Role of Ethics in Mass Media and Social Media

DIGITAL MEDIA ETHICS

Digital media ethics deals with the distinct ethical problems, practices and norms of digital media. Digital media includes online journalism, blogging, digital photojournalism, citizen journalism and social media.

It includes questions about how professional journalism should use this ‘new media’ to research and publish stories, as well as how to use text or images provided by citizens.

A media revolution is transforming, fundamentally and irrevocably, the nature of journalism and its ethics.

The means to publish is now in the hands of citizens, while the internet encourages new forms of journalism that are interactive and immediate.

Our media ecology is a chaotic landscape evolving at a furious pace. Professional journalists share the journalistic sphere with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists, and social media users.

We are moving towards a mixed media, a media citizen and professional journalism across many media platforms. 

This new mixed media requires a new  mixed media ethics – guidelines that apply to amateur and professional whether they blog-, Tweet, broadcast or write for newspapers.

Media ethics needs to be rethought and reinvented for the media of today, not of yesteryear.

The changes challenge the foundations of media ethics. The challenge runs deeper than debates about one or another principle, such as objectivity.

The challenge is greater than specific problems, such as how newsrooms can verify content from citizens.

The revolution requires us to rethink assumptions. What can ethics mean for a profession that must provide instant news and analysis; where everyone with a modem is a publisher?

The media revolution has created ethical tensions on two levels

First level, there is a tension between traditional journalism and online journalism

Second level, there is a tension between parochial and global journalism. If journalism has global impact, what are its global responsibilities?

The culture of traditional journalism, with its values of accuracy, pre-publication verification, balance, impartiality, and gate-keeping, rubs up against the culture of online journalism which emphasizes immediacy, transparency, partiality, non-professional journalists and post-publication correction.

The challenge for today's media ethics can be summed up with the question: Where is ethics in a world of global and multimedia journalism?.

The ethics of the media must do more than point out these tensions. In theory, you must untangle the conflicts between values.

It must decide which principles should be preserved or invented. In practice, it should provide new standards to guide journalism online or offline.