On Media Responsibility Ethics

No one will deny the power and role of the media. Today, our era has been a part of the media age, or which has been a high degree control by the media. Responsibility, refers to the legal and ethical requirements conferred by a person's qualifications (including qualification as a human being and as the role of qualifications)when a social role is engaged in certain activities to complete certain tasks, and so undertakes its corresponding consequences. Media responsibility is the core of media ethics, which constitutes the basic provisions of media moral principles and norms, and is an integral part of the media culture and the media image. A prominent issue in the status quo of China's mass media is the lack of media responsibility. Therefore, calling for media responsibility, should become an urgent and arduous task in the building of media ethics.For the media ethics, the issue that is "on whether the media should bear responsibility" is essential, if not to clarify this issue, the media responsibility can only be regarded as a "plus" and not be regarded as the media itself, then the media ethics is also defect of inherent moral dimension.This paper, starting from responsibility ethics perspective, combining the traditional ethical theories, discusses the lack of media responsibility and the construction of media responsibility ethics systematically. The reason why this paper put responsibility ethics as the logical starting point for argument, mainly founds on the following consideration:first, responsibility ethics provides a new ethical dimension to solve the lack of media responsibility. Responsibility ethics is a proactive, preventative ethics philosophy that regards the behavior of mankind as a whole object. Compared with the traditional ethics, responsibility ethics is first and foremost a long-range ethics. The past ethics, regardless of time or space, are involved in the direct relationship between people. Responsibility ethics which regards the whole mankind as a guide, is a kind of respect, responsibility and obligations to the global information communication. Responsibility ethics is also a holistic ethic. Our modern society is an increasingly complex media-oriented society, in which individual behavior space is narrowing. The mass media is gradually beyond its initial function of the exchange of information and begins to form a powerful force that affects people's political life, social values, reconstruction of people's daily lives, and even emotional world and ideology. People's dependence on the media has become increasingly stronger. On the one hand, with the rapid development of mass media, whether public or social organization, from information exchange to cultural communication, each has a high degree of dependence on the mass media; on the other hand, the growing influence of mass media, increasingly is permeating society organizations and social life of various fields. The media has been able to change the world because it can change our understanding on the world's ways and the experience means and even change our way of thinking, so the media using its influence changes our views and affects social change. Strictly speaking, individuality ethics can no longer grasp a large number of issues in media era. The individual will be replaced by the whole and the overall high-level actors, decision-making and behavior will be a collective thing. Secondly, responsibility ethics is the basic ethical requirements in dealing with media default. John Rawls believes that responsibility is a precondition to promote social fairness and justice, as the legitimacy of moral good doesn't base on good behavior, it must be objective, universal and rational, independent, otherwise you will go to the teleological position in which "ends justify the means", so that the bottom line of social moral will collapse. The significance of the media responsibility is to achieve fairness and justice in information communication independently. Third, awareness of responsibility is the moral consciousness of the media responsibility subject. The development of modern media society has made the responsibility become a core issue. Elimination of media default, whose value is not only a goal to pursue, but also a sense of the common responsibility of the media and its practitioners,which fully reflect the reality of the media moral level and the ethical requirements of the media society. The full-text is divided into four parts:The first part is the first chapter, that is, introductory, the second to the third chapter is a foundation of the full text's argument, the fourth to the sixth chapter is the main part, the fourth part is the conclusions. On research methods, this paper links up with ethics, communication, sociology, economics, psychology and other disciplines'research perspectives, using a combination of theory and practice, methodology, analysis and description, studies the premise and basis of media responsibility ethics, analyzes the reasons of media default in-depth. Starting with media organizations and their practitioners, this paper explores ethical ways to solve the problem of Chinese media default and the construct path of the media responsibility ethics innovativly. In the area of chapter structure, the paper treates responsibility ethics as the red line and treates the governance of media default as the focal point, closely around the relationship between the two principal subject of media responsibility ethics and the realization of media responsibility ethics.The total paper completes the analysis according to a total-sub-total logical structure.The first chapter, that is, the introduction of this paper disserts that, because of the rapid development of media technology, contemporary society will become a "media-oriented society," or even "over media-oriented (hypermediation) society". The so-called media-oriented society, is a society in which all social life, social events and social relationships is exposed in the media. An important feature of the media-oriented society is the media's full permeable influence on society. In essence, that is, people is media-oriented, interpersonal relations is media-oriented. Everyone is "media people", not only the imagination of the world is mainly constructed by the media, their way of thinking, individual consciousness also put on a media-oriented imprint. The major characteristics of modern society's risk is superimposed in the "media society", in popular expression:most of contemporary social risks are communicated by the media, which is a typical "show risk" or "media-based risk", ordinary people's feel is not the actual risk, but after the media has showed the risk by media reports. The risk information disclosed by media, is a key source by which general members immediatedly perceived the risks. "Media responsibility ethics" is generated by the background of media risk society, or even say "media responsibility ethics" itself is a positive response to the moral aspirations in media-oriented risk era, which appropriately reflects the spiritual needs and spiritual temperament when contemporary media is facing great challenges of the times. In short, media responsibility ethics adapts to the emergence of media-oriented risk times, which is a new dimension of the media ethics in the media-oriented society.The second chapter of the second part, by defining the ethical responsibility and the responsibility and sorting out the ethical thinking of rheology, discussed that we must put it into the social history of the river to correctly grasp the meaning of ethics and to understand the evolution. The third chapter of this part, from the point of view the media as a necessity of existence of interest, as a necessity of contractual existenc in regulating interest as well as coexistence and development of "eco" system, there should be three levels of probability to explain the reality on which the media responsibility ethics established. On this basis, this chapter briefly discusses the elements, characteristics, internal standards and value targets of media responsibility ethics so these basic constituent elements.The third part discussed how both the media individual practitioners and the media organizations should put media ethics of responsibility into practice in a targeted manner. In other words, the resolution of the mass media default and the implementation path of media responsibility ethics necessarily need to be achieved through the mass media individual practitioners and media organizations.Conclusion of the fourth part analyzes the ideal quality of the media responsibility ethics must go with freedom, equality, humanity:freedom, is goal of media ethics; equality, is the media's ethical orientation; "Three treat" as the basic content of the humanity, is the value measure of media ethics. And to be rational, objective, impartial constitutes the rational spiritual pursuit in the contemporary media moral practice:rational spirit is that media must adhere to the goal of ethical practice; objective spirit is the value measure of media moral practice that media must advertise; the impartial spirit is the moral norms that media must implement in practical action. Only with such ethical ideals and moral practical spirit can the media come into being a public tool really in building a modern information society.