| Professional discussion of ethics in media typically revolves around questions of 'codes of ethics' and their adoption, enforcement, etc. This does not adequately address the full range of the media's role and impact on consumer society. This paper looks more deeply into structural impediments to ethical behaviour on the part of media workers and the corporations that employ most of them. It begins with an exploration of the sources and meaning of morality, proposing a 'critical moral realism' that denies moral relativism but accepts as inevitable the fact of moral relativity, as well as suggesting the possibility of 'absolute' moral values. It proposes that the scientific Rationalist underpinnings of market capitalism and the modern business corporation define lines of moral responsibility in ways that tend to obscure, rather than clarify, ethical issues. The modern business corporation is examined in detail from historical, legal, and ethical perspectives, in its role as legal person, employer of media professionals, and source of virtually all commercial information and entertainment media. It is proposed that, the business corporation as defined can, in a metaphorical sense, usefully be theorized as a cybernetic machine that tightly controls the decisions of its nominal human managers. It therefore exists outside conventional human ethical frames of reference, which accounts for its frequently 'sociopathic' behavior. This machine-like character makes highly problematic the legal fact of personhood and the access to the protections of human rights codes recently granted to corporations. Corporations benefit from many of the rights of human citizens but are in a position to---are in fact designed to---avoid many of the legal and moral responsibilities of citizenship. It is proposed that corporate, rather than human, needs and goals are responsible for the evolution of both the consumer ethic and the work ethic, and that current neo-liberal 'enterprise culture' ideology is a further expression of corporate influence in society. The paper concludes with an examination of the ethical relevance of professional and corporate 'codes of ethics' and some tentative approaches to ethical behaviour in contemporary mass media. |
