Ethics

[Page 593]Journalism ethics is a branch of professional ethics. Recognizing the power of communication technologies worldwide today, occupations in the media are now included with such professions as medicine, law, engineering, and business under the purview of applied ethics. There are many parallel ethical concerns such as autonomy and accountability, but common to all professions is the issue of professional power, both its uses and abuses. Although journalists have been roundly criticized for more than a century, the exponential growth in media ethics did not occur until it began rising in parallel during the 1980s with the growth of professional ethics as a whole. The challenge at present is whether journalism ethics can contribute to applied ethics as a field while making significant progress on ...