Explorations in Global Media Ethics

Muhammad Ayish, Shakuntala Rao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135738556
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Studies of global media and journalism have repeatedly returned to discussions of ethics. This book highlights the difficulty that journalists encounter when establishing appropriate ethical practices and marks the pressing importance of global media ethics as a subject of current debate. A wide range of contributors – both scholars and practitioners of journalism – identify how changes in journalism practice, developments in new media technologies, legal regulations, and shifting patterns of ownership all play a role in creating ethical tensions for journalists, with some chapters in the book suggesting practical solutions to this pertinent issue. The growing need to faithfully represent other diverse cultural groups is also considered, with certain chapters discussing the impact that human rights, freedom and justice have upon journalistic decision making.

Explorations in Global Media Ethics recognises that, with the escalation of globalisation and a public striving for honest quality media, journalists around the world face an increasing pressure to comply with and simultaneously satisfy diverse ethical practices at both a local and a more global level. The book sympathises with the position of the journalist and calls for greater consideration of his ambiguous role.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

Introduction

Explorations in global media ethics

Muhammad Ayish and Shakuntala Rao

Studies of global media and journalism have repeatedly returned to discussions of ethics. Philosophical models of interpretation have consistently informed analyses and cognizance of the fast changing media landscape. In the era of globalization and the “post-postmodernization” of the world as marked by the birth of new nations, decolonization, the end of Soviet hegemony, and the rising consciousness of democracy, we become increasingly obligated to pay attention to the multi-layered exploitations of development in the form of migrant labor, sex industries, and sweat shops. The question posed by Wasserman (2008, p. 92), “Is it possible to agree on ethical conduct for journalists around the globe?” has become an urgent one. New media technologies, as well as the processes of media liberalization, deregulation, and privatization across national boundaries, have altered journalism as a profession. While journalism has stayed firmly anchored in the local, often adapting, appropriating, and localizing global practices and technologies, a vision for global journalism ethics remains only partially articulated. Study after study shows that audiences around the world continue to desire quality journalism, and thinking through an ethics of journalism and media that reflects changes in the media, marketplace, and political landscapes as well as in contemporary philosophy becomes an urgent task. “If news media are to be guided by universal ethics, then journalists need to reconceive their role as major players in cross-cultural discourse”, write Christians et al., “the first step is to reconsider journalists as active inquirers who should seek to provide nuanced and informed interpretations of their world, while being fully aware of the difficulties of representing others” (2008, p. 139). Journalists and media professionals require not only an understanding of the ongoing philosophical debate about the accommodation of otherness, but should work with a framework of concrete universals, one which transforms universalism, rather than abandoning it, while attempting to redress the coercive, manipulative, and exclusionary application of the “universal”.

The coeval perturbations of the theory revolution and canonical revisionism of the 1970s, felt first and most profoundly in the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and anthropology, challenged and transformed ethical theory in most professions. Ethics talk has been re-legitimized during the past two decades by currents within “high theory”: by Foucault’s reevaluation of the category of the self, conceiving of care as an ethical project among Feminist writers, and Derrida’s desconstructive critical practice as itself an ethics. Philosophers, such as Carey, Couldry, and Nussbaum have themselves turned to media and journalism to examine and express ethical reflection. These theoretical debates penetrated studies of media and journalism practices as the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and by Christians and his colleagues, integrated insights from Communitarianism into studies of media and journalism.

Contemporary debates on media and journalism ethics appear to come to an impasse in the confrontation between two positions, the one (identity politics) vying to assert absolute difference between culturally constituted human beings, and the other (neo-Kantian proceduralism) arguing for sameness based in the common “humanity” of all human beings. While the claimants for the “sameness” of all human beings accuse the proponents of difference of promoting radical relativism, the proponents of acknowledging and accepting difference accuse the universalists of trying to impose (usually Western) values onto (sometimes colonized) people. Instead of remaining in such a polarized, and paralyzed, argument, we can start with a study of current philosophical debates around ethics which would not only show that we are intellectually current, responsible, and rigorous, but also will give us hope about creating a revitalized, effective, and future-oriented global media ethics. And if we are to proceed with some degree of intellectual possibilities (and hope), studies of media and journalism should confront such questions without lapsing into metaphysics, total undecidability, or simply, political disaffectedness. We begin by invoking Appiah’s (2006, p. 118) simple question, “Why the need to consider the ethics of the other?”

At the center of negotiating the universal–particular, self–other debates in ethics has been the difficult concept of culture (media often has become the conduit through which culture is defined, captured, or critiqued), encoded in the language of cultural rights and choices. Universal ethics should be rejected, one could thus argue, because it infringes on the terrain of “my” culture’s ethics. Many theorists have argued that culture is constituted by encounters with the other and that culture and identity are hybrid and dynamic (see Ayish and Azzi’s articles in this issue). Geertz and others have tried to challenge the idea of culture-as-self-containedness by taking on the responsibility of engaging with “strangeness” as constitutive of the very moment of cultural identification and ethical enunciation. Geertz asks us “to refocus our attention and make us visible to ourselves by representing us and everyone else as cast into the midst of a world full of irremovable strangeness we can’t keep clear of” (1986, p. 121). Encounters with such cultural strangeness cannot be regulated in a binary representation of cultural difference as “us-versus-them.” The problem is not, Geertz warns “the distant tribe enfolded upon itself in coherent difference” but a disjunctive, anxious terrain of “sudden faults and dangerous passages” that produce moral asymmetries within the boundary of a “we” (1986, p. 121). The making of the “we”, Geertz argues, is not limited to the West though it has been most highlighted in the post-Enlightenment citizen as a political subject (the conflation of the outsider in Euroamerican sense with the global outsider should be avoided, the “we” here could constitute identity as much for Algerians in France as for Tibetans in China and South Asian migrants in the Middle East). Such strangeness is oblique and shaded, less easily set off as anomalous as it is “scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social spaces whose edges are unfixed, irregular, and difficult to locate” (Geertz, 1986, p. 121). For Bhabha, culture is highly productive and he proposes “ethos and poetics of identification” which represents the process through which international relations in between class, gender, generation, race, religion, or region are articulated as hybrid identifications and that identities are produced in the “intersective or interstital cultural processes” rather than in any claim of originary self-definition with free access to “moral or mimetic measure of cultural knowledge” (2000, p. 188). If culture is a regulator to how someone knows and taxonomies of culture are possible and useful, while recognizing that any culture at work is also, as Spivak notes, a play of differences from these taxonomies. “Culture alive is always on the run” Spivak writes, “always changeful” (2008, p. 357), the fear is until culture, in broad strokes, starts “speaking in the name of political, ethical, and other narratives” (p. 359).

Ethicists are starting to move away, in as much practice of ethics for media and journalism as in the theory of media and journalism ethics, from an articulation that cultural difference can only be achieved by acknowledging values within any one cultural system, to a wider position that judgments across cultures (universal) can be linked to and be tolerant of ontological rights of self-representation (particular). Appiah, Taylor, Foucault, and others, have thought about how pluralist democracies can ensure the coexistence of a potentially infinite array of diverse ethical systems and approaches. While the solutions of interlocutors in these discussions vary, to the point of seeming irreconcilable, all appear animated by a genuine commitment to an ethos of “recognition of difference” (Appiah, 2006, p. 118). Journalism and media ethicists could also problematize universalism, while taking seriously the various philosophies and histories of others. Like the philosophers working on the question of ethics and the other, we can try to think through a series of questions: “How can we combine a commitment to the universal recognition of others with respect for the concrete particularism, difference, or asymmetry of others?”; “How can we dispel the generalized figment of the “generalized other” that dominates versions of the universal in order to acknowledge particularlized others?”; “How can we avoid reifying the otherness of the other so as to turn him or her into an abstract alterity?”; and, most crucially, “How can we try to redress the violence enacted by hegemonic discourses that silence or slight the subaltern other?” Studies of global media and journalism should confront such questions. The essays in this issue, when read collectively, not only present a mix of theoretical frameworks and case-studies but seek connections between global media ethics and regional approaches, theories, and professional practices. For journalists and media practitioners, the efforts at seeking “human-centered global proto-norms” (Christians et al., 2008), we believe, require such connections.

Grappling with changes in technology, globalization and ethical theory during the past decade, journalism and media professionals have made various efforts to develop a philosophically rigorous and epistemologically sound ethics for the global media (Brislin, 2004; Christians and Traber, 1997; Couldry, 2006; Merrill, 2002; Silverstone, 2007; Ward, 2010). In one attempt to formulate global media ethics, the Journal of Mass Media Ethics published a special issue titled, “Search for a Global Media Ethics” (2003). In this issue, Callahan writes that the profession’s global scope and transnational media provokes the question of whether there can be “universal ethical standards for journalism to meet the challenges of globalization” (Callahan, 2003, p. 3). Similarly, Ward (2005, p. 4) states that a global media ethics would imply that responsibility “would be owed to an audience scattered across the world”, given the increasingly global reach of media corporations facilitated through new technologies. Christians and Nordenstreng (2004) have proposed a theoretical formulation which re-examines the search for global media ethics, and proposes the social responsibility theory as a possibility for the press to adopt internationally. They offer the possibility of establishing several universal principles which they ground in “a morality rooted in animate nature” (2004, p. 20). Stating that “global social responsibility needs an ethical basis commensurate in scope, that is, universal ethical principles rather than the parochial moral guidelines represented by codes”, Christians and Nordenstreng list respect for human dignity based on sacredness of human life, truth, and non-violence as three universal principles (2004, p. 20). Ward and Wasserman, in the introduction of their book Media Ethics Beyond Borders: a global perspective, one of the first comprehensive anthologies on global media ethics, write, “A global-minded media is of significant value because biased and parochial media can wreak havoc in a tightly linked global world. By the same token, media that claim to be ‘global’ yet fail to acknowledge the ways in which their ethical perspectives are influenced by their own cultural, historical or political positioning, will be unable to help us make sense of the world in which we live” (2008, p. 1). Ethicists, journalists, and scholars alike agree that any invention, evolution, or construction of global media and journalism ethics should be highly nuanced both in its epistemological approaches and in practical applications.

Christians et al. (2008), in their essay on global media ethics, propose a cross-disciplinary theoretical perspective. The essay does not presume to provide conclusive answers to theoretical questions about the relationship between the self and the other, the local and the global, or the universal and the particular, but puts forward an argument about ways in which current disagreements about the nature, possibility, and desirability of a global media ethics could be addressed. “Progress in developing a global media ethics is stymied by a number of wide-spread beliefs and presumptions,” write Christians et al. The authors contend that “One issue is whether there are universal values in media ethics.” Their answer is a qualified “yes”; they write:

It appears there are universals. Even a cursory survey of many codes of journalism ethics would find agreement, at least on a denotative level, on such values as reporting the truth, freedom, and independence, minimizing harm, and accountability. Yet, a survey would also find differences. Some media cultures emphasize more strongly than others such values as the promotion of social solidarity, not offending religious beliefs and not weakening public support for the military. Even where media systems agree on a value, such as “freedom of press” or “social responsibility”, they may interpret and apply such principles in different ways. (Christians et al., 2008, p. 138)

In opening up these tensions, the authors describe several theoretical positions which might coalesce to form our current understanding of global media ethics. In their attempts to avoid errors of the past, Christians et al. propose an outline of a theory of ethics consisting of levels: “the levels of presuppositions, principles, and precepts” (2008, p. 140), that interact dynamically in experience. Rooted in a holistic conception of theory where basic values and ideas emerge from a “common humanness in concrete contexts”, Christians et al. see such values as “context-influenced articulations of deep aspects of being human” (2008, p. 139). The most deeply embedded disagreements between factions (agnostic, antifoundationalist, poststructuralist, accounts of pluralism and multiculturalism), the authors argue, should not necessarily detract from the circumstances that they also come together at notable junctures and that most theories of ethics usually subscribe to a modicum of universalization and to some universal extension of nonviolence and sacredness of human life. The authors juxtapose their claim of “humanness” as universal with a critique of past ethicists who did not fully articulate their own theoretical location as imperialist or as historically, culturally, and politically positioned. Christians et al. hope that the global and local can engage in a reflexive, relational, and critical dialectic that could contribute to an extended discussion of ethics for the global media.

Given such contentiousness debates and new ideas in the history of media and journalism debates, the three-day Global Media Ethics Roundtable organized at Zayed University on March 22–24, 2010, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, gave scholars and practitioners a chance to discuss such debates. The essays in this special issue were presented at the Roundtable. While four of the nine articles at the Roundtable addressed media in the Middle East, the participants consciously tried to move away from the usual diagnosis of Middle Eastern media (as well as of the societies from which such media emerge) as non-plural and parochial and, therefore, as needing intervention from Western journalists and ethicists. These articles were penned much earlier to the citizens’ revolutions we have witnessed in some of the countries in the Middle East and the significant role media has played in these revolutions. While such changes could not have been predicted a year earlier, essays in this issue challenge the model of the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric and the subsequent defeat of any composite idea of multi-ethics in journalism and media practices and policies. The conference took place in Dubai, a city which has emerged as a major hub for global media, with a large number of regional and international satellite television news and entertainment networks and because the influx of new media has also radicalized rhetoric, leading some scholars to argue that new media is incompatible with the region’s social and cultural traditions and indigenous value systems (Azzi and Meshmeshi, 2010).

While some critics in the region have viewed state-controlled media as part of socially and politically-conscious and benevolent governments, some have interpreted private media, especially satellite television and websites, with their commercial and Western-style formats, as the least committed to regional and local ethical values. Amin (2008), for instance, accuses new media as providing highly sensationalized content, and thus breaching the “standards of public morality”, often only to attract more audiences for advertisers. In 2003, for instance, angry demonstrators in Bahrain took to the streets to protest the filming and broadcast of Big Brother (renamed in Arabic as al-Ra’is or The Boss), a reality TV show in which 12 unmarried young men and women are video-taped living under the same roof. The broadcast of al-Ra’is was subsequently cancelled. The most recent example of an offensive broadcast featured a Saudi man who bragged of his sexual escapades on a talk-show on Lebanese TV. In response to a petition from thousands of angry protestors, the man was tried in a Saudi court, received lashings, and a long prison sentence.

Increased exposure to Western media content and formats has generated interest in, and concern about, the ethical standards of those media. In tandem with protests about the content of new media, the emergence of satellite news channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya has also posed questions about the implications of applying Western-style journalism ethics in an Arab region marked by state-control of information and cultural conservatism. Such wariness accompanies, and arises out of, raised awareness among media practitioners, journalists, policy makers, and the general public about the need for professional standards in addressing ethical issues. In recent years, journalists, media owners, and policy mavens in the Middle East have begun to recognize that global media does not always or necessarily subvert and erase indigenous (Arab) values. These changes in perceptions of the local/regional versus global/Western ethical divide have inspired some Middle Eastern professionals to try to self-regulate by combining global and local ethical perspectives. While it had been almost impossible, in the past, to discuss media and journalism ethics beyond the cultural and social parameters of Arab–Islamic values and norms, it has become increasingly acceptable to address ethical issues in a “synthesist fashion”: one which combines regional and Western media ethics (Ayish, 2008, p. 12).

While Middle Eastern media and journalism ethics codes vary in content, they commonly emphasize freedom, responsibility, privacy, fairness, objectivity, and access to information. The code of ethics developed by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Satellite Channel (JSC), for example, highlights the hybridity of these codes. The JSC code of ethics states that Al Jazeera “adheres to the journalistic values of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, independence, credibility and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or political considerations over professional ones” (Al Jazeera, 2008). It also states that “the broadcaster will endeavor to get to the truth and declare it in our dispatches, programs and news bulletins unequivocally in a manner which leaves no doubt about its validity and accuracy” (Al Jazeera, 2008). Recent codes of ethics developed in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Explorations in global media ethics
• 2. The Philosophy of Technology: Globalization and ethical universals
• 3. Ethical Flourishing as Aim of Global Media Ethics
• 4. Contesting Patriotism and Global Journalism Ethics in Arab Journalism
• 5. The Morality of Journalism Ethics: Readings of Al Nursi’s theory of God’s attributes
• 6. Television Reality Shows in the Arab World: The case for a “glocalized” media ethics
• 7. The “Local” in Global Media Ethics
• 8. Towards a Global Journalism Ethics via Local Narratives: Southern African perspectives
• 9. Journalism’s Moral Sentiments: Negotiating between freedom and responsibility
• 10. Negotiating Global and Local Journalism Ethics: A case-study of how a local Dubai radio talk show covered the arrest of a couple for kissing in public
• Index