By: Leslie Koch
Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning by Christians et al., does a great job at comprehensively discussing ethical issues involved with today’s media as well as society. The book not only makes the readers think about their own moral values, but brings up great points about the changing ways of thinking in today’s media.
The book outlines important issues in four separate parts; news media, advertising, public relations and entertainment. In the news media section the authors discuss the effect of corporations on the news, the difficulties of truth telling, the reliability of sources and portrayal of social issues. In advertising the book focuses on issues brought up by commercialization, image portrayal, and general moral issues in the profession of advertising. When discussing public relations ethics, the authors bring up issues involving conflict of interests, social responsibility and the challenges of representing an organization. The entertainment section of the book describes violence as entertainment, the pressure of profit, and censoring issues.
In each section, the book uses actual cases to illustrate the issues and defend the authors’ arguments. In the preface, the authors say that they believe in using case studies to learn, because that is the nature of the media industry. Media and communication is an experience-based and hands-on environment, where learning occurs by doing. Because of this, the authors choose to use real-life examples for the readers to learn vicariously through.
I enjoyed reading the book because of these cases. I found it very beneficial to be able to analyze the arguments by seeing how they were applied (or not applied) in an actual situation. I believe that ethics is a hard subject to teach, because it is based on moral reasoning and the answer is not always the same. However, I thought the book did a great job at working through those challenges and shedding light on sensitive subjects.
1 comment:
I think that you did a great job of relaying the basic ethical guidelines given by the author. Conflicts of interest and social responsibility are really important issues in public relations and can decrease public trust if not taken into account.
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