Lack Of Possibility Of Founding New Media Ethics From The Journalism Ethics

Nemogućnost utemeljenja etike novih medija iz etike novinarstva

Abstract

Known international and domestic scholars aim to found new media ethics on general ethics, media ethics, and the deontology of journalism as a professional ethics, which they believe to be fully adaptable to new media as well. Although this evolutionary process seems logical at first glance, it is in fact misguided, because the overwhelming number of communicators in new media are not professional journalists but people from diverse educational and professional backgrounds, with neither knowledge of media ethics nor the willingness to study it; consequently, they cannot apply ethical principles in new media. Instead of evolving from the ethics of journalism in traditional media, new media ethics - understood as a new content framework grounded in multidirectional, asymmetric communication among both real and virtual actors (e.g., bots) - can be established only through general media culture. Such culture should be developed as “upbringing for the media” and treated as a building block of family upbringing, education, religious studies, social morality, human rights education, and general ethics, as well as through the education in media ethics and journalism deontology of the relatively small proportion of communicators who aspire to become journalists.