Controversies in Media Ethics

A. David Gordon, John Michael Kittross, John C. Merrill, William Babcock, Michael Dorsher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136818653
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

Controversies in Media Ethics offers students, instructors and professionals multiple perspectives on media ethics issues presenting vast "gray areas" and few, if any, easy answers. This third edition includes a wide range of subjects, and demonstrates a willingness to tackle the problems raised by new technologies, new media, new politics and new economics.

The core of the text is formed by 14 chapters, each of which deals with a particular problem or likelihood of ethical dilemma, presented as different points of view on the topic in question, as argued by two or more contributing authors. The 15th chapter is a collection of "mini-chapters, " allowing students to discern first-hand how to deal with ethical problems. Contributing authors John A. Armstrong, Peter J. Gade, Julianne H. Newton, Kim Sheehan, and Jane B. Singer provide additional voices and perspectives on various topics under discussion.

This edition has been thoroughly updated to provide:

• discussions of issues reflecting the breadth and depth of the media spectrum
• numerous real-world examples
• broad discussion of confidentiality and other timely topics

A Companion Website (www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415963329) supplies resources for both students and instructors. You can also join the Controversies community on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CME3rd

Developed for use in media ethics courses, Controversies in Media Ethics provides up-to-date discussions and analysis of ethical situations across a variety of media, including issues dealing with the Internet and new media. It provides a unique consideration of ethical concerns, and serves as provocative reading for all media students.

Part One

The Basics

Overview

Theoretical Foundations for Media Ethics

John C. Merrill

MEDIA ethics concerns right and wrong, good and bad, better and worse actions taken by people working in the field of journalism and mass communication. Media themselves, of course, cannot be ethical or unethical—only workers in the media can. When we deal with media ethics, we are really concerned with standards media people have and the kinds of actions they take.

Because this book is designed largely as a textbook for students considering the complexities of media ethics as well as for those who want an introductory view of the moral problems and dilemmas of mass communication, it is well that we use this rather long introduction to build a framework or a foundation from which to attack the specific ethical controversies that we discuss later on. Ethics is a nebulous subject. All a person has to do is to pick up almost any book or article on ethics to see that disagreements and contradictions arise almost at once. The great moral philosophers of history have not agreed on many aspects of ethics or on its main theories and subtheories.

One thing we do know: ethics is the study of what we ought to do. Some of us (followers of Immanuel Kant) try to follow predetermined rules and treat others as ends and not means. The intuitivists get help from some kind of instinctive, metaphysical or mystical sense. The egoists think of self first and the transvaluation of the person. The altruists put self last and the community first in making ethical decisions. The existentialists are devoted to freedom, courage, action, and personal responsibility. The communitarians seek group conversation, harmony, social stability and security. The utilitarians want to maximize happiness and goodness. The Machiavellians desire pragmatic success in achieving desired ends, by any means necessary.

Ethics has to do with duty—duty to self and duty to others. It is private and personal, although it is related to obligations and duties to others. The quality of human life relates to both solitude and sociability. We do right or wrong by ourselves in the private or inward part of our lives where we are acting and reacting in a context of others. This duality of individual and social morality is implicit in the very concept of ethics, and the reader of this book will notice how these two aspects affect core arguments on each side of various issues.

For example, a journalist (or for that matter, a person who writes a television drama) is not simply writing for the consumption of others. He or she is writing as self-expression and self-gratification, and the self is developed by the very act of expression. The processes of deciding to do a story, selecting what will be used, and expressing this material all impinge on ethics and affect the moral character of the media person. What all media people communicate is, in a very real sense, what they are. They please or displease themselves, not just those for whom they are writing. What they do to live up to their personal standards affects not only the beliefs and activities of others but also, in a very real sense, the very essence of their own lives. Through their actions, they existentially make their ethical selves.

Ethical Concern: Starting Point

A concern for being ethical is the starting point. If media people do not care whether what they do is good or bad, then they will have little or no interest in, or consideration of, ethics. For the average person working in the communications media, however, ethics is an important concern that permeates the entire professional activity. A sense of right conduct does not come naturally; it must be developed, thought about, reasoned through, cared deeply about. In short, it must be nurtured. Unless journalists, for example, see themselves as blotters, soaking up news-reality, how they collect this news and what they do with it is the essence of their professional life.

In recent years, an interest in making ethics relevant to the professions has become firmly entrenched. Books, articles, seminars, conferences, and workshops have stressed the need for practical ethics. Professional ethics courses have developed in many areas, especially in business, law, medicine, and journalism. Books for such courses have followed; a good example of an ethics book encompassing several professions is Serafini’s (1989) Ethics and Social Concern. Journalism and mass communications academics and practitioners have written a great number of ethics books in the last several decades. Media organizations, subject to increasing criticism from the public, have encouraged their staff members to become more concerned with moral issues.

Mass communicators are right in the middle of all sorts of ethical problems in the daily work environment. Such people must decide what is the right (or at least the best) thing to do at every turn. At the core of media ethics are certain key questions: What should I consider worth publishing, broadcasting, or disseminating in the first place? How much should I publish? Which parts should I omit? These and other questions spin out of a decision to bring a story, program, or advertisement to the public’s attention. The media person works in the realm of ethics, whether or not he or she gives any thought to it as ethics.

Ethical concern is important, for it forces the media person to make commitments and thoughtful decisions among alternatives.

Ethical concern is important, for it forces the media person to make commitments and thoughtful decisions among alternatives. Ethical concern leads the media person to seek the summum bonum, the highest good in professional practice, thereby heightening self-respect and public credibility and respect. The reader who expects this book to answer every question about what to do (prescriptive ethics) or not to do (proscriptive ethics) will be disappointed. In fact, as the very nature of the book attests, ethical determinations are debatable. What we hope to do is to serve as ethical thought-provokers and moral consciousnessraisers, and to raise significant ethical controversies in various media contexts with which readers can grapple. The purpose of this book is not to answer once and for all the basic questions of media morality, but to raise significant questions worthy of continuing concern.

Although concern with media ethics may be growing, it is still underdeveloped. Marvin Kalb, former NBC reporter who went on to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, maintains that American journalism is “mean-spirited,” having a “desire to tear down rather than build up” (Budiansky, 1995, p. 46). In the same article by Budiansky in U.S. News & World Report, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania says of today’s journalists that “everyone operates out of cynical self-interest” (p. 46). Newton N. Minow, who called television “a vast wasteland” in 1961, reappraised the medium in 1995 and found it still lacking in quality. He writes that TV has had a “distorting influence” (Minow, 1995, p. 6) and has failed to serve four main needs: properly supporting education, meeting the needs of children, adequately providing serious public programming, and supporting the political system during campaigns. Minow maintains that television has not “fulfilled our needs and will not do so in the next 30 years” (Minow, 1995, p. 6). There seems to be no doubt that ethical awareness among media people is not what it ought to be.

Two Main Ethical Emphases

Ethical concern can manifest itself in two main emphases: (1) the mass communicator can be concerned mainly with taking ethical cues from the society, from colleagues, and from the community, or (2) he or she can emphasize personal ethical development and put community priorities second. The first emphasis is today called social or communitarian ethics, the second is called personal or individual ethics. In both cases, the media person is concerned with ethics and wants to do the right or best thing. It is simply a matter of emphasis—one relying on group-driven ethics, the other on personally determined ethics. One stresses other-directed ethical action, the other inner-directed ethical action.

Actually, these two emphases are not mutually exclusive, although the proponents of each often seem hostile to one another. The communitarian does not ignore individuality; the individualist does not disdain cooperative or social concerns. It is simply a matter of emphasis. A good book that gives the communitarian perspective is Good News, by Clifford Christians et al. (1993), which proposes that journalists forget the Enlightenment concepts of individualism and libertarianism touted by such liberal thinkers throughout history as Locke, Voltaire, Constant, Adam Smith, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Kant. Communitarians see individual or liberal ethics as dysfunctional to the community and generally based on personal quirks rather than on group-determined standards.

Today, communitarian ethicists such as Amitai Etzioni, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Joseph de Maistre, and Michael Sandel would have journalists publish things that would bring people together, not fractionalize them. Christians et al. (1993) ask for a universal ethics, saying that journalists should realize that “universal solidarity is the normative core of the social and moral order” and that journalists should throw out the old concepts of journalistic autonomy, individualism, and negative freedom (Christians et al., 1993, pp. 14 and 42–44).

The other emphasis or ethical orientation is the liberal or libertarian one, which asks for maximum personal autonomy in ethical decision-making. It does indeed stress the values of the European Enlightenment thinkers and puts the individual at the center of the ethical system. One of the best books upholding the liberal or individualistic emphasis and criticizing the communitarian perspective is Stephen Holmes’s (1993) book The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. This University of Chicago political theorist explains both communitarianism and libertarianism, but mainly provides a critique of what he calls antiliberalism (communitarianism).

FIGURE 0.1 Two ethical mega-emphases

Another defender of individualism and critic of egalitarianism and other forms of communitarianism is Time magazine’s former media critic, William A. Henry III. In his book In Defense of Elitism, Henry (1994) describes the growth of the “community” emphasis, which leads to a deprecation of the individual, and of “elitism” or meritocracy—the idea that some people are smarter than others, that some ideas are better than others. Explaining the kind of elitism he supports, Henry (1994) writes:

The kind of elitists I admire are those who ruthlessly seek out and encourage intelligence and who believe that competition—and, inevitably, some measure of failure—will do more for character than coddling ever can. My kind of elitist does not grade on a curve and is willing to flunk the whole class. My kind of elitist detests the policy of social promotion that has rendered a high school diploma meaningless and a college degree nearly so. . . . My kind of elitist hates tenure, seniority, and the whole union ethos that contends that workers are interchangeable and their performances essentially equivalent.

(Henry, 1994, p. 19)

To Henry, the contemporary emphasis on community desires is taking precedence over individual preferences to the degree that the marketplace of ideas is being threatened. Even in education, which Henry believes should foster individualism, there is an “academic echo of Marxism [as] administrators join activists in celebrating the importance of ‘community’ over the importance of individual thought and exploration” (Henry, 1994, p. 108).

Another book, George Morgan’s (1968) The Human Predicament, is also anticommunitarian in its thrust; it extols the individual person and bemoans the drift toward standardization of social activities. In a chapter called “Dissolution of the Person,” Morgan warns that increasingly one’s everyday activity is modeled after the machine: standardized, automatic, and repeatable. “In all departments of life,” he writes, “unceasing efforts are made to avoid, or render unnecessary, the judgments, decisions, and even the presence of the individual man” (Morgan, 1968, p. 61). He continues:

This situation is so taken for granted that few are aware of it or can see its true nature. Once recognized, however, its manifestations are found everywhere. Let it be epitomized here by a development that reaches into the core of the person: the ever-spreading assumption that a person’s life need not be shaped through his own search, understanding, and decision—aided by the experience and wisdom of others.

(Morgan, 1968, p. 62)

We can see that these two emphases are important: the libertarian holds fast to individualistic ethical development and the communitarian seeks to enhance the community and take ethical nourishment from the group. The first would improve society by stressing self-improvement and individual decision-making; the second would improve society by sublimating personal concerns to community wishes and cooperatively making decisions that are designed to eliminate friction.

The Importance of Freedom in Discussions of Ethics

It is good that we think seriously about press freedom and its relationship to media ethics. Freedom, or a large amount of it, is necessary even to consider ethical action. Positive freedom (freedom from outside control) must be present for the actor to be able to decide between or among alternative actions. If there is no freedom, then the ethical debate is moot—the media person is acting in accordance with a controlling agent and cannot really be making an individual ethical decision.

In the United States and throughout Western society, journalists—and people generally—put their trust in the owners and managers of their media. And, therefore, this loyalty affects their concept of ethics. But in many non-Western countries—e.g. Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—the main loyalty is to a political or religious authority. Social order there is often more important than individual pluralism or a private media system. Many in the world feel that Western journalism is irresponsible, biased, greedy, imperialistic, and harmful to nation-building. Therefore, it is natural that they see Western media morality as intrinsically bad.

So, in discussing media ethics there are really two main paradigms of the press in the world—(1) the Western freedom-centered one that has grown out of the European Enlightenment and (2) the non-Western authority-centered one that prevails in most of the world. The first type of press system is designed for maximum freedom and consequently permits excesses in journalistic activity, while the second type is designed to bring about an increasing degree of social order.

In the social-order (authoritarian) countries the media system is not much concerned with ethics per se, but with guiding principles and controls placed on the press by the political authority. Journalists in these countries have their guidelines and rules; what is the proper thing to do is determined for them a priori, so there is no real need for any serious consideration of ethical behavior. So it should be remembered that when we talk about countries having less and less press freedom, we are at the same time decreasingly concerned with ethics. Yet there are exceptions, for example Venezuela in mid-2007, when the opposition television channel was ordered off the air by the government. It moved its content to the Web and defied government efforts to silence its point of view (James, 2007).

Since the controversies in this book mainly relate to ethics in the United States, it is helpful to assume that those making the ethical decisions are virtually free. Of course, we know that there are freedom-limiting factors such as political correctness, editors and publishers, news directors, advertisers and others that impinge on complete freedom. But by and large, U.S. journalists are free and cannot really escape their freedom (and necessit...