The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory

Abstract

Media theorists have created competing normative ethical frameworks based on libertarian and communitarian philosophies, but because each approach essentially promotes different moral principles, they do not merely offer competing alternatives that essentially serve the same purpose, as some scholars have presumed. This analysis suggests that the two dominant theoretical approaches of libertarianism and communitarianism require further clarification and elaboration. The article seeks to clarify why the libertarian approach is insufficient as a basis for a news media ethic. Instead, it suggests a modified communitarian approach that advances media ethics theory by resisting a moralizing ethic, foregrounding the epistemic nature of moral philosophy as it relates to the communicative enterprise, and reconceptualizing the public sphere being served by the mass media as a population predicated on moral agency.Since the close of the 19th century, when researchers began proposing various theories to explain how the media work or ought to work, the debate over the purpose of a free press has continued to spawn volumes of books and competing moral claims. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm proposed their four typologies of the press in the 1950s, and since then, most democratic-based media systems have been viewed primarily through two general theoretical prisms: the libertarian and the social responsibility approaches. The latter largely has been subsumed under a more refined approach that has come to be called communitarian thought. Peters (1989) argued that the debates about mass communication have really been national discussions on the role of the media-discussions, at bottom, about "the perils and possibilities of democracy" (p. 200). However, the continuing debate over the purpose of the media as defined by libertarianism and, more recently, communitarianism, has gen-Communication Theory Fifteen: Three

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