Abstract
This volume is an exceptionally valuable contribution to contemporary media and information ethics. It will be of great value for students and instructors in journalism and media studies, as well as for philosophers and others concerned with the ongoing development of ethical frameworks and approaches that allow us to analyze and, ideally, resolve especially new issues evoked by rapidly developing communication technologies.
First, the volume provides an introduction to media ethics that is unusually well grounded in both historical and philosophical terms. Second, the book intends nothing less than to develop a new media ethics, one appropriate to what the author identifies as ‘the fifth revolution in journalism ethics’ (p. 213) – a revolution, namely, resulting from the extraordinary explosion of communication media made possible especially by the Internet and the World Wide Web over the past two decades. The volume deftly captures the current and evolving state of communication media – including a maturing conjunction of earlier, especially print-based, media with contemporary networked electronic media. The first four chapters develop an exceptionally comprehensive overview of the historical and philosophical backgrounds of journalism and journalism ethics. On this basis, the author then undertakes the development of what he calls a ‘mixed media ethics’ (p. 214) that conjoins earlier professional journalism ethics with a new media model that ‘favors a participatory model of democracy which is libertarian in spirit’ (p. 213). I believe the author very much succeeds in this ambition, both as he articulates this mixed ethic and as he illustrates how it would work in praxis vis-à-vis several common scenarios and cases. More broadly, both substantively and in terms of its dialogical commitments, the book intentionally invites precisely the critical dialogue needed for the ongoing development of this new media ethics.
Somewhat more carefully: the author notes at the outset that ‘The book is neither a textbook of cases nor a book on theory’ (p. 4). Still, chapter 1 begins with a very useful overview of how to theorize about ethics, including a robust understanding of virtue ethics, alongside the more usual attention to utilitarianism and deontology. This is easily one of the best introductions to ethics for a non-philosophical audience I’ve seen. Chapter 2 takes up media ethics per se, meaning primarily journalistic ethics. The defining impulse of the book throughout – namely, how journalism can contribute to thriving democracies – appears here. The author summarizes five historical stages of journalistic media ethics, and closely analyzes the Society of Professional Journalists’ current Code of Ethics. Chapter 3 is entirely devoted to ‘Free Press and Deliberative Democracy’. Classic sources – Mill, Berlin, Rawls, and Dewey, among others – both illustrate the rise as well as the central importance of journalism as devoted to the cause of democracy, which cause thereby grounds much of its ethical dimensions. Specifically, the notion of deliberative democracy as developed by Held, Fishkin, and others is argued to be the primary form of democracy that journalism should support.
Foundational models of truth, as these shape assumptions and ethical norms about journalistic reporting, are the focus of chapter 4. Ward provides here an excellent account of two models of truth – a correspondence notion (realism) and a coherence notion, which he allies with pragmatism. He explores classical, positivist-based models of objective truth as undergirding earlier notions of journalistic objectivity, and then their erosion under especially postmodernist critiques of various sorts. His defense of a pragmatic notion of truth seeks to recognize the force of the latter, while avoiding epistemological relativism. Ward makes clear that such a non-relativist notion remains critical for democratic societies.
Ward begins his own ethical theory per se in Chapter 5, ‘Media Harm and Offense’, starting with a discussion of the harm principle and paternalism in liberal societies. He argues for three ‘liberty-restricting principles’ for media, and shows how these apply in specific cases. While it is not the primary goal of the volume to serve as a textbook – the cases offered here will be useful both within a journalistic ethics class as well as in other classes addressing information ethics. Chapter 6 continues this development by first making clear the sort of ‘ethical revolution’ that is arguably required in light of the massive and ongoing changes in the media landscape. These changes require a paradigm shift (an explicit reference to Kuhn) – one involving ‘a synthesis of old and new norms’ (p. 211). Moreover, the sort of ‘open ethics’ emerging here is first a concern ‘for all of “us”’ (p. 232) – meaning, all of us as interwoven through digital media with the work of journalism in new ways; this further means that this ethics should emerge precisely through a dialogical process engaging more or less all participants, not simply the professional journalists and major publishing and professional institutions. Most importantly, the final chapter, ‘Global Media Ethics’, orients this ethics both towards democracy at a national level as well as towards global democratic processes for resolving the multiple problems (e.g., poverty, environmental issues, and political issues) that engage us all as inextricably interconnected via digital media. In my view, beginning here with an originally Stoic cosmopolitanism is exactly right.
The volume thus stands as a first-rate contribution to contemporary media ethics – and more. That is, ongoing technological and social developments will only continue to transform – dramatically, in some ways – our practices and expectations regarding journalism and thus journalism ethics. These transformations will certainly include an acceleration of the developments Ward addresses here – specifically, the ever-increasing diffusion of digital media, as both sources and conduits of journalism, into previously ‘digital-free’ spaces and places. Such transformations will continue to spawn novel ethical challenges, demanding new approaches alongside extensions of older ones. Ward’s cosmopolitan ethics will not only offer substantial aid in attempting to cope with the ethical demands of the current media landscape; it further offers in both form and content a substantial model for how to proceed ethically in the face of rapid technological and social changes.