Explorations in Global Media Ethics by Muhammad Ayish Shakuntala Rao

Author:Muhammad Ayish, Shakuntala Rao [Muhammad Ayish, Shakuntala Rao]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135738488
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18556431
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Debates on Global Media Ethics

Ward defines global journalism ethics as aiming at ‘‘developing a comprehensive set of principles and standards for the practice of journalism in an age of global news media’’ (2005, p. 4). Though the notion of ‘‘glocalization’’ or ‘‘hybridization’’ of media ethics has enjoyed a good amount of scholarly currency, it was in the post-9/11 era that the issue received substantive attention. In 2003, a special issue of the Journal of Media Ethics discussed ideas on whether there can be a universal set of moral values toward which media professionals may look for guidance. Contributors saw the September 11 attacks as creating the need for a commitment to global communitarianism to align powerful Western media and the rest of the world. Long before 9/11, however, Christians had spearheaded a remarkable intellectual drive for a global media ethics rooted in what he termed ‘‘universal proto-norms’’ shared by human cultures (Christians and Traber, 1997). Cognizant of the fact that theoretical debates about global media ethics are marked by disagreements about the nature, possibility, and desirability of a global ethics, Christians et al. (2008) champion what they label as an ‘‘ethics of universal being’’ expressed by such universals as the sacredness of life, truth, and nonviolence. According to Steiner (2011), the compelling ethical legacy of Christians and his profound commitment to moral action is enriched by his engagement with universal ‘‘proto-norms’’, values that order all human relationships and institutions and so bypass the divisiveness of appeals to individual rights, cultural practices, or national prerogatives.

For some scholars, the construction of a global media ethics is a natural response to increasing media globalization. Ward (2008) refers to the emergence of a global media ethics movement comprising scholars, global-minded journalists, websites and international journalism associations who are united in their belief that the globalization of news media requires a re-thinking of the principles of journalism. As the ‘‘public’’ of journalism turns increasingly trans-national, basic norms, such as objectivity, should be interpreted from an international perspective. In answering the question of why journalism ethics should go global, Ward (2008) argues that in a radically connected world, news media should report on events in a way reflecting a global plurality of views. It should practice a journalism that helps different groups understand each other, and avoid conflict. Among other things, Ward (2008) notes that a global journalism ethics reins in parochial media inclinations such as extreme patriotism. He cites the case of how some news organizations during the Iraq War of 2003 so quickly shucked their peacetime commitments to independent, impartial reporting as soon as the drums of war started beating.

The genesis of global media ethics goes back to the early 1990s as tensions between the local and the global came to dominate academic and policy discussions of media development, especially in developing nations. According to Robertson (1995, p. 26), who is credited with popularizing the term, ‘‘glocalization’’ describes ‘‘the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole’’.

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