Assessment

Essay: 7,000 word essay

Module Aims

Aims: To enable students to engage in ethical exploration and examination of the media. This will include an account and assessment of the application of multiple moral approaches to the agents and contents of communication in contemporary understanding and usage of media in institutional and interpersonal contexts.

Indicative Syllabus

• Media Ethics – An Introduction
• Normative and Virtue Ethics
• Truth: Communication or Corruption?
• Ethics of Journalism
• Issues of Confidentiality and Privacy
• ‘New Media’
• Church and Communications
• Ethics in the Digital Age
• Sport, Media and Morality
• Fake News, Film and Free Speech

Bibliography

• — Gernot Böhme, Ethics in Context – The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions, Oxford: Polity Press, 2001
• — David Stanford Horner, Understanding Media Ethics, London: Sage, 2013
• — Pontifical Council for Social Communication, Ethics in Communication/Ethics in Internet, Rome: Vatican City Press
• — David Rowe, Ed., Sport, Culture and the Media: Critical Readings, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004.
• — Eugenia Siapera, Understanding New Media, 2nd edition, London: Sage 2018.
• — Anne Thomson, Critical Reasoning in Ethics – a practical introduction, (London: Routledge, 1999).
• — Stephen J. A. Ward, Ethics and the Media – An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)