Media Ethics Theories

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 [Page 638]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, an endeavor that dates back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the work of Socrates. Other more recent and contemporary moral philosophy explores the properties of goodness and how our moral judgments might be based on them.

Ethics, conversely, refers to a process of deliberation we undertake to weigh moral claims that may be in conflict in a given case; such cases are often referred to as ethical dilemmas. Philosopher Margaret Walker characterized ethics as the pursuit to understand morality in a way that highlights one's personal responsibility for values. Ethics is concerned with the strengths of our argumentation and the quality of our articulation for or against a course of action when moral claims or obligations may be invoked. In media practice, such dilemmas often involve conflicts between truth and harm, individual interests and public service, privacy and community, and so on. Ethics arises from conflict among the elements of a moral system, according to media ethicist Deni Elliott.

Communication ethics addresses questions regarding the primacy of communication in human identity and interaction. Communication involves natural processes of meaning making and construction of reality that we use to bridge internal experience (i.e., consciousness, symbolic modeling, attitude formation) and outward experience (observable behaviors, negotiated meaning, material production). The philosophy of ethics, then, situated as it is in this relational context involving interaction, interdependence and effects, finds a natural home at the nexus of the communicative act: the duties it presumes, the responsibilities it entails, and the possible harm it can contain.

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