| Media ethics is embedded in a context of practices, facts and values, which the media themselves articulate and promote. Notions like media "objectivity" and "reporting of facts" must be evaluated in this light. Herein is the deepest challenge to the moral responsibility of communicators.Current media practice is dominated by a functionalist-utilitarian view that often prefers financial profit to authentic value of the human person endowed with intelligence, will, love and the ability to enter into communion through communication. Problems such as commercialism, libel, pornography, violence, stereotyping, sensationalism and lying are seldom given a personalist interpretation.In this dissertation, I argue that present crisis in ethics can be traced to the philosophical concept of autonomous individualism which developed from the Enlightenment. I also contend that certain approaches which have based media ethics on the principles of democratization (White), discourse analysis (Habermas) and protonorms (Christians), can be bolstered with the idea that the person, and not just cultural structures, is radically at the center of ethics.After reviewing the crisis in normativity, I argue that an interdisciplinary approach to a normative personalism recognizing the unique endowments of the human person-in-community offers better, more universalizable and robust principles for media practice. Personalism provides a foundation for Human Rights and recognizes that the professional mandate of the media is a covenant from the people, undertaken to foster the truth that liberates and saves.For media ethics to be relevant to the journalist, a shift from the present focus on laws, sanctions, and deontological codes to education in personalist normative principles is required. The country of Nigeria is used as an example of how this formation can be done.Finally, I propose that our presently enthroned belief in media autonomy, as well as the impersonal motives of mere legal acceptance and profitable outcome must be complemented by a commitment to personal responsibility and a commitment to the common good that the media, if they are to be true to their very mission, must serve. |
