Arendt on media ethics

revisiting traditions as the heart of the public sphere

Ronald C. Arnett

pp. 57-71

in: Nick Couldry, Mirca Madianou, Amit Pinchevski (eds), Ethics of media, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

This chapter examines the question of media ethics from the vantage point of tradition, an uncommon move in modernity. One modest presupposition about media ethics is that one must disclose the connecting communicative linkages that unite a given news event to explication in the public domain. Media ethics is the mediating fulcrum between an event and the public domain. Perhaps the first mediating function in the human condition is the notion of tradition, which, in the eyes of Hannah Arendt, mediates between past and future. This chapter examines the connections between these two mediating functions, media ethics and tradition. Media ethics within a modern context offers insight untainted by the local, the provincial and the traditional. This chapter offers an alternative perspective, relying upon the insights of Arendt's Between Past and Future, which provides a creative engagement of the notion of tradition as central to health in the public sphere from an established critic of modernity. This chapter frames media ethics within the notion of tradition as an alternative to a modern rendition of media ethics with a stress on the vitality of the public domain.

Cited authors

Arendt Hannah