Finding Common Ground: CSR and Media Responsibility

Abstract

Media companies have a 'dual responsibility'. For one, they produce and distribute media products intended to inform and entertain the population. This entails a set of duties that may be termed Media Responsibility (MR). On the other hand media companies, just like any other company, have to be profitable, as well as living up to social and ecological standards. These related duties may be designated Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (see Altmeppen, 2011).At the same time, media companies are confronted with a twofold structural change. On the one hand, the media sector is always in transition. Some changes are radical and drastic; quite a few are slow, incremental and creeping. The changes may be conceptualized by the keywords tabloidization, digitalization, commercialization, convergence, concentration, liberalization, and economization. As the media sector changes, we are seeing fewer media companies concentrating more market power. In the Swiss print media sector the three major media companies, Tamedia, Ringier and the NZZ media groups, currently control 79.3% of the market share (see f€ og, 2014, pp. 252-258). The concern here is that decreasing diversity in the media sector lowers the quality of the media. As a consequence, media companies are increasingly being accused of neglecting one of their core responsibilities, to inform the population, in their pursuit of increased profits (see Habermas, 2008; Kramber & Imhof, 2011). On the other hand, we see a moralization of the business world. Companies are expected to not only feel obligated to their shareholders, but also to their many stakeholders (see

Separation or integration of journalistic and business responsibilities? Corporate responsibility in Finnish media companies

“…One of the core ideas of corporate responsibility is that the actions of an organisation can be openly assessed by external parties and, thus, attempts to separate journalistic and business responsibilities and, consequently, transparently report only some of them can make media responsibility fuzzy and difficult to assess. Although media actors in democratic societies operate under unusually high self-regulation and serve an inherently societal role that, to some extent, has diminished the pressure to adopt corporate responsibility practices (Bachmann & Ingenhoff, 2017), the media industry has become concentrated, more complex and thus more difficult to assess. In the materials used for this study, any stakeholder seeking information on ethical conduct would have been left uninformed about how dual-thinkers address journalism ethics.…”

“…Though the notion of corporate responsibility is significantly newer than media ethics and journalism ethics (Gulyás, 2011;Jaehnig & Onyebadi, 2011), media ethics and journalism ethics can be viewed as parts of the sector-based traits that characterise corporate responsibility in the media sector (cf. Bachmann & Ingenhoff, 2017). As sector-based corporate responsibility presents an integrative view of media organisations as producers of journalistic content and media products and as businesses that run manufacturing processes to make a profit, it potentially solves some of the tensions between journalistic ideals and business goals.…”

“…Therefore, it can serve as a possible solution to resolving the tension between journalistic ideals and business goals. This article is situated in an emerging stream of research that discusses responsibilities and ethics in the media sector not only as media ethics and journalism ethics, but also as combined economic, social and environmental business responsibilities (for other examples, see Bachmann & Ingenhoff, 2017;Ingenhoff & Koelling, 2012;Karmasin & Bicher, 2017;Olkkonen, 2015). The entwinement of different responsibilities is supported by a recent study, which found that people do not view media organisations' journalistic and business responsibilities separately; rather, the actions of media organisations, whether they relate to editorial decisions or business decisions, are assessed as a whole, and they both contribute to how responsible an organisation is perceived (Olkkonen, 2015).…”