The Significance of Contemporary Media Ethics

Ideally, Media Ethics seeks to facilitate the best possible world for humanity by applying a universal moral understanding to complex social situations. In other words, anyone who cares about human beings and journalism's relationship to society will care about media ethics. We must assume that this ideal is as unattainable as any Platonic Form, while acknowledging that it nonetheless remains our duty to use reason and our most universal sense of human morality to come as closely to it as possible.

The first thing I would want people to know about ethical practices in media is that on a fundamental level, they rarely exist. While contemporary thought has a venerable tradition of ethical philosophy stretching back millennia to draw from, these abstractions offer no simple application to social circumstances that largely did not exist when they were conceived. Modern media ethicists develop systems on a similar level of abstraction as these traditions, restricting our understanding to individualistic notions of ethical action that don't properly address the ethics of institutionalized media practices.

The concentration of media ownership, increasing specialization of social structure and its implications for the journalist-reader relationship, and systematic technological advancement are issues that require a less abstract, more critical understanding of journalism's place in society. According to obsolete notions of journalistic objectivity, media institutions have become too enmeshed in the things they are supposed to cover (via subsumption under gigantic corporations with a dominant social influence) to even remotely approximate objectivity. A broken clock has the correct time up to the moment it stops, and so it is with the objectivity-advocacy dichotomy.

We need to question why a given piece of information was created, and what its implications are for whatever individuals and institutions effected. Is it important to everybody and appeal to a common sense of humanity, or a petty trifle usurping the just place of such issues? Has it been interpreted in terms of its ultimate human consequences, their domain and scope? This seems to be the most important ethical consideration in contemporary media.

I see my future career as an ethical issue. How do I eek out a living without contributing to six corporate giants that have swallowed up a vast bulk of media outlets, or advertise for consumer products that hurt humanity in the long run for a short-term profit? I certainly don't know. But where many journalists see disaster in declining newspaper readership and TV ratings, I see an entirely new world opening. Journalists seem to see no quick-fix financial schemes and cry that the sky is falling. I see an opportunity for a renewed, vibrant relationship with an audience alienated by the infobyte-mill modern journalism is turning into. It couldn't possibly be easy, but I don't know of any natural laws against it.