The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics

Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians, Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781134792771
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This fully updated second edition of the popular handbook provides an exploration of thinking on media ethics, bringing together the intellectual history of global mass media ethics over the past 40 years, summarising existing research and setting future agenda grounded in philosophy and social science.

This second edition offers up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of media ethics, including the ethics of sources, social media, the roots of law in ethics, and documentary film. The wide range of contributors include scholars and former professionals who worked as journalists, public relations professionals, and advertising practitioners. They lay out both a good grounding from which to begin more in-depth and individualized explorations, and extensive bibliographies for each chapter to aid that process.

For students and professionals who seek to understand and do the best work possible, this book will provide both insight and direction. Standing apart in its comprehensive coverage, The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics is required reading for scholars, graduate students, and researchers in media, mass communication, journalism, ethics, and related areas.

I

Foundations

1

A Philosophically Based Inquiry into the Nature of Communicating Humans

Wayne Woodward

Conducting “A Philosophically Based Inquiry into the Nature of Communicating Humans” is foundational to developing a comprehensive “philosophy of life” (Levy, 2002, p. 44) that would encompass “the logic of [the] emergent … from its origins in the simplest most primitive forms of organic being to its culmination in the unprecedentedly complex forms of human existence.” Informational and communicative functions and practices are observable in all living entities and systems and require directed attention from communication ethics scholars, arguably more now than ever, as human historicity and natural history proceed into a twenty-first century that has been quick to display global crises arising at the nexus of society and nature. The associated practical and ethical challenges reach into the most profound concerns about life and death, existence and non-being, survival and annihilation. Ethics, as responsibility to and for the “other” – human and natural, as well as artifactual from the perspective of a number of contemporary philosophies – emerges as the “first philosophy” Emmanuel Levinas envisioned. Levinas and fellow philosopher Hans Jonas are principal inspirational and substantive sources for the central ideas presented in response to this topic. Both may require preliminary introduction, since these thinkers are not widely regarded as founding visionaries for contemporary communication and media studies, though they should be.

Jonas’ wide-ranging philosophical writings during the course of seven decades sought to comprehend the integrated interplay of natural and human processes and practices, ranging from basic metabolism and motility of simple organisms to the human exercise of moral imagination in its most complex manifestations. This depth and breadth of philosophical concern brought Jonas specifically and centrally to the theme of modern technology, considering how its ever-­increasing powers put at issue “the integrity of our organic being … the integrity (or proper ‘good) of anything …” (Jonas, 1974, p. xvii). What Jonas strove towards ultimately was articulation of “a substantive link between the theory of the organism and the ethics of technological intervention.” The part played by communication in shaping natural as well as human history has not been adequately examined, and Jonas’ philosophy provides a point of origination for this effort.

The nature of communicating humans comes distinctively into view for Jonas at a threshold of ethnological development where the qualities of interaction between and among beings transcends functional, adaptive, biological behaviors to advance in a direction that opens time and space extensively (into contact with and exposure to social and cultural multiplicities) while also penetrating intensively (into the depths of personal experience). Extensive powers are celebrated in our era for advances in technically-supported connectivity, thereby enhancing the potential for ever more widespread dissemination of information and increased reach for telecommunications. But extensivity becomes a cause for ethical concern as persons acquiesce to complex technological systems providing for design control to be exerted across vast stretches of space while encompassing the widest spectrum of human activities, bio-energetic circumstances, and physical ecology. Increasingly precise surveillance of designed environments can take place in so-called “real time” when extensive capabilities combine with increased intensivity in directing audiences’ and consumers’ attention and interest, especially through collection and use of personal data. Moreover, intensive impacts of communication in the contemporary era are linked with the technological capacity to simulate human experience and participation. For example, contemporary media content and mediated spectacles exhibit highly refined verisimilitude and quality of felt presence. Thus, technological systems now compete with phenomenological consciousness and experience as these have been traditionally conceived.

Jonas criticized both the extensive and intensive dimensions of expanded, modern technological powers by concentrating attention on the threats leading towards violent destruction of social life and catastrophic neglect and abuse of the natural world. His way of addressing the situation was to call for heightened commitments to the qualities of human intimacy and mutual-personal relation, with the parent-to-child relation of care as the normative standard. Specifically, Jonas held that the specter of annihilation should summon a mature acceptance of responsibility that characterizes the intentional, reflexive consciousness of the adult, the loving parent in particular. This reflexive intentionality should inspire moral resolve to care for those beings and entities that are ontologically within the human sphere of responsible duty.

Consideration of the perspective provided by Jonas leads ultimately, in this chapter, to the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas as the basis of a complementary position that provides communicative detail about the ontological “face” of mutual-personal responsibility. Human being declares its nature through responsiveness to an originary “pure communication” (Levinas, 1987, p. 119), which transcends saying or doing, or acts of production, but rather instigates an intimate event of “exposure” (Levinas, 1981, p. 49) to an “other”. The exemplary form is an experienced “proximity” (p. 81ff.) to a living “face” (Levinas, 1969, p. 81) that “shows itself simultaneously in its poverty and height” (Colledge, 2002, p. 179). A “command” to act with responsibility to and for the other is imposed through proximity as awareness of an infinite obligation to the other, a responsibility that arrives “as though from an immemorial past, … a time before the beginning” (Levinas, 1981, p. 88).

Ethics is described by Levinas as passivity, obsession, hunger, absence, restlessness, undoing, weight, density, and trauma; it is communicative undergoing rather than communicative doing (see Dewey, 1958, p. 46 ff.). The distinctively human “competence” that can be distilled from these attributes becomes the communicative capacity to experience – i.e., to be impressed by – the significance and inherent dignity associated with (a) the other as person – self-­constituting and indeterminable – and (b) the self-other encounter as the paradoxical basis of a common life in and through communication, but one that is only made possible by and through the authority that emanates from the other, since it is a capacity born from the condition of the ethical being as held “hostage” by the other.

Jonas and Levinas sought pathways towards ethical reorientation in a modern world in which nihilism had penetrated pervasively into the foundations of human meaning-making; it now shadows the constant, near-frenzied pursuit of satisfaction, which provides for postmodern societies only a semblance of human flourishing in the form of expanded connectivity to a global storehouse of techno-commercial values, which are the facade of nihilism’s ethical void (Wolff, 2011, p. 128).

The argument now returns to Jonas’ writings (Jonas, 1966, 1974, 1984, 1996) for the framework that initiates this philosophical inquiry into the nature of humans communicating, an undertaking that requires interrelating natural processes with cultural practices. Jonas draws on several foundational premises to guide the study of practices, activities, and actions of humans communicating.

The first is that interdependencies between inward experience (that is, consciousness, including the psychological dimensions of meaning-making) and outward experience (that is, the externalization of consciousness in the form of material productions and observable behaviors) need to be taken into account in comprehending how humans exercise meaning-making capacities. This integration of extensive and intensive perspectives provides specificity to Jonas’ positioning of human communication within the larger philosophical project he pursues, which is to “restore life’s psychophysical unity to its place in the theoretical totality, lost on account of the divorce of the mental and the material since the time of Descartes” (Jonas, 1996, p. 59).

Consider, by way of illustration of Jonas’ point, how “symbolic forms” (Thompson, 1995, p. 18) – that is, extensively circulating, diverse formats and genres of communication – both constitute and express human sensibilities, as the domain of human inwardness; moreover, communicative forms develop interdependently with the “technical medium” or “material substratum” employed in particular instances of communication. Significant attributes associated with technical media include the ability to provide for durable “fixation” (p. 19) of content; ease of reproduction (p. 20); and “space-time distanciation” (p. 21), that is, the spatial/temporal “detachment of a symbolic form from its context of production.”

In line with these capacities, changes in technical media become interlinked with the development of particular formats and concentrations of content while providing resources for “the exercise of different forms of power” (p. 19). Thus, social roles and the attainment of status and authority should be considered historically as significantly a matter of how information and knowledge are produced, collected, stored, augmented, transformed, and retrieved (see Carey, 1989, p. 23), along with how content is transmitted and exchanged through institutional practices.

One observes, for example, how the earliest forms of writing developed by Sumerians and ancient Egyptians were put to economic uses, such as supporting property ownership and facilitating trade (Thompson, 1995, p. 19); today, these interests are carried forward into a globalizing, digital age, as high-powered computers allow for vast flows of financial information while diminishing the historically-perceived “tyranny of geography” (Gillespie and Robins, 1989, p. 7) and turning transactional time into nanoseconds. In such a communicative milieu, functional identities (see Couch, 1990, pp. 29–30) associated with economic and technical roles often take priority over “primal identity, the primordial mode of identification” (Levinas, 1969, p. 36). ­Dramatic transformations take place within broader patterns of continuities; and these patterns are constituted through communication as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (Carey, 1989, p. 23).

Jonas’ second premise is that this demand to integrate analysis of the inner and outer, and the semantic and the material, can be best met by elaborating how a “philosophy of life comprises the philosophy of organism and the philosophy of mind” (Jonas, 1974, p. xvii). Humans, along with other life forms, must derive ways to thrive as organisms in their environments; yet, our species is distinguished by the particular capabilities of mind that inform the human response to this fundamental challenge. Since communication is a way of extending mind (see Carey, 1969, p. 273), understanding the role of communication becomes central to a philosophical understanding of life. Furthermore, as Jonas (1966) notes, “a philosophy of mind comprises ethics – and through the continuity of mind with organism and organism with nature, ethics becomes part of the philosophy of nature” (p. 282).

This trajectory of thought allows for distinctive dimensions of human experience, notably symbolic meaning-making and ethical directedness in actions and relations, to be considered as part of an integrative picture of human life. From this vantage point, one can address in a unified manner the widest spectrum of contributing factors in human activity – “metabolism, moving and desiring, sensing and perceiving, imagining and thinking” (Vogel, 1996, p. 10). Basic modes of organismic contact with the environment, as well as advanced socio-cultural and technological ways of impressing individual and collective intentions and projects on shared worlds of experience, should be seen as comparable orders of complexity and meaningfulness; these derive from a primeval, natural drama that becomes historically conditioned within “an ascending scale in which are placed the sophistications of form, the lure of sense and the spur of desire, the command of limb and powers to act, the reflection of consciousness and the reach for truth” (Jonas, 1966, p. 2). Communication is, arguably, the key element within repertoires of instinctual, programmable, and creative functions and faculties that undergird this pageant.

Third, special consideration should be directed towards technological practices, since these have come to be regarded, in modern and postmodern societies especially, as humankind’s “most significant enterprise, in whose permanent, self-transcending advance to ever greater things the vocation of man tends to be seen, and whose success of maximal control over things and himself appears as the consummation of his destiny” (Jonas, 1984, p. 9).

Technological augmentation of communication has been a constitutive feature of social interaction in nearly all societies and in so-called advanced societies in particular (see Couch, 1990, 1996). Jonas contends that the modern results of this general path of development should be critically examined, with particular attention to ethical implications. To encompass social life in its entirety and unity requires comprehension of the technological dimensions of ­meaning-making. The “technologizing of the word” (Ong, 2002) merits special attention as the transformations from oral culture, to manuscripts, print, and electronic-digital communications play out in the psyches and the social relations that characterize different eras and societies.

To summarize this set of points derived from Jonas: (1) Communication should be addressed as human consciousness in vital action, including attention to the material, or physical-artifactual (see Woodward, 1996) contexts for action. (2) Consciousness and action, with their basis in “the state of being affected and spontaneity” (Jonas, 1996, p. 69), need to be approached with an analytical lens focused on the continuity of human life with other life forms. These range from the simplest organisms, to complex hybrid systems that combine human agency with cybernetic programming. (3) Particular emphasis should be placed on the role of technology as a set of developments that conditions the direction and destiny – for better or worse – that humans embrace through consciousness and set out to realize through communicative action.

These commitments lead to a substantive concept of nature focused on the “omnipresence of life” (Jonas, 1966, p. 8) of which humans and human communication form a part. Natu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Foundations
• 1. A Philosophically Based Inquiry into the Nature of Communicating Humans
• 2. A Short History of Media Ethics in the United States
• 3. Essential Shared Values and 21st Century Journalism
• 4. Moral Development: A Psychological Approach to Understanding Moral Decision Making
• 5. On the Unfortunate Divide between Media Ethics and Media Law
• 6. The Search for Universals
• 7. Justice in Media Ethics
• PART II: Professional Practice
• 8. Truth and Objectivity
• 9. Photojournalism Ethics: A 21st-Century Primal Dance of Behavior, Technology, and Ideology
• 10. Diversity Requires Ethics Change
• 11. The Ethics of Advocacy: Moral Reasoning in the Practice of Public Relations
• 12. The Ethics of Propaganda and the Propaganda of Ethics
• 13. Exploring Latin American Advertising Ethics: Legislation and Self-Regulation
• 14. Moral Problems and Ethical Issues in China’s Media
• 15. Perspectives on Pornography Demand Ethical Critique
• 16. Violence
• 17. The Eroding Boundaries between News and Entertainment and What They Mean for Democratic Politics
• 18. What Can We Get Away With? The Ethics of Art and Entertainment in the Neoliberal World
• 19. Culture Is Normative
• PART III: Concrete Issues
• 20. Justice as a Journalistic Value and Goal
• 21. Transparency in Journalism: Meanings, Merits, and Risks
• 22. Coercion, Consent, and the Struggle for Social Media
• 23. Digital Ethics in Autonomous Systems
• 24. Peace Journalism
• 25. Toward an Institution-based Theory of Privacy
• PART IV: Institutional Considerations
• 26. Islamic Reform for Democracy and Global Peace
• 27. Buddhist Moral Ethics: Intend No Harm, Intend to Be of Benefit
• 28. Communitarianism
• 29. Feminist Media Ethics
• 30. Spatial Ethics and Freedom of Expression
• 31. Media Ownership, Autonomy, and Democracy in a Corporate Age
• 32. The Media in Evil Circumstances
• 33. Ethical Tensions in News Making: What Journalism Has in Common with Other Professions
• Index