. In the UK the phone-hacking scandal, implicating not only the News of the World and the tabloid press more widely but also the police and the government, has generated an ongoing discussion on media ethics and regulation, which culminated with the reporting of the Leveson Inquiry. Before the hacking scandal and Leveson, WikiLeaks raised questions of accountability and trust on a global scale (Brevini, Hintz and McCurdy 2013). But, crucially, the backdrop to these developments and the concern with an ethics of media is the sheer pervasiveness of the media not only as centralized institutions but also as technologies and means through which we sustain relationships with each other. We live with and in media, and this book is the attempt of its editors and contributors to identify the normative contours of this new life. What are the ‘ethics’ of media? What forms would we expect them to take? What understanding of ‘media’ is needed to bring such ethics, if such exist, into focus?

We pose these questions and publish this book at a time when media institutions’ ethical standards (or lack of them) have dominated recent public debate to an unusual degree (in the UK at least), yet the characteristics, even the identity, of ‘media’ have become ever more difficult to define. How is it possible that public figures frequently argue about the morality of journalists, yet the conceivability of an ethics of media remains, for some, problematic? In this book, no single answer is offered to this question; this is not a field where single or univocal answers are possible. Instead, our point of departure is to treat ethics as a category to be theoretically and even empirically explored rather than defined in abstraction from the details of our practices with media. The chapters aim to display the diversity of competing answers to the question ‘What are the ethics of media?’ whether from specialist researchers of media or from philosophers. We hope thereby to establish beyond doubt that debate about the ‘ethics of media’, whatever forms they take, is integral to a world and of lives increasingly suffused with media content and media devices. We cannot live so intensively with media without generating questions about the ethical dimensions of that life, questions that, as with other aspects of our lives, hold no promise of consensual answers.

The centrality of ethics to any public discourse about media has not always been so clear. Ethics has, for many decades, been a formal part of journalistic training in most countries, within the context of voluntary or legally binding codes of conduct for journalists of varying degrees of strictness (Bertrand 2000; Keeble 2001). But, important though such codes are, journalists’ working rules and norms are only one part of the domain of ethical questions raised by media. Janet Malcolm caused a sensation when in two articles published in New Yorker magazine in the 1980s she questioned the morality of a particular journalist’s treatment of a convicted murderer whose story that journalist had told (Malcolm 1990), but the sensation only underlined how rare such questioning is. Over the longer term, the public world of countries such as the US and the UK has been surprisingly devoid of discussion about the wider morality of what media institutions do, not least because it is rarely in the interests of those same institutions to promote such discussion. Speculation about the role that chasing paparazzi played in the death by car crash of Princess Diana in a Paris tunnel in August 1997 was an exception, but it did little to halt the longer-term growth in newspapers’ reliance on an industry of image capture and circulation (Howe 2004). Philosopher Onora O’Neill’s BBC Reith Lectures in 2002 provoked debate about growing mistrust in media and a number of other institutions, and the causes of such mistrust (O’Neill 2002), but no consequences followed for media institutions. Only the emergence of sustained evidence of malpractice across three core institutions (media, police and government) forced the News of the World ‘phone-hacking’ scandal onto the front pages and prime-time news bulletins, and onto the agendas of government. At the end of this Introduction we return to the aftermath of that scandal which has attracted global attention and major financial consequences for News Corporation at the end of this Introduction. It may be that we will look back on the past decade as one that finally installed the ethics of media at the heart of public debate in mature democracies.

While hardly a new preoccupation, it was only recently that ethics achieved centrality in the humanities and social sciences, culminating with what has been dubbed ‘the turn to ethics’ (Garber, Hanssen and Walkowitz 2000). Ethics is foregrounded in many recent works in cultural theory (Bauman 1993; Bhabha 2004; Butler 2006; Gilroy 2004) and the mainstream of communication and media studies is now following suit. An important precursor is the work of Clifford Christians (Christians, Ferré and Fackler 1993; Christians, Rotzoll and Fackler 1991). Drawing on wider debates about humanitarianism and community in Christian discourse and beyond, his work has combined philosophical analysis and contextualization with rigorous discussion of examples from media practice. Strikingly, however, in spite of the richness of this work, its influence has been largely confined to the US where the tradition of ‘public journalism’ has provided an important context (Glasser 1999), and even there its implications have been, at least until recently, neglected by the wider field of media and communications research. A paradoxical consequence of that neglect was that, for scholars like us, interested in connecting media research to wider ethical debates in the mid-2000s, the field seemed almost undiscovered territory; however misleading that sense of ‘newness’, it proved to be an impetus to the recent revival in the field of media and communication ethics (Couldry 2006; Madianou 2005; Pinchevski 2005). A further impetus to thinking normatively about media was the emergence of a globalized media space, enacted most vividly in the terrible events of 9/11. Roger Silverstone’s book The Media and Morality (2007) was a notable response to that challenge, and was joined by a number of writings that reflected on the centrality of normative questions to media research, often in the context of globalization (Couldry 2008; Eide, Kunelius and Phillips 2008), but sometimes also in a national context (Morrison et al. 2007). Another impetus was political theory and media analysis on the normative implications of media’s presentations of distant suffering, as demonstrated most dramatically by the global audience for the Asian tsunami of 2004 (Boltanski 1999; Chouliaraki 2006). Since then, a number of summative works have begun to consolidate this mainstreaming of normative discussion within media research (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng and White 2010; Ward 2011; Ward and Wasserman 2010).

It was in the middle of this emerging validation of ethical debate within the mainstream of media research that we, the editors of this volume, organized a series of small colloquia bringing together philosophers and social scientists to highlight ethics of media as a topic: in Cambridge, UK, in April 2008; in Paris, France, in June 2008; and in Chicago, US, at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in May 2009. Several of the chapters here started life as participations in one or more of those events, but this book is far from being a set of conference proceedings, since we have also drawn in new participants (Angela Phillips, Damian Tambini), and a number of chapters move a long way from the conference contributions of their authors.

The result of these efforts, we hope, is a volume that offers some useful signposts, even if not always convergent ones, onto an expanding domain of reflection about whether the media we now have are consistent with lives we want to lead.

Overlapping uncertainties

The territory of media ethics is difficult: marked by branching paths, ambiguous directions and potholes into which the traveller can easily fall. We can illustrate the sheer difficulty of ‘ethics of media’ through some quotations.

‘Journalism is a profession in search of norms’, wrote Clifford Christians and his co-authors (1991: 417, added emphasis), a diagnosis that echoes loudly in the UK of the News of the World scandal: a problem, then, of framing an ethics of journalism and, perhaps, more widely of media. ‘The liberal values that underlie any democratic society ... are kept outside the realm of journalism’, wrote Israeli legal philosopher Rafael Cohen-Almagor (2001: 79); ‘as long as this is the case’, he continued, ‘the term “media ethics” will remain a cynical combination’. Here, then, is a problem of will on the part of journalists and of focus on the part of the rest of us. How indeed can we bring everyday values to bear on the paradoxical specialism of journalism (paradoxical because it remains a particular craft whose specialism is the description of everything outside itself)? Underlying the problem of bringing the moral questions raised by media into proper focus is a deep institutional issue: if, as in the conventional model of liberal democracy, the press’s role is to monitor all the institutions of government, what institutions are left to monitor whether appropriate normative standards apply within the press itself? This was a problem already for the great French historian and proto-sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, who worried in his diagnosis of emerging American democracy:

If any one could point out an intermediate, and yet a tenable position, between the complete independence [of the press] and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion, I should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position. de Tocqueville.

(1964: 204–205)

de Tocqueville’s worries about institutional frameworks remain unresolved today: indeed, they are at the heart of the Leveson Inquiry which reported in the UK in November 2012. (For a discussion of various aspects of the inquiry, see contributions by O’Neill (Chapter 2); Madianou (Chapter 11); Phillips (Chapter 15); and Zelizer (Chapter 16).)¹ The first and last parts of this volume cover questions that relate to these various problems: Part I, ‘Framings’, and Part IV, ‘Practices’, which also begins to turn to questions of policy and regulation.

A different area of difficulty – but also a huge stimulus to the field of ‘ethics of media’ – is the changing nature of ‘media’ themselves. In 2006 The Economist asked: ‘what is a media company?’ (20 April 2006, added emphasis). Whether you are a media professional or a media researcher, media ontology – what media ‘are’ – has been transformed over the past decade. All of us have to consider forms of production with very different features and dynamics from the traditional media of press, radio, television and film. Meanwhile, those who lack that specialist interest use media interfaces for an increasing range of activities, both as background infrastructure and as their principle focus of attention. As new media technologies have blurred the line between production and consumption, media texts and everyday interactions, ethical concerns have become relevant not only to institutional practitioners but to all media users. Media, in some form, are everywhere, making it all the more pressing to consider the boundaries of an ethics of media. Moreover, digital media may be understood to create new types of ethical problems.² For instance, new media practices, such as citizen journalism, and transnational developments, such as WikiLeaks (Tambini, Chapter 14), compel us to reassess notions of accountability and trust. Technological convergence blurs the boundaries between public and private interactions and between mediated interpersonal and institutional communication. Can private views expressed in social media still be considered private? Can they be governed by freedom of expression – an individual right – or do we need new principles to assess their new status (Madianou, Chapter 11)? The middle two parts of this volume are designed to focus first on the growing proliferation of media interfaces (Part II, ‘Interfaces’) and second on the proliferating ways in which everyday life is represented by media institutions and media-related practices (Part III, ‘Mediations’).³

We can schematically – as an introduction to the summary of the volume’s chapters that follows – list a series of overlapping questions which are inherent to the domain of ‘ethics of media’ and which various authors address in one way or another. These are the intersecting themes and questions that chapters from across the volume seek to address.

The first question is the institutional quandary raised early on by de Tocqueville: How does one identify or build institutions appropriate to overseeing or intervening in the normative standards that democracy’s own watchdogs (the media) adopt? Clearly, government cannot take on this role without undermining media’s role as watchdog over the state; any regulatory body set up by legislation and with powers of intervention granted by the state must, at the very least, be able to demonstrate an independence from the state and from government. The path to institutional innovation here may be blocked by constitutions that give primacy to the freedom of the press, as O’Neill notes (2002, and Chapter 2), requiring a re-examination of what we really mean when we talk of the press, not just individuals (journalists, citizens), having ‘freedom’ of speech. Where institutional innovation is not blocked, there may be scope for rethinking how a regulatory process might work, involving a range of citizens in an open deliberative process that, whatever its legislative origins, is designed to exceed the control of the state (Couldry 2006: 137–139). The issue of accountability of media institutions was at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal and its aftermath, which resulted in the Leveson Inquiry in the UK. It is clear that discussion about how to build new institutions for regulating the media has only just begun.

A secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Ethics of Media: An Introduction
• Part I: Framings
• Part II: Interfaces
• Part III: Mediations
• Part IV: Practices
• Index