Conference Review
The Ethics of Media: Philosophical Foundations and Practical Imperatives.
4-5 April 2008
Summary Abstract
This conference seeks to address the current lack of academic and public debate about media ethics, that is, about the frameworks within which we can ask precise questions about the ethics of what media institutions do and reach some consensus about appropriate answers. Within media research, discussion of media ethics has with few exceptions been limited until recently to the development of detailed codes for journalists; while within philosophy relatively few moral philosophers have discussed the ethics of the media process. There is now an urgent need to develop interdisciplinary work in this area.
The imperative for developing a conceptual and theoretical framework on media ethics is driven on the one hand by observations of the ubiquitous presence of the media in social and political life with clear implications for democracy and the ways we live together; on the other hand, developments in the field of media and information technologies often raise new ethical problems and dilemmas that need to be addressed.
This is intended as a specialist conference which will bring together two groups of academics: first, media specialists (whether from sociology, anthropology or psychology) who are committed to developing an ethical perspective on media practice that draws explicitly on philosophical debates; and second, philosophers who are interested in applying general principles of ethics and moral philosophy to the areas of media, communications and representation
Through a series of presentations and panels, the conference will explore the following questions among others: which philosophical tradition (or hybrid of traditions) provides the most useful starting-point for framing ethical questions about media and communications? Should questions of 'the good', and of individual virtue, have priority, or rather questions of duty and justice? Do mass-communicated media and new interactive technologies generate new types of ethical and philosophical problems? For instance, are accountability and trust still relevant concepts in assessing new developments such as citizen journalism? How does media ethics interrelate with questions of political theory's concerns with the sustaining of effective democratic politics and safe co-existence? How should the media represent otherness in our increasingly multicultural societies and how should we assess their role in creating relationships of trust or fear? The conference will encourage dialogue between a range of philosophical traditions, and is particularly concerned to encourage dialogue between the Anglo-American and the Continental philosophical traditions.
Conference Review
This was an interdisciplinary event as it was one of the first to bring together philosophers and social scientists who work on the media. Both disciplines were well represented in the conference and speakers represented some of the top names in the field with the inclusion of some younger scholars. The programme also included one journalist from the BBC with a background in philosophy. The two keynotes were given by Baroness Onora O’Neill who opened the conference, and Prof. John Durham Peters.
The conference was very well attended and was fully booked before the closing date.
In order to encourage the discussion across disciplines and perspectives, papers were pre-circulated amongst speakers and were uploaded in a password protected page on the conference’s CRASSH website after the end of the conference. Papers were of excellent quality, representing a range of perspectives and paradigms and the level of discussion was high.
We are seriously considering putting together a book proposal based on the conference papers with some input from another event that Nick Couldry is organising in Paris later this year. Richard Fisher from CUP attended the second day of our event and we will be in touch with him again about our book plans.
