On Media Moral Responsibility

Should reporters and media take moral responsibility for their own professional behaviors?The answer is undoubtedly yes.Many reporters may think their job responsibilities are only to report the facts to satisfy the right of the public to know without other responsibilities.Aristotle once said,carefully narrative stories always contain moral intentions.Undeniably,the media and their employees are the communicators of values as well,and the behaviors to disseminate information have influences on the presence of goodness and evilness,which shows that there exists objective possibility of the propagation behaviors of communicators.Therefore,the media should take some moral responsibility for the public.In our current era,though the media have exerted larger and larger influences,there are more and more accusations concerning the media moral responsibility.Frequent false media reports,intensified vulgarity,reporters at the mercy of benefits,the objects of the reports being hurt by the reports,etc.are so commonplace.Besides,there are also some new problems with the emergence from the network media,such as network pushing hands,deliberately misleading the public by online water army,and the network violence.Noisy and impetuous circumstances of the media have rapidly declined in the credibility of the media,and at the same time it is urgent to study the media moral responsibility.This paper attempts to fulfill two tasks.The one is to build a basic framework of the theory of media moral responsibility and its concept,types and basic characteristics from the perspective of ethical philosophy.The other is to explore the paths to fulfill the media moral responsibility,based on the current crisis in the media moral responsibility.As an important concept of ethical philosophy,moral responsibility refers to the specific individual's requirements of moral behaviors towards society and other people in a certain society in the form of moral principles,based on their roles to do what they should do morally under the premise of the libertarian.Under the premise of freedom of the press,the media has a right of wide propaganda.With their special social roles,the media are not only the social community to provide services to public institutions,but also a propaganda tool.As a result,the media should be charged with multiple moral responsibilities.The moral responsibility refers to the responsibility of the main media(media organizations and individual communicators)for the goodness and evilness of their propagation morally when they perform the role of public services in the context of freedom of the press.To put it simply,the media moral responsibility is to do what the media should do,not only affirming the good dissemination activities,but also looking into the evil dissemination behaviors.The current media is facing all kinds of moral crisis,manifested in many default behaviors:lying and deception of reporters,coverage in the media discourse hegemony,reflecting the abuse of press freedom;tilt for the dissemination of guidelines of media organizations for the interests of advertisers,vulgarity and amusement orientation of the contents of the dissemination,reflecting utilitarianism of media's pursuit of economic interests;media violence,news coverage of secondary victimization and discrimination,reflecting media's moral indifference and lack of humane care.The moral conflicts that exist in the news media have reflected the moral dilemmas that current media have faced.This thesis analyzes in detail the phenomena from three aspects:the right to know and the right of privacy,the interests of the media and the interests of the public,professionalism and spirit of humane care.The current various default behaviors of the media have shown the worrying status of media ethics and the heavy and deep moral responsibility of the media.The media moral responsibility is the cornerstone of the survival and development of the media and the duty of the media as well.Because the current media have played a variety of social roles in the market-oriented environment and faced multiple conflicts of interests,the media and their practitioners are only concerned about their own economic interests,failing to understand their moral responsibility.So the media should be clear that they must assume the moral responsibility,which the thesis analyzes from five social roles of the media:environmental monitoring,community relations coordinator,opinion leader,public opinion monitor and culture watcher.This thesis maintains that in order to take the moral responsibility,Chinese media should adhere to the Party's principles,the principle of public interests,people-oriented principle and the basic principles of journalistic professionalism:truth,objectiveness and justice.In terms of the controlling mechanism to achieve media moral responsibility,this thesis analyzes the roles of internal and external controlling mechanisms.In terms of concrete measures to implement moral responsibility,this thesis investigates the specific implementation methods from media organizations and individual communicators.Mass media is an extremely complex process of social interaction,having relative independence and belonging to the whole society system.They have interactions with all aspects of the society:political,economic,cultural,and ideological ones.Therefore,for the media to take the moral responsibility,it is necessary to strengthen media ethics and self-discipline,and there is need for external controlling system to provide necessary support and restraint,thus building an enabling environment for the media to take moral responsibility.