Media Ethics

This study discusses the ethical implications of the quote “The distinctions between news, entertainment and advertising are becoming blurred in today's media” by William Babcock and Virginia Whitehouse. It relates the quote with the paper of William Babcock and Virginia Whitehouse and discusses the blurriness of the media industry.

Running head: MEDIA ETHICS
MEDIA ETHICS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Answer to Question No. 1...............................................................................................................2
Introduction..................................................................................................................................2
The Quote....................................................................................................................................2
Establishment of the relation and justification............................................................................2
Answer to Question No. 2...............................................................................................................4
The quote and the theory to relate with.......................................................................................4
The ethical implication of the quote............................................................................................5
References........................................................................................................................................7

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Answer to Question No. 1
Introduction
The communication technology that has been selected for the study is the Internet
technology. The quotes of Habermas, where he stated about the gradual conversion of the
rational public into passive consumer public, is being related with the technology selected. It will
be discussed in the later section about how the selected technology has the responsibility to
justify the quote made by the philosopher and socialist, Jurgen Habermas.
The Quote
The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, quoted about the conversion of rational
public into the passive consumer public (Habermas, 2015). The quotation made by Habermas is
- “...the growth of the commercial mass media has had a hand in turning the public sphere (a
powerful, critical public) into a passive public once again – a passive consumer public. Mass
consumption and the search for leisure time replaces rational-critical debate.”
Establishment of the relation and justification
The post modern period has witnessed the massive makeover that has been done to the
humankind (Murphy & Potts, 2017). Technology has affected the daily activities of human
beings. Along with that, social activities, professional fields as well as personal well-being is
also affected. Any changes that take place have two sides of it. There is an advantageous side as
well as a disadvantageous side. For years, human civilisation has been influenced considerably
due to the technical marvels and its further stages and implementations. Science and technology
acted as boons to the humans (Sharma & Sharma, 2016). Tasks that required heavy effort and

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huge man force are simplified and now the task is completed with the help of a single machine.
Science took a turn into digital world when Internet came into existence. A new technology
boosted in the digital world named Information technology (Martin, 2017). Internet gave humans
the chance to have a massive database of knowledge at fingertips. Knowledge from every field
becomes available in the digital world and anyone can access these information sitting at their
home in their very own personal computer. Later, with further advancements Internet proved to
be the most useful tool for carrying out communication across the world, among not only the
individuals but also used in corporate sectors and organisations as well as government
organisations. Besides, Internet also developed itself to be the primary mode of entertainment in
the recent world. It is also a source of daily news across the world. In the recent days, almost all
of the necessary functions of a human being including the academic, professional activities as
well as social and personal activities are also performed on this digital platform.
With the advent of Internet, people started to engage themselves with this technology for
the maximum part of an entire day. Some remain engaged with it for the purpose of the work,
some remain for their study, and the remaining art of the population remain engaged with it for
its entertainment purpose. One can easily remain over the Internet for hours for the amount of
content that it serves. There is no ending of the content in Internet as it involves all of the
occurrences throughout the world. Among them, the most time consuming is the social media
sites that make the people remain engaged with it from the morning till night. Besides, there are
online platforms where people can watch the videos on demand such as Youtube, Netflix, and
more, for either free or for a paid membership (McDonald & Smith-Rowsey, 2016). The social
sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more like these are the primary involvements for
a human being nowadays. The time is extinct when people used to gather and had a session

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where they used to talk about various topics, starting from personal affairs to topics of national
and international interest. There was a time when people used to share their views in a group
directly among other present there physically. Now the time has changed a lot. These people now
prefer to sit in their home and be on their Smartphone or their desktop or laptop to browse
through the different websites in the Internet. Though all of the activities are not done for
entertainment purposes only, there are some people, who do it for researching for their work or
for their study. However, time was different when people used to go to libraries and read various
books and journals based on their subject of research. More rational and practical analysis was
done at that time as they used to criticise the things that they used to witness. Various social
issues were being discussed face to face and different views were ventilated (Poltorak, 2017).
Grievances, praise, criticising and all of such activities used to happen which have become
almost extinct due to the Internet. Now people are more interested in the statistics given over the
internet on a random website rather than going to trusted sources and self-investigate it. With
time passing by, people all over the world is lacking proper amount of time to conduct their
social activities that they are supposed to do. Hence, gradually the people who were once critical
and powerful now are being turned into passive public who just go by the information that has
been presented without analysing its authenticity (Sennett, 2017).
Answer to Question No. 2
The quote and the theory to relate with
“The distinctions between news, entertainment and advertising are becoming blurred in
today's media”. – this quotation has been considered for the study. This quote has to be related

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with the paper of William Babcock and Virginia Whitehouse (Baron, 2018). The ethical
implications of the above quote is being discussed in the later part of this study.
The ethical implication of the quote
From its invention, digital and television entertainment has been an integral part of daily
human life. News became the form of entertainment that is accompanied with knowledge of the
occurrences from every corner of the world (Lazer et al., 2018). With time, every sector is
upgraded and multifarious features are added every now and then. However, advertising,
publicity and business are gradually devouring these forms of entertainment. Consequently, the
media industry is more getting blurred in its performance. There is no clarity in the form of
content they supply to the viewers. Besides, the form of portrayal that the entertainment industry
has adopted is of a exaggerating nature (Tai, Liang & Liu, 2017). As a consequence, the
characters are getting so much of priority that in reality these portrayal is putting more emphasis
on the character rather than the person him/herself. While talking about the ethical implications,
the first context that William and Virginia brought up is Arnold Schwarzenegger entering
politics and being the governor of California (Lawrence & Bodystun, 2017). Being a
stereotypical action hero it is a common concept that is put forward that when a hero can save the
world from supernatural aliens from outside world then it will be easy for him to upgrade the
welfare of the residents. These kinds of ideas are not only presented in United States or any other
neighboring country but also throughout various parts of the world. The concept that was put
forward may seem to be absurd but these ideologies are put in front of the public to have a
promotional campaign for the candidates who are appearing in some kind of contest.
For Schwarzenegger, this promotion was done by the Tonight Show that became the
ticket for him to get into the politics (Lynch, 2017). Today’s media is no doubt the best form of

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promotion of available, but the kind of promotion that they are doing is something that cannot be
considered unethical. Making unimportant topics to be the hot gossip of the day and inviting
people over the studio to discuss the subject is something that is on the trend. The blurriness that
can be seen in the media is primarily due to the interest of the people nowadays. It is observed
that such kinds of absurd contents bring more interest among the people and hence to increase
the business the industry is more focused to bring the focus of the audiences as much as possible,
irrespective of the types of content they are displaying. Entertainment nowadays is full of
absurdness and portrayal of the characters associated is done in the most exaggerating way
possible. Hence, the authors William and Virginia did put focus on such instances. Besides, the
involvement of the government for creating the discrimination and making the media to promote
a particular person is something that is acting as an unethical agent in order to make the media
industry more blurry. The greed for more business and publicity, today’s media industry has
totally leave out the actual content that should be shown and put more emphasis on the subjects
that could be presented in a spicy and as a gossip (Fehon & Garrard, 2017). Many important
topics throughout the world is not covered the way it should be covered. Social and political
issues are presented in a manipulative manner promoting a single side and negatively criticizing
the other side of the story.

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References
Barron, L. (2018). Postmodern theories of celebrity. In Routledge Handbook of Celebrity
Studies (pp. 58-72). Routledge.
Fehon, M., & Garrard, W. (2017). Inexperienced, self-preserving or perhaps, just greedy? Why
the leaders of organisations are ignoring obvious ethical problems. Governance
Directions, 69(3), 164.
Habermas, J. (2015). The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of
Functionalist Reason(Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.
Lawrence, R. G., & Boydstun, A. E. (2017). Celebrities as political actors and entertainment as
political media. In How political actors use the media (pp. 39-61). Palgrave Macmillan,
Cham.
Lazer, D. M., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., ... &
Schudson, M. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), 1094-1096.
Lynch, T. (2017). President Donald Trump: A case study of spectacular power. The Political
Quarterly, 88(4), 612-621.
Martin, W. J. (2017). The global information society. Routledge.
McDonald, K., & Smith-Rowsey, D. (Eds.). (2016). The Netflix effect: Technology and
entertainment in the 21st century. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Poltorak, A. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,634,855. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.

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Sennett, R. (2017). The fall of public man. WW Norton & Company.
Sharma, P. K., & Sharma, D. (2016). Mobile Wireless Technology is Boon or Curse?. Indian
Journal of Science and Technology, 9(40), 1-7.
Tai, Z., Liang, J., & Liu, X. (2017). 5 Populist Sentiments and Digital Ethos in the Social Media
Space. Chinese Social Media: Social, Cultural, and Political Implications.