Media Ethics

The question of media ethics is increasingly relevant in the digital age. At its core, ethics is a social system of deliberating and prioritizing shared values and principles to provide moral guidance toward ideal actions. In the context of communication, media ethics is a process whereby media practitioners examine moral dilemmas and hard choices to determine which standards of conduct best meet professional and societal expectations and responsibilities for truthfulness, fairness, and minimization of harm in order to promote the integrity of information and a diversity of people and perspectives in a global society. Given the economic and social power of mediated communication and its pervasiveness in people’s lives, this involves consideration of everyone affected by one’s communication; these entities can be deemed moral claimants ...