Mass Media vs. Responsibility

452 Words2 Pages
Do you agree that the mass media should pursue responsibility and not profit? Mass media: communication technology such as radio, television, internet, etc. that can reach mass populations Responsibility: The state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something, a moral obligation to behave correctly toward or in respect of Profits: a financial gain Ethical Responsibility -> Sensationalism in order to attract more viewers (viewers =money)/lesser focus on objective journalism in favor of a profit motive. Media doing this in an effort to compete with other sources of media. Exaggerated facts are often taken as truth to attract more attention e.g. Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight." Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic. Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day. e.g. A UPI story a in 2006 reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. If so, as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total number of the homeless. Ethical Responsibility -> Some media forgo objective journalism to support advertisers/sponsors, etc GameSpot dismissal of Jeff Gertsmann when he wrote an unfavorable review of Kane & Lynch video game (creating the ironic situation when Kane&Lynch ads were plastered next to a bad review of the game). Other senior staffers left as a protest to this forgoing of objective journalism Profits: The mass media play a key role in broadcasting values and
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