Saving ethics—from the market
First of two parts – “Saving ethics”
Second and last part
THE ATTITUDE has carried over to this day such that very few media companies turn a profit and the media fraternity has remained a mixed collection of bona fide journalists, ex-journalists, para-journalists, and pseudo-journalists; in fact it is the proper practitioners in the mix who seem themselves in greater danger of being expelled from the fraternity than the improper ones in a sort of reverse ostracism, a perfect farcical example of democracy at work in its most fundamental sense: the rule of the numerical majority.
At work in the same fashion are the twin forces of change of our day—the free market and an ever-new technology. The free market has commercialized everything, admitting all products and peddlers. On the other hand, a technology that improves, renews, even reinvents itself as it goes along drives the market, cheapening journalism in particular because it has made everyone a potential journalist. All one has to do is string words together, dump them on the Internet, and one has all the world for a potential audience. A dubious form of journalism is thus born—blogging.
Thus, too, ethics, as the priceless, sacred thing that the squeamish have always regarded it, may have itself become, along with principle, a mere commodity in a free-wheeling world.
(And worse yet! As I have written recently in one of Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility’s own cybersites, In Medias Res: “Cyberspace, for all its intractability and non-governability, is inescapable. It’s a world without boundaries, a world indiscriminate and amoral…providing the ultimate test of human decency: it admits anyone and, if he knows how to work the suitable weapons in its ever-growing technological armory, it allows him to pick his targets in the real world and terrorize them, not unlike a sniper, except that he has found a perfect perch, one where he’s invisible, virtual, unreal, but able to inflict real harm.”)
The hopeful truth, in any case, is that no one would be caught selling ethics, which shows after all that there is no open season on it—yet. Whoever actually sold ethics would either deny or rationalize the transaction. He would desperately try to look for that mitigating circumstance, try to raise that liberating shadow of a doubt, if only so that he might be able to live with himself. A typical example is the journalist who has taken a bribe and tries to fit it in the culture of gift giving or justifies it with his poverty.
Naturally, the first casualty is a parent principle, the one with which the practice of journalism—indeed, of all professions pledged to the public interest—ought to be squared:
conflict of interest, the incompatibility between private interests and public responsibility.
The principle is bent, nay, desecrated by separating one of the pair (private interests) from the other (public responsibilities) in the sense of splitting one person into two characters, as in switching at will, and with mutually exclusive consciousness, between hack and journalist. In other words, convenient schizophrenia.
All this rationalization owes itself to that persistent little voice within all of us, and so long as it speaks and is listened to, there’s hope, I hope, for ethics to be saved from the temptations of the market.
When will you start exposing your fellow journalists, editors, publishers and and owners of tv and radio stations who are corrupt? For someone who considers himself in the middle of things and only write a blog about it (which is dubious by your own standard) is dismaying.
Not planning to, never, not part of your job? For an insider, collecting evidence and witnesses wouldn’t be that impossible undertaking right? Ratting out a fellow journalist who is corrupt is not part of your code of ethics? Afraid of libel, of being ganged up on, losing your job and eventually being a full time blogger or being six feet underground?
Yeah, it’s not that easy, but since when did doing something good ever comes easy?
Airing your frustrations on how your profession is evolving and not proposing any possible concrete solution is just another fart in the dark. If we can smell it, it must be happening.
Try to live with it if you can’t do anything about it and accept the consequences… nothing to be saved here.
Some of the stories published by the Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility (CMFR) and PJR (Philippine Journalism Review) Reports on corruption in the press and the media:
Custom-Made “Journalists”
httpss://www.cmfr-phil.org/2011/10/03/custom-made-%E2%80%9Cjournalists%E2%80%9D/
May-June 2009, PJR Reports
httpss://www.cmfr-phil.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/PJR_Reports_May_-_June_2009.pdf
Articles:
A community journalist looks at media corruption (page 14)
Community Media’s Catch 22: Reporting or ad soliciting? (page 16)
The wages of corruption (page 17)
Corruption in Media: A Multi-Sectoral Perspective
httpss://www.scribd.com/doc/117481133/Corruption-in-Media-A-Multi-Sectoral-Perspective
Ah, the perks of a media job
httpss://www.scribd.com/doc/117482563/Ah-the-perks-of-a-media-job
Thanks, I’ll try to read all the links tomorrow… today I need to get drunk.