THE MEDIA AND IT'S RESPONSIBILITY

The Media and it's Responsibility

The Media and it's Responsibility

The investigative journalism and the "watchdog" role developed by the American press in the 1960s and early 1970s gave way to increased attention to "journalism ethics." During the Vietnam War, the press played a major role in accelerating the U.S. exit from an unpopular war. During the Watergate investigation, two persistent reporters from the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, succeeded in uncovering facts that led to the resignation of President Nixon. There was, however, also a feeling that the press sometimes went too far, crossing the fine line between the public's right to know and both the right of individuals to privacy and the obligation of the government to protect national security. In many cases, the courts have decided when and if the press has overstepped its rights. In 1971, the government tried to stop the New York Times from publishing a secret study of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, claiming that publication would damage national security. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that since the government could not demonstrate the extent of the damage to national security, the newspapers should be free to publish the information. (Wilkins & Coleman 2005)

The field of media ethics encompasses a range of work that applies moral philosophy, ethics discourse, and social-science approaches for the purpose of documenting and critiquing practices in journalism, public relations, advertising, and other types of communication. Scholarship in media ethics has sought to bring various philosophical claims to bear on media practice, to construct normative frameworks for behavior, and to draw upon the philosophies of mind and technology to articulate the moral duties of communicators in a variety of contexts. For example, theoretical work in the field seeks to explore and understand the value of nonmalfeasance, or minimizing harm, in a variety of media practices and how this value might be weighed against other moral claims. More broadly speaking, communication ethics articulates moral duties stemming from verbal and mediated transactions and attempts to set forth our moral obligations residing in the communicative act. Media ethics also provides frameworks for addressing ethical dilemmas that include a variety of ethical reasoning and rhetorical strategies in media practice.

Ethics, as one of four main branches of philosophy, along with logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, generally can be divided into studies of goodness, studies of right action, applied ethics, and several other subdivisions. Ethics and communication are closely intertwined because we understand ethics to be fundamentally relational: It addresses questions of our duties as moral agents and requires us to consider the impact of our actions on others. Media-ethics theorizing is rooted in moral philosophy, of which ethics is a branch. Although related, moral philosophy and ethics are necessarily distinct. Moral philosophy is concerned with the epistemological examination of what constitutes the good, how we might identify its intrinsic features, and how we come to know it. Moral philosophers are largely preoccupied with justifying the use of ought statements, ...