Media Ethics
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- First Online: 01 January 2022
- pp 1813–1820
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- Seow Ting Lee 2
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Media ethics, as an applied approach to assessing and understanding media performance, is premised upon a complex set of ideas drawing on philosophical principles, psychological theories of moral development, and contextual understanding of the ethical issues being discussed including societal culture and values and organizational norms. How bioethical debates are presented in the media, through framing and agenda setting by media professionals, shapes how audiences feel or think about a bioethics issue. The case of the 2013 pediatric anthrax vaccine trials is discussed to illustrate the complex interplay between public relations and news in shaping news coverage about bioethics issues.
- Information subsidies
- Codes of ethics
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Further Readings
Kruvand, M., & Vanacker, B. (2011). Facing the future: Media ethics, bioethics, and the world’s first face transplant. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 26 (2), 135–157.
Simonson, P. (2002). Bioethics and the rituals of media. Hastings Center Report, 32 (1), 32–39.
Willmott, C. (2013). Headline bioethics: Engagement with bioethics in the news. Bioscience Education, 21 (1), 3–6.
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Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Seow Ting Lee
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Correspondence to Seow Ting Lee .
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Center for Healthcare Ethics, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Henk ten Have
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Lee, S.T. (2016). Media Ethics. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_279
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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_279
Published : 19 January 2022
Publisher Name : Springer, Cham
Print ISBN : 978-3-319-09482-3
Online ISBN : 978-3-319-09483-0
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Introduction. Media ethics focuses on evaluating communicative performance and behavior. Ethics, as a branch of knowledge and a liberal arts discipline, uses determinative principles to appraise voluntary human conduct insofar as it can be judged right or wrong. To put it simply, ethics is a systematic study of right and wrong.