Media Morality in a Postmodern Era: A Model for Ethics Restoration in the Mass Media

This paper develops a chronology of milestones in mass media ethics from inception to contemporary times, demonstrating that media ethics has been on the decline throughout mass media’s history. As a response to the continual decline of ethics in the mass media, this paper proposes a model for restoring ethics to the mass media. The model has four corner stones: (i) journalism and mass communication curricular revision, (ii) student entry placement, (iii) revised training for future journalists, and (iv) journalistic de-collectivization, a term used by this author to describe the act of shielding a journalist from the impact of corporate culture in the newsroom. Essential theoretical frameworks guiding the model include Kohlberg’s moral development theory and Patterson and Wilkins’s ethical news values.