Radical Media Ethics

The digital media revolution has created a revolution in journalism ethics. Established principles are under scrutiny, new practices emerge, and a previous professional consensus on the aims and principles of responsible journalism has been shattered. Journalism ethics has to be re-invented for a global, digital media. The once cozy world of journalism ethics—a somewhat sleepy domain of agreed-upon codes of ethics too often presumed to be invariant—is becoming a faint memory from an earlier media era. We witness the end of a tidy, pre-digital journalism ethics for professionals and the birth of an untidy digital journalism ethics for everyone. Although the digital media revolution is much-discussed, the far-reaching consequences of this revolution for journalism ethics is less discussed, and not clearly understood. This article views the state of journalism ethics through the lens of this digital revolution. To get a sense of the depth of the ethical revolution, it compares pre-digital media ethics and the evolving digital media ethics. The article identifies the assumptions of the pre-digital approach to ethics, and describes the “fatal blow” that digital media delivered to this traditional framework. The article argues for a radical media ethics and outlines some features of the emerging ethics. It concludes with an agenda for digital journalism ethics. The guiding idea is that we need serious and systematic responses to the situation of journalism ethics today, and such changes should be radical—not piecemeal or conservative.