Communication Ethics and the Law

Communications professionals have to navigate the complex space between freedom of expression and the reasonable right to privacy, between highlighting injustice and maintaining public interest, between demanding accountability, and infringing on human rights. From both practical and theoretical spaces, there has been extensive work in trying to delineate the legal and ethical boundaries of the responsibilities and freedoms that comes with public communications. (Beckett, 2004) This chapter focuses on the existing legal provisions that impact media professionals and will contextualize them within the ethical parameters that have been understood as best practices in a globalized environment. This chapter looks at global discourses around media ethics through a historical and political lens, and examine them through case studies. This chapter also looks at legal restrictions on the press. The ambit of the chapter will be to understand the lines between legality and ethics and to negotiate the balance of responsible media representation of a complex, diverse, and swiftly changing society. This chapter broadly focuses on the 5 tenets of communication ethics—honesty, transparency, compassion, independence, accountability, and will (Arnett, et al., 2009). It will then look at how the law enshrines these privileges and the room it leaves for mediatized editorialization (Eberwein, Porlezza, 2016).