Information Ethics as a Guide for New Media

Abstract

Good journalism is based—and to some extent thrives—on a diversity of perspectives from those who supply information and informed opinions to the public. New media journalism is a contemporary newsgathering and disseminating method with enormous communication potential because it is an online forum that can connect a great number of diverse contributors and audiences. Citizen journalism—performed on a global level through the Web—is a potential marvel because of its wide reach and range of diversity. This paper offers an examination and philosophical analysis that shows which facets of new media information ethics and epistemology can be reconciled with universal ethical and epistemological principles and which, if any, cannot. To that end, we wish to provide groundwork for the description and critical evaluation of universal ethical and epistemic standards consistent with the phenomenon of new media journalism.

Notes

1. The Platonic (and widely—but not exclusively—held) definition of knowledge is justified, true belief. Later in this article, truth is relativized to journalism by citing that journalistic knowledge is often no more than a justified belief because of difficulties in proving journalistic information as true in the absolute sense. Instead, journalistic information is justified by standards of sincerity and accuracy, which are used to measure informational truthfulness from common sources of data such as documents and personal testimony. We owe great debt to philosopher Bernard Williams regarding the values of sincerity and accuracy from his book Truth and Truthfulness (Williams, 2002).

2. For further explanation and a detailed justification of the argument for the principle of generic consistency (PGC), see Spence (2006), chapters 1 to 3. It is also worth mentioning the possible similarities that may exist between Gewirth's theory of universal rights (1978) based on the necessary features of action and agency and Habermas' theory of communicative action (1981). As we argue in this paper, the necessary features of action of freedom and well-being extend also to communicative action, committing the disseminators of information in various communication practices, processes and procedures to universally prescribable ethical conduct. Namely, respect for the rights of freedom and well-being of the recipients of what is being or is not being communicated. Another interesting similarity often mentioned is between Gewirth and Kant. Both philosophers attempt to establish foundational grounds of morality through the use of the principle of noncontradiction, this being the formal principle that can reveal to our own subjective but collectively shared rationality the overriding and authoritative status of morality.

3. For a more detailed study on the mainstream media's response to the CBS report about the National Guard forged documents, see Hindman (2008).