Abstract
The speed and distance in which news travels today is unquestionably much faster than when the first journalistic code of ethics was written more than a century ago. A dictator is captured, a politician missteps, a celebrity couple breaks up, and minutes later the world’s two billion smartphone users can know about it. Advances in news-gathering and dissemination raise new questions about global media ethics and how journalism can be a tool for improving the world by uncovering injustices brought about by governments, businesses, and individuals.
To sharpen this tool, Shakuntala Rao and Herman Wasserman, editors of Media Ethics and Justice in the Age of Globalization, argue there needs to be an understanding of the good and bad aspects of local media practices, in addition to how they can be applied in a much larger context. Rao, who previously edited an anthology on global media ethics, is a professor and communication studies chair at the State University of New York. Wasserman, who has written extensively about media in post-apartheid South Africa, is a professor and director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. This compilation of case studies and essays by 10 highly respected media scholars follows up on global media ethics roundtables that took place in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Collectively, the book argues for a “thickening” of global media ethics through theory, policy, and practice.
Western traditions are covered by Clifford G. Christians, who provides an eloquent definition of social justice: [It] is first and foremost a matter of loving one another, with love the motivation to give to others what is their due . . . When we love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we treat them according to their intrinsic worth and, thereby, justice is done.
Lee Wilkins offers ethical guidelines for both collaborative journalism funded by individuals or organizations and crowdsourcing. Stephen J. A. Ward argues how moral globalism and cosmopolitanism can reshape media ethics, resulting in a more globally responsible media.
Non-Western traditions are prominently represented throughout the book. Wasserman’s chapter suggests that polarization in South Africa could be lessened if reporters actively listened to the stories of lower-class citizens. Shahan Mufti provides an account of satellite television’s impact on Pakistan’s judiciary and legislative practices. Muhammad I. Ayish richly describes the Arab-Islamic meaning of justice, which is grounded in fairness and responsibility.
India receives the most scrutiny in the book, with four distinct chapters: the historical perspective of news media in the world’s second-most populous country (by Prasun Sonwalkar), ethical practices of Indian journalists in a crowded media landscape (by Rao), the system of charging for one-sided news coverage (by Vipul Mudgal), and the impact of media ownership on ethical news coverage (by Bharat Bhushan). As the editors point out, taken together, these chapters demonstrate how a dominant commercialization and privatization journalism model makes it difficult for justice-based ethics to thrive.
Students will receive more from these readings if they already have some grounding in philosophy, political theory, and ethics. Familiarity with the work of Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, philosopher John Rawls, political theorist Hannah Arendt, and globalization theorist Manuel Castells, as well as classical Greek philosophers, will provide a much deeper understanding of the ideas put forth by the chapter authors. This text would be particularly beneficial in an upper-division or graduate-level course on international media or media ethics.
Overall, the wide variety of chapters makes a connection between justice and democracy. Indeed, the editors state, It is the central argument of this book that media can play an important role in the deepening of democratic processes when it reflects on the ethical dimension of its practices within specific communities, and, more broadly, within the global information society.
As Sen wrote in The Idea of Justice (2009), “Media is important not only for democracy but for the pursuit of justice in general.”