Proto-norms and global media ethics

Abstract

Normativity is a problem of modernity. Relativism has emerged with the negation of moral universals. Clifford Christians consistently argues for the concept of proto-norms as a workable basis for normative ethics applied to media practices that operate on a global scale. Christians declares philosopher Charles Taylor to lie in the background of his theorising, but seldom gives a hint as to how Taylor’s thought influences his own. There appears to be sufficient congruence between Christians’ thinking about proto-norms and the articulation of hypergoods, strong evaluation and persons in Taylor’s philosophical anthropology to consider this to be the influence, among other sources Christians draws on. Of particular interest is Taylor’s insistence that persons always exist in normative moral space as an inescapable horizon of existence. The article explores some aspects of Taylor’s thought that may shed light on what proto-norms are and how they may be applied in the quest for a viable global media ethics in an age when moral relativism seems to be the media's only ethical principle.     

Introduction: Assessing the Social and Political Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia

This paper introduces a special issue on the social and political impact of new information communications technologies (ICTs) in Asia, with specific attention paid to new social media. This paper provides some contextualisation of the broader questions that the principal literature on the subject raises, namely questions about the effectiveness of ICTs as tools for mobilisation and information exchange; mechanisms of censorship and control; and the nature of public discourse on the Internet. In doing so, the paper introduces and locates the articles that comprise this special issue within these debates.     

Many Clicks but Little Sticks: Social Media Activism in Indonesia

Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia, this article offers a critical approach to the promise of social media activism by analysing the complexity and dynamics of the relationship between social media and its users. Rather than viewing social media activism as the harbinger of social change or dismissing it as mere “slacktivism,” the article provides a more nuanced argument by identifying the conditions under which participation in social media might lead to successful political activism. In social media, networks are vast, content is overly abundant, attention spans are short, and conversations are parsed into diminutive sentences. For social media activism to be translated into populist political activism, it needs to embrace the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light package, headline appetite and trailer vision. Social media activism is more likely to successfully mobilise mass support when its narratives are simple, associated with low risk actions and congruent with dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity. Success is less likely when the narrative is contested by dominant competing narratives generated in mainstream media.     

泰国高层对南海争端的看法

泰国本身并非南海主权申索国,但试图在南海问题上扮演协调者的角色。泰国官方对南海争端给予极高的关注度。本文试从泰国主流媒体近两年所刊载的泰国官方对南海争端的表态,尤其是总理和各部首脑的发言,对泰国政府在南海争端中的基本立场进行分析解读。     

Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.     

Social Structure and Citizenship: Examining the Impacts of Social Setting,Network Heterogeneity,and Informational Variables on Political Participation

In this study, we develop a model of the interplay between sociostructural determinants of an individual's discussion behavior, such as the setting of primary discussion networks (work, church, and volunteer groups) and the nature of discussion (i.e., level of exposure to non-like-minded ideas), and individual-level outcomes, such as hard news media use, political knowledge, and participation in political processes. In doing so, we synthesize many of the different and sometimes competing models that political communication scholars have used to examine the link between more macroscopic sociological variables and the individual-level behaviors that political scientists often focus on. Data to test our theoretical model come from a national telephone survey conducted in October and November 2002. Our analysis showed that the social setting in which citizens discuss politics is an important antecedent of political participation. Discussion networks as part of volunteer groups, for example, indeed serve as important networks of recruitment. In other words, discussing politics frequently in this setting is positively and directly linked to political activity. The impact of conversational networks in church and work settings on participation, however, is only indirect. In fact, our data show that the impact of church and work networks on political participation is to a significant degree mediated by the different viewpoints that individuals are exposed to when they discuss politics in these settings.     

Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs: How Russians Watch the News

Citizens in democracies are expected to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners' agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in 16 focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, showed that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes.     

Learning from the news: Experiments in media,modality, and reporting about star wars

This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.     

Image formation,the low involvement viewer,and televised political advertising

Political observers have extensively documented the national media's focus on committee and party leaders. Legislators' local coverage, in contrast, remains largely unexplored and unexplained. This article examines 40 local newspapers to explore how these factors may influence legislators' local newspaper coverage. We find that local newspapers do not provide more coverage to congressional leaders and that independent papers write more frequently than chain-owned competitors about the local House delegation. Additionally, the extent to which a legislator's district geographically overlaps with the newspaper's market has a strong effect on legislators' mentions.     

The National Press and Voting Turnout: British General Elections of 1992 and 1997

Britain is a good place to test hypotheses about the impact of the mass media on political attitudes and behavior, and this article uses the British Household Panel Survey to investigate the impact of the national daily press on turnout in the general elections of 1992 and 1997. The evidence does not support the hypothesis that reading a newspaper regularly helps to mobilize people on election day, but it also does not support the claim that the daily press--even the notorious British tabloid press--helps to induces political apathy. On the other hand, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that those whose political attitudes and party identification are reinforced by the paper they read regularly are significantly more likely to vote than those whose attitudes and ID are cross pressured by the paper they read. As predicted, this newspaper effect is statistically significant but not large. The newspaper effect is larger in the close-fought election of 1992 than in the landslide Labour victory in 1997. And it is larger for the "Labour reinforced" than the "Conservative reinforced." The article concludes that the British national press has a statistically significant effect on political behavior in the form of turnout in British elections, especially when election results are close. This, in turn, suggests that the extent to which the Conservative press dominated daily circulation in Britain during 1945-1992, may have helped the Conservative party win elections.