Some Thoughts On The Current Morality Of News Media

As we all know, news media plays an important role in our today's modern social life. As a self-organizing social system, news media communicates the true information to promote the social justice, the purposes of which are to satisfy people's need for the increase of property, to enrich people's spiritual life and to improve people's spiritual taste. All of these are the basic moral ideas. However, with the impact of the waves of market economy, there appears "moral vacancy" in the transitional period because some traditional rules have been broken while the new rules haven't been established. In the field media, there are not only many problems on vocational morality but also many ethical issues on media itself which can't be solved. From the whole, the ethical crisis of the field of new media has become a problem that we must face. Therefore, the morality of new media has also become an important subject currently. As an indispensable part of the communication of media, the morality of new media is essential to regulate the anomie phenomena of new media, to reinforce the management of media, and to reconstruct the moral principles of media.This paper consists of three parts. The first part mainly analyzes the major moral problems in the current media field from the respect of moral decline of media organization and the respect of morally cognitive mistakes of media's practitioners. During the wave of market economy, news media organization's commercialization becomes more and more obvious. Under the influence of benefit, the behavior of benefit drive gets serious gradually. And there appear many phenomena of disobeying the ethical principles. At the same time, media practitioners who are the final implementers in the course of news communication, have some morally cognitive mistakes. Morph metrically, media that is merely a means of communication, hasn't any obvious features of value. It is the use by media practitioners that brings up many moral problems. Therefore we should pay more attention to the news practitioners'vocational morality and regulate it. The second part mainly argues some basic functions and some basic principles of the morality of news media. Among these principles, the principle of truth and objectivity is the most important, and it is also the moral demand. The second is the principle of justice which argues the internal relation of news media to social justice from the point of modern justice theories, and suggests that the news media plays an important role in the actualizing and maintaining the social justice. The third is the principle of bottom line in the news interviewing, which argues the acceptance of implicit interviewing mean in the course of news communication and mainly elucidates its specialization and untouched areas, intending to analyze and limit the implicit interviewing by way of bottom line morality and to make it at a point of balance and play its role in moderate range. The fourth is the spirits of humanity, that is to say, we should take human as the emphasis, respect human lives, take human values seriously and pursue the human freedom and happiness in any time, all of which are the deserved significance of humanistic spirits, and the core of news communication.As far as these above concerned, the third part puts forward some advisable approaches for how to eliminate the unmoral behaviors of media operation and how to reconstruct the media morality, including the respects of academic construction on media morality, ecologically environmental education of morality, news media organization, practitioners'autonomy and heteronomy and social public's participation and supervision and so on. This part intends to find the way to construct the morality of our country's news media in the transitional period.