Media ethics & governance

Overview

Media Ethics and Governance About this course: This course explores some of the basic theories, models and concepts in the field of media ethics. We will introduce influential ethical theories and perspectives, explore changing societal demands and expectations of media creation and media use, and we will elaborate on existing ethical norms for media professionals. After following this course, you will be able to reflect on ethical dilemmas and develop a well-substantiated argumentation for ethical decision making in a variety of media-related contexts. Upon completion of this course, students should: • have knowledge of the history and development of perspectives on media ethics; • have knowledge of the dominant theoretical approaches and concepts; • be able to use this knowledge to develop a well-substantiated argumentation

Syllabus

Theoretical building blocks of Communication Ethics

In this section, we discuss several ethical theories and perspectives, such as Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. These theories serve as building blocks for the rest of the course: when you understand the most important aspects of each perspective, you are able to use the various perspectives to consider ethical dilemmas from different angles.

Media Governance

In this part of the course we will discuss the developments of ideas on media governance. Media Governance refers to the entire system of rules and regulation and informal societal, ideological and economical processes that influence the behavior of our media. We will start with some basic models and then give an overview of the (historical) roots of modern governance models.

Communication Ethics in Practice

In this section, we put our knowledge from the previous two modules to practice. With the use of an ethical decision making scheme, you can apply your knowledge of ethical theories to come to a well-substantiated argumentation for ethical decision making. In addition, you will learn about common ethical issues for professionals in a variety of media-related fields (e.g., media entertainment, advertising, journalism, big-data, and research).